2006 war delivered blow to Israel’s ‘spirit, arrogance,’ Nasrallah taunts

The head of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah said Saturday that the Second Lebanon War 10 years ago delivered a blow to “Israel’s spirit, arrogance, will, trust and existence,” and that the 34-day conflict led the Israeli public to lose faith in the military.

In a televised address, Nasrallah on Saturday told thousands gathered to mark the 10th anniversary of the war that Israel’s defense establishment was shaken by what he claimed was a defeat to Hezbollah in the 2006 conflict.

“It was an earthquake which shook the Israeli army,” Nasrallah said according to media outlets affiliated with the Shiite organization.

Nasrallah said the war created a “mutual deterrence between the Zionist entity and the resistance” and repeated a long-time his threat of launching rockets towards Israel, claiming Hezbollah weapons could reach “any point” inside the country.

The Hezbollah leader also said the relative calm along the Israel-Lebanon border in recent years proved correct his remarks the Jewish state was “more feeble than a spider’s web.”

Nasrallah first made the “spider web” comparison in a speech following the Israel Defense Forces’s pullout of Bint Jbeil, a major Hezbollah center in May 2000.

The 2006 conflict erupted when Israel retaliated over a cross-border raid in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three, and quickly spiraled into a full-fledged war.

Throughout the conflict, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel, which carried out devastating strikes across Lebanon.

Many people in Israel considered the massive ground and air war on Lebanon to be a failure because it did not halt Hezbollah rocket fire or recover the two captured soldiers. Their remains were retrieved in a prisoner exchange in 2008.

The war claims the lives of 1,200 people in Lebanon, many of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.