Hassan Ezzedine – not to be confused with Hezbollah-linked TWA Flight 847 hijacker Hassan Ezzedine – was born in Maaroub, in the Tyre district, in 1953. He first ran on Hezbollah’s parliamentary ticket during the 1992 legislative elections. Ezzedine is a Shiite sheikh, but does not don the traditional turban and garb of the sect’s clergy.

 After the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000, he served as Hezbollah’s chief spokesman and head of its central media relations unit, during which time he conceded that the group’s campaign to expel Israel from south Lebanon and the Shebaa Farms was a pretext for a larger goal. “If they go from Shebaa, we will not stop fighting them. Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine,” he added, referring to the year of Israel’s founding. The Jews who survive this war of “liberation,” Ezzeddine said, “can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from.” He added, however, that the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948 will be “allowed to live as a minority and they will be cared for by the Muslim majority.” Prior to, and shortly after, the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, media outlets identified Ezzedine as Hezbollah’s “top political official in south Lebanon.”

He has headed the Hezbollah Political Council’s Arab and African Affairs unit since at least 2009. He acted to strengthen Hezbollah’s relations with Arabic-speaking countries, particularly in the African continent. He developed ties with Bahraini activists, including the head of the “Bahrain Human Rights Monitor.” In 2011, he headed a Hezbollah delegation first to the Conference of Arab  Parties held in Morocco, and then to Mauritania at the invitation of The National Rally for Reform and Development party. In 2014, a Hezbollah delegation  Ezzedine led traveled to Tunisia to participate in a conference organized by the Tunisian Anti-Zionist and Anti-Normalization Coalition, but was turned away by the country’s authorities.

Ezzedine replaced Nawwaf al-Mousaoui as a Hezbollah parliamentarian on September 15, 2019 in a parliamentary by-election as the Loyalty to the Resistance parliamentary bloc’s representative for the Tyre district. The party forced Mousaoui to step down on July 18, 2019 after an incident during which the parliamentarian fired upon his daughter’s ex-husband. Ezzedine won the election after Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and his deputy Naim Qassem interceded with his opponents and requested they withdraw from the race.