Hezbollah chief says won’t stop shelling north until Israel ends Gaza ‘aggression’
In sixth speech since Oct. 7, Nasrallah dismisses diplomatic attempts to end hostilities on the Lebanon border, claims Lebanese civilians in combat area support his terror group
Gianluca Pacchiani is the Arab affairs reporter for The Times of Israel
Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, said on Tuesday that his terror group’s cross-border shelling into Israel would only end when Israel’s “aggression” on the Gaza Strip stops, and claimed diplomatic efforts so far to bring a halt to hostilities along the border have so far seemed to only benefit Israel.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah has been trading fire with the Israeli military across Lebanon’s southern border in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas, which launched a devastating assault in Israel on October 7 in which some 1,200 Israelis were massacred and 253 were taken hostage into Gaza.
Israel, in response, launched a massive military campaign in Gaza in order to eradicate Hamas’s capabilities, remove it from power and return the hostages.
In his Tuesday comments, Nasrallah said his group would only stop its attacks in the north if a full ceasefire was reached for Gaza. “On that day, when the shooting stops in Gaza, we will stop the shooting in the south,” he said in his sixth televised address since October 7.
He said many foreign “delegations” had traveled to Beirut with “proposals” to end the hostilities in southern Lebanon, but said they only seemed to “have one goal, which is the security of Israel, the protection of Israel.”
The foreign ministers of France, Britain and other countries, as well as senior US envoy Amos Hochstein, have visited Lebanon in recent weeks in an attempt to bring calm to the border.
France’s foreign minister delivered a written proposal to Beirut that calls for fighters including Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit to withdraw 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the border, among other measures, according to a document seen by Reuters.
Without specifying the French proposal, Nasrallah said one delegation had “presented a paper as a mediator.”
“You read the paper — there’s nothing. There’s Israel’s security,” he said.
According to Nasrallah, the plan did not take Hezbollah’s demands into consideration, particularly as regards territorial disputes along the border, which the French delegation suggested tackling at a later date, such as the Sheba Farms and the cross-border town of Ghajar, both currently under Israeli control. “Their priority [of foreign mediators] is Israel’s security,” the terror leader claimed.
Vowing that his group would carry on its attacks on Israel, Nasrallah said that “all options are on the table.”
“We were hoping that once the ceasefire is declared in Gaza, the attacks would stop in Lebanon. However, [Defense Minister Yoav Gallant] said that this will not be the case, that even if they stop their attacks on Gaza, they will continue to strike Lebanon,” he said, referencing options currently being studied by the IDF to carry out a large-scale operation to dismantle Hezbollah’s capabilities.
“Gallant said he won’t stop, so don’t stop. We won’t stop either,” he warned, adding that Israel will have to evacuate “millions” of residents, and not just those in the north, if the conflict escalates.
Nasrallah insisted that military pressure is an effective strategy and that security along the border with Israel since the Second Lebanon War was not guaranteed by Resolution 1701 — the UN Security Council decision that ended the 2006 conflict, which the terror group has violated for years — but rather by Hezbollah’s armed deterrence.
“The enemy is not in a position to impose conditions on Lebanon. I call on Lebanese authorities to add new conditions to 1701 rather than implement it,” he said.
Earlier Tuesday, a 47-year-old mother and her 15-year-old son were seriously wounded when a rocket struck the northern city of Kiryat Shmona on Tuesday in an assault claimed by Hezbollah.
The attack came in retaliation for a deadly Israeli strike on a Hezbollah site a day earlier and was one of several incidents in which projectiles were fired into northern Israel Tuesday morning.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there. So far, the skirmishes on the border have resulted in six civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of nine IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 193 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon, but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 29 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and at least 19 civilians, three of whom were journalists, have been killed.
Reuters contributed to this report.
