Nasrallah: If Israel attacks Iran, Hezbollah won’t necessarily join fight

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is delivering a speech in which he appears to attempt to distance his movement from Tehran, while also gloating that Israel is afraid to go to war against either.

The leader of the Iran-backed Shiite terror group claims Israel is not serious about actually attacking Iran, but if it does, Hezbollah will not immediately retaliate against Israel on Tehran’s behalf, but will decide whether or not to get involved.

“Iran is a strong regional state and any war with it will blow up the entire region,” he says, according to Naharnet.

Amid domestic criticism that his group acts in Tehran’s interests and not Lebanon’s, he challenges in a speech for anyone to “tell us about a single act that Hezbollah did for the sake of Iran rather than for the sake of Lebanon.”

He claims that Hezbollah’s precision-guided missiles are spread all around Lebanon, so that Israel would need to launch a full-scale war in order to destroy them.

He says Israel is afraid to go to war against Hezbollah, which has unprecedented manpower. He also claims that Israeli drone flights over Lebanon have stopped due to Hezbollah’s superior air defenses.

He adds that he is against sharing offshore gas with Israel and doesn’t really care about negotiations between Beirut and Jerusalem over determining the countries’ exclusive economic zones.

“We do not consider ourselves to be concerned with the technical discussions about the sea border demarcation with Israel,” he says.