US, Israel should fear war not Lebanon: Hezbollah chief

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised speech on Sunday in commemoration of Wissam Hassan al-Tawil, a senior Hezbollah commander who was assassinated in an Israeli strike in the southern Lebanese village of Khirbet Selm on January 8.

Nasrallah praised Tawil as one of the commanders in the war against the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in Syria and stressed that he had also been one of the field commanders on the southern front since October 8, 2023, when the Lebanese resistance movement engaged in fire exchanges with the Israeli occupation regime in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Nasrallah hailed as “legendary” Palestinian resistance against the Israeli aggression after 100 days and said the regime had not succeeded in achieving any goals of its campaign “neither the explicit nor the implicit ones”.

“One hundred days have passed and Gaza and its people remain steadfast in a legendary manner that history has never witnessed,” the Hezbollah chief stated.

“The implicit goals of the Israeli war are to occupy Gaza, displace the Gazans and to turn the territory into a beach for the Israeli settlers,” he added.

“The Israeli enemy was neither able to eliminate the resistance in Gaza, nor able to eliminate Hamas.”

Underlining that the Lebanese front has been open since October, Nasrallah expressed Hezbollah’s readiness to fight and said Lebanon has no fear of war or US and Israeli threats.

“Those who should fear war and be scared of it are Israel and its settlers,” Nasrallah underscored.

“We have been ready for war for the past 99 days and we do not fear it. We will fight with no restrictions.”

Warning that the Americans must fear for their bases in the region, Hezbollah’s leader stated, “Our stance is that the Lebanese front has been for supporting and assisting Gaza and its objective is halting the aggression against Gaza. Let the aggression against Gaza stop and then talks related to Lebanon will be possible.”

Nasrallah said the resistance continues to inflict losses on the Israeli occupation but the regime has been keeping its real number of casualties “under wraps”.

“The greatest catastrophe will be when the war ends and the extent of the catastrophe that befell the entity, which the resistance in Gaza inflicted on it in the first place, is revealed,” he underlined.

He said the extent of the occupation’s concealment of its losses “is reflected in its failure to acknowledge the targeting of the Mount Meron base”, which was targeted by the resistance in Lebanon earlier in the month as part of the initial response to the assassination of the deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas, Martyr Saleh al-Arouri.

Stressing that the Lebanese resistance movement fired 62 missiles, including 40 Katyushas and 22 Kornet anti-tank guided missiles, at the base, Nasrallah stated, “18 of the Kornet missiles hit it.”

Pointing to the various resistance fronts supporting Palestinians in Gaza, the Hezbollah chief added the Americans and many Western countries worked over a period of 100 days to “silence, subjugate and thwart these fronts.”

Nasrallah underscored the continuation of resistance in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq will push the Israeli regime to “accept the conditions of resistance, and this will mean the promised victory”.

Commenting on the recent US-UK aggression on Yemen, Nasrallah said US President Joe Biden and his administration would soon find out that they committed a folly.

“Biden will quickly discover the extent of the foolishness he committed through his aggression against Yemen, and today more than ever before, it is the responsibility of every Arab, Muslim and free person to declare his support for the Yemeni people, leadership, supporters and resistance, and this is the decisive factor between the fronts of truth and falsehood,” he added.

“If Biden and those with him think Yemen will stop supporting Gaza, then they are ignorant and know nothing,” he stressed, describing the aggression against Yemen as “American and British foolishness”.

The Hezbollah chief pointed to “what the Americans did in the Red Sea”, and said, “It will harm all shipping traffic, and they did all of this in order to protect Israel.”

“What is happening in the Red Sea has dealt a major blow to the enemy’s economy,” Nasrallah continued, adding that Israel’s image “has been exposed in the world, and this is what was revealed in the International Court of Justice in The Hague”.

Referring to South Africa’s lodging proceedings against Israel in The Hague, Nasrallah stated, “Independent of the outcome of the trial, the spectacle of the occupying entity being accused, before the eyes of the world and based on irrefutable evidence, is unprecedented and has confounded the occupying entity, which relies on moral hypocrisy before the world, by denying that it is waging a genocidal war in Gaza.”