Hezbollah No. 2 says attacks could halt if Gaza war winds down without ceasefire, or not

The deputy leader of Hezbollah says the group cannot say if it would halt hostilities against Israel should the war in Gaza wind down without a formal ceasefire.

“If there is a ceasefire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion,” Sheikh Naim Kassem tells The Associated Press at the terror group’s political HQ in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Hezbollah’s participation in the Israel-Hamas war has been as a “support front” for its ally, Hamas, Kassem says. “If the war stops, this military support will no longer exist.”

But he is less unequivocal on what happens if Israel withdraws but no ceasefire is declared, a scenario that Israeli and US officials have increasingly looked to as a possible way to bring fighting on Israel’s northern border to an end before it snowballs into all-out war.

“If what happens in Gaza is a mix between ceasefire and no ceasefire, war and no war, we can’t answer [how we would react] now, because we don’t know its shape, its results, its impacts,” Kassem says.

Kassem says he doesn’t believe that Israel has the ability or has made a decision to launch a war at present. He warns that even if Israel intends to launch a limited operation in Lebanon that stops short of a full-scale war, it should not expect the fighting to remain limited.

“Israel can decide what it wants: limited war, total war, partial war,” he says. “But it should expect that our response and our resistance will not be within a ceiling and rules of engagement set by Israel… If Israel wages the war, it means it doesn’t control its extent or who enters into it.”