Hezbollah chief says supply route via Syria cut, hopes rebels won’t have ties with Israel
Naim Qassem expects jihadist leadership that ousted Assad will consider Israel an enemy, allow arms flow to resume
Hezbollah head Naim Qassem acknowledged Saturday that the Lebanese terror group had lost its arms supply route through Syria following the toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s regime nearly a week ago by a sweeping rebel offensive.
Qassem didn’t mention Assad by name in his televised address, and said the group “cannot judge these new forces until they stabilize” and “take clear positions,” but said he hoped that the Lebanese and Syrian people and governments could continue to cooperate.
“Yes, Hezbollah has lost the military supply route through Syria at this stage, but this loss is a detail in the resistance’s work,” Qassem said.
“A new regime could come and this route could return to normal, and we could look for other ways,” he added.
Syria provided a land route for Hezbollah’s patron, Iran, to send convoys of weapons to Lebanon. Such convoys were often targeted by Israeli airstrikes but the terror group was able to heavily arm itself regardless.
Hezbollah started intervening in Syria in 2013 to help Assad quash the rebels seeking to topple him at that time. Last week, as rebels approached Damascus, the group sent supervising officers to oversee a withdrawal of its fighters there.
More than 50 years of Assad family rule have now been replaced with a transitional caretaker government put in place by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate that spearheaded the rebel offensive.
The Hezbollah chief also said Syria’s new rulers should not recognize neighboring Israel or establish ties with it.
“We hope that this new party in power will see Israel as an enemy and not normalize relations with it,” Qassem said.
The Syrian rebel leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who is better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Julani, said Saturday that Israel has “no more excuses” to carry out airstrikes in Syria and that recent IDF attacks on Syrian soil have crossed red lines and threaten an escalation in the region.
However, he said his group did not seek further conflict in the region.
Hezbollah began launching cross-border attacks on Israel from Lebanon the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, firing rockets and drones at border communities and military posts, displacing some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the country’s north. Qassem’s predecessor Hassan Nasrallah was killed in late September 2024 by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, as Israel escalated its campaign against Hezbollah, eventually launching a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.
In late November, the sides agreed to a ceasefire, which has broadly held, despite some airstrikes by Israel against Hezbollah operatives amid alleged violations of the truce.
According to IDF data, since October 2023 Israeli forces struck over 12,500 Hezbollah targets, including 1,600 command centers and 1,000 weapons depots.
Sources close to Hezbollah say the terror group believes the number of its fighters killed by Israel in the last year could be as high as 4,000, the vast majority of them during the last two months of intensified fighting. The sources cited previously unreported internal estimates.
In addition to Nasrallah, the IDF killed most of Hezbollah’s other top leaders and is said to have destroyed some 80% of its military capabilities.
Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel since October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 45 civilians. In addition, 80 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes, attacks on Israel, and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.
On the Israeli side, nearly 3,000 homes and buildings in Israel were damaged by Hezbollah attacks, according to an Army Radio report last month, citing official figures.
