Hezbollah chief: Renewed attacks on Israel a response to 15 months of violations, ‘unrelated to any other battle’

In a televised address, Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem says his group’s resumption of rocket attacks on Israel this week is a response to Israel’s continued presence and airstrikes in Lebanon since the November 2024 Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal.

The speech comes amid the Lebanese government’s searing accusations that the Iran-backed proxy terror group is dragging Lebanon into a regional war, after the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign on Iran that the Islamic Republic has responded to with missile and drone strikes across the region.

“By God, how strange you are,” Qassem says in a televised speech, addressing the Lebanese government. “What is your response to the wide-scale aggression?”

The renewed fighting against Israel, he claims, “is not linked to any other battle; what we want is to stop the aggression.”

But he also says that the renewed rocket attacks on Israel “are a response to 15 months of violations against us, including the targeting of the great religious authority,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader who was killed at the start of the US-Israeli bombing campaign on Saturday.

“To anyone asking about the timing” of Hezbollah’s resumption of attacks, Qassem says: “Were we expected to remain endlessly patient?”

He adds that the Lebanese government’s formal decision in August to bring all weapons in the country, chiefly Hezbollah’s, under state control, “was a grave error that has weakened the position of the Lebanese state and legitimized Israel’s freedom of aggression.”

“As long as there is occupation — resistance and arms are a right,” he says.