New Hezbollah leader won’t last ‘long’, says Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant

Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has warned Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, that his appointment was ‘not for long’.

New Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. Picture: Anwar Amro/AFP

Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has warned Hezbollah’s new leader, Naim Qassem, that his appointment was “not for long”.

“Temporary appointment. Not for long,” Mr Gallant wrote in a post on X alongside a photograph of Qassem, who Hezbollah had named as assassinated leader Hassan Nasrallah’s successor.

In a separate post on Tuesday, in Hebrew, Mr Gallant wrote that the “countdown has begun”.

Mr Gallant, who visited the Israeli military’s northern command on Tuesday, said in a later statement that he estimated that Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal had been mostly destroyed by Israeli attacks.

“I estimate the residual capacity of (Hezbollah) projectiles and rockets to be in the order of 20 per cent, and it is no longer organised in a way that it can fire volleys,” he said.

On Tuesday, about 60 projectiles were fired by Hezbollah into Israel by about 3pm, the military said in a statement.

In recent weeks, Hezbollah fired between 180 and 200 rockets on some days, according to figures provided by the Israeli military.

The military has also carried out intense airstrikes on Hezbollah’s weapons production and storage facilities inside Lebanon.

Mr Gallant said that tens of thousands of soldiers had succeeded in pushing Hezbollah “out of all the villages along the border and destroyed infrastructure of all types that were there”.

“These things create a different reality in Lebanon and in the region as well,” he said.

Regional analysts had previously said that Hezbollah possessed an arsenal of about 150,000 rockets before it began fighting Israel on its northern border in October last year following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

It had an unspecified number of anti-aircraft, anti-tank and anti-ship missiles as well as ballistic missiles capable of accurately hitting targets deep inside Israeli territory.

AFP