BEIRUT (Reuters) – President Joseph Aoun summoned jurist Nawaf Salam on Monday to designate him as Lebanon’s prime minister, after a majority of Lebanese lawmakers nominated him for the post.
Salam, 71, is an attorney and judge who served as Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2007-17.
He won support from 84 of Lebanon’s 128 parliamentarians, among them leading Christian and Druze factions and prominent Sunni Muslim lawmakers, including Hezbollah allies.
But Hezbollah and its ally the Shi’ite Amal Movement, which hold all the seats reserved for Shi’ite Muslims in parliament, named nobody. Hezbollah accused its opponents of seeking to exclude the group.
Salam joined International Court of Justice in 2018 and was named as its president on Feb. 6, 2024 for a three-year term, the first Lebanese judge to the hold the position .
He took over the presidency of the ICJ, which is based in The Hague, as it held its first hearing on a case filed by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip, which Israel has dismissed as baseless.
Salam is from a historically political family: his uncle Saeb Salam served as premier in Lebanon four times before the 1975-1990 civil war, and his older cousin Tammam Salam served as Lebanon’s prime minister from 2014-2016.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Toby Chopra)
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