BEIRUT – The leader of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah warned today that all options were “on the table” in his group’s battles with Israel but stopped short of announcing an all-out escalation in his first public comments since the start of the Gaza war.
The speech by Hassan Nasrallah was closely watched in Israel, Lebanon and around the Middle East for any signs that his powerful Iranian-backed group could expand its rocket attacks and other strikes on northern Israel and possibly push the region closer to a wider conflict.
Speaking live in a video feed, Nasrallah demanded an end to Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip and said any decision by Hezbollah to escalate – from what, for the past few weeks, have been intensifying border skirmishes – would depend on Israel’s military decisions in both Gaza and southern Lebanon.
There has already been spillover. Other Iranian-backed groups allied with Hezbollah, in Iraq and Yemen, have launched attacks against Israel and U.S. bases. Israel has carried out airstrikes in Syria. But a decision to escalate by Hezbollah – one of the most heavily armed militias in the world – would transform the conflict and could further draw in the United States, Israel’s main ally.
Nasrallah addressed a significant portion of his speech to the United States, which has sent warships to the region, including the eastern Mediterranean close to Lebanon’s coastline. “Your fleets in the Mediterranean Sea, these do not scare us, nor have they ever scared us,” Nasrallah said. The only path Washington could take to reduce tensions, he continued, was reining in Israel.
“You Americans can stop the aggression on Gaza, because it is your aggression. Whoever wants to stop the start of a regional war – and the message is to the Americans – then you have to rush to stop the aggression on Gaza,” Nasrallah said in the nearly 90-minute speech.
Hezbollah, a major political force in Lebanon, has faced competing pressures. Lebanese political groups worry about the country’s being drawn into a full-scale war with Israel even as Lebanon reels from a devastating economic crisis. But some within Nasrallah’s own movement, as well as armed factions around the region, seek to open a new front against Israel.
In Iraq, members of Iranian-backed militias gathered to hear Nasrallah. Ali Al-Yassiri, a member of one of the groups, the Badr Organization, said he was expecting something “stronger” – a speech that “draws a road for the resistance to begin achieving the dream, liberating the Arab land of Palestine,” he said.
“All he did was give a brief account of what happened since Oct. 7,” he said.
In the northern Israeli city of Tiveria, where hotels are packed with evacuees from Israel’s border with Lebanon, people checked their phones or asked others whether there was news about Nasrallah’s speech. One, Lliron Ziv, from Hanita, a stone’s throw from the Lebanese border, said, “We all just want to go home.”
“This all seems so stupid. We have evacuated. They have evacuated,” she said, referring to residents of southern Lebanon. “There is a tank parked in my driveway.” The evacuees heard that Nasrallah had recited old grievances but did not call for an escalation in the fighting. “So that’s something,” Ziv said.
In Beirut, around the corner from a rally held by Hezbollah, a cafe was filled with a few dozen men and women smoking hookahs and watching the speech on two TV screens. When it ended, the cafe was silent, in contrast to the thundering applause echoing from the rally. Three men clapped and urged others to join, but no one else did. Groups that had cheered at points during the speech packed up slowly and left.
Ali, a 31-year-old man with a Hezbollah bandanna on his head, paused when asked whether he had expected more from Nasrallah or felt relief at the absence of a formal declaration of war.
“When we see Palestinian fetuses dying, and the children bleeding on hospital floors . . . no state accepts this,” he said, asking that The Washington Post use only his first name because of the sensitivity of the topic. “When we see this, of course we get agitated. We think, ‘Maybe we’ll be heading to a war, a big one, a wide one.'”
But Nasrallah, Ali added, “knows what he’s doing. We have trust in the leadership.”
(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Kareem Fahim, Sarah Dadouch, William Booth, Ellen Francis
“Your fleets in the Mediterranean Sea, these do not scare us, nor have they ever scared us,” Nasrallah said.
Guess what, nothing scares you, unlike most of civilization
You know why?
Because for most people death is not an option to embrace, so they have what to be scared of. but if you embrace death, of yourself and of others, than there is nothing that will scare you.