BEIRUT: Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Friday warned that a wider regional escalation could not be ruled out if Israel continues its war in Gaza, in his first speech since the war broke out.
Tens of thousands of people watched the widely anticipated televised address from rallies called by the Lebanese group to honour fallen fighters.
In his address, Nasrallah said that “all scenarios are open on our Lebanese southern front” and that “what happens on the Lebanese front will depend on what happens in Gaza”, calling on Israel to stop its attacks on the besieged strip to avoid a regional conflagration.
Since the beginning of the war, Hezbollah had taken calculated steps to keep Israel’s military busy on its border with Lebanon, but not to the extent of igniting an all-out war.
Hassan Nasrallah said Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel was “100 percent Palestinian” and expressed support for the Palestinian group.
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The Hezbollah chief praised the Hamas attack four weeks ago in Israel, wherein 1,400 people were killed. Since then, more than 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in an air and ground assault by the Israeli military on Gaza, most of them women and children.
“This great, large-scale operation was purely the result of Palestinian planning and implementation,” Nasrallah said, suggesting Hezbollah had no part in the attack. “The great secrecy made this operation greatly successful.”
US ‘responsible’ for the war
Nasrallah said that one of the biggest mistakes Israel was making now in its war against Hamas in Gaza was pursuing goals that it cannot achieve.
“For a whole month, Israel could not offer a single military achievement,” he said, adding that Israel can only get back hostages through negotiation.
Hassan Nasrallah blamed the conflict and high Palestinian civilian death toll on the United States, as US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv.
“The United States is totally responsible for the war raging in Gaza,” Nasrallah said.
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Nasrallah said the two objectives of the group now were to end the war and “enable the resistance to triumph”.
He said “the victory of Gaza means the victory of the Palestinian people,” and that would be in the interest of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, as well as Lebanon. He called on the Arab world to recall their ambassadors and cut off oil and gas and food supplies to Israel.
Hassan Nasrallah insisted that Hezbollah has “been in this battle since October 8”, pointing out that what’s happening on the border is “unprecedented since 1948”, when Israel was created and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced during the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
The speech came a day after the most significant escalation in clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces on the border since the war started.
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