The head of the Hezbollah terror group said Monday he would not allow Lebanon to become a battleground, responding to an implicit threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day earlier to target a senior Hamas member being hosted in the country.
“For any Israeli assassination against a Lebanese, Palestinian, Iranian person or anyone else, that is carried out on Lebanese territory — there will be a severe reaction and we will not be silent about it,” Hassan Nasrallah said.
“We will not allow a return to assassinations in Lebanon and we will not accept changes to the rules of conflict. Israel must understand this,” Nasrallah continued.
On Sunday, Netanyahu appeared to mock top Hamas deputy politburo head Saleh al-Arouri, who days earlier had told a Lebanese news outlet that any Israeli targeted killings of the terror group’s leaders would spark a “regional war.”
The premier “heard the verbiage by the senior Hamas official Arouri, from his hiding place in Lebanon. He knows very well why he and his colleagues are in hiding,” he said at the outset of his weekly cabinet meeting.
Al-Arouri’s comments came days after Arabic-language media reports said terror chiefs in the Gaza Strip were taking heightened precautions over concerns they could be targeted by Israel.
“Hamas and the other Iranian proxies understand very well that we will fight with all means against their attempts to use terrorism against us – in Judea and Samaria, Gaza and everywhere else,” Netanyahu said, referring to the West Bank and the Palestinian coastal enclave ruled by Hamas. “Whoever tries to hurt us, whoever finances and organizes, whoever dispatches terrorists against Israel, will pay the full price.”
The prime minister’s stipulation of “everywhere else” and “Iranian proxies” echoed similar remarks he recently made that were taken to mean that Israel’s response to terror attacks could include actions beyond its borders, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.
Hamas deputy political chief Saleh al-Arouri, after signing a reconciliation deal with senior Fatah official Azzam al-Ahmad, during a short ceremony at the Egyptian intelligence complex in Cairo, Egypt, October 12, 2017. (AP/Nariman El-Mofty)
The threat by al-Arouri came after the security cabinet convened last week following several recent deadly terror attacks in the West Bank, with Netanyahu’s office later saying ministers had agreed on “a series of decisions to target terrorists and authorized the prime minister and the defense minister to act on the matter.”
No details were given on what those decisions were, but leaks from the meeting said the resumption of assassinations was one of the steps called for.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a cabinet meeting, at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on August 27, 2023. (Sraya Diamant/Flash90)
In his speech Monday, Nasrallah also responded to recent accusations by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that “Iran and its cancerous proxies” were behind the recent spike in terror attacks.
“Facing the resistance’s escalation in the West Bank, Netanyahu wanted to blame Iran and created a reality in which the whole situation in the West Bank is an Iranian plot and the Palestinians are just Tehran’s tool,” the Hezbollah chief said. “That is, of course, an insult to the intelligence of the whole world and of Israelis. They don’t understand that the resistance in the West Bank is purely a Palestinian decision.”
Israel was at an “existential, strategic dead end.”
“The only solution is for Israel to leave this land,” he threatened.
Violence has surged across the West Bank over the past year and a half, with a rise in Palestinian shooting attacks against Israeli civilians and troops, near-nightly arrest raids by the military, and an uptick in revenge attacks by extremist Jewish settlers against Palestinians.
