Top Israeli defense official: Nasrallah asked us for a ceasefire

A senior Israeli defense official says yesterday’s border skirmish ended quickly because Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah asked Israel not to escalate the fighting, after his men launched missiles at an Israeli border post and Israel responded with some 100 artillery shells fired at Lebanese targets.

Nasrallah sent a message through interlocutors, including Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and officials from France, Egypt and the US, that “from Hezbollah’s perspective the event has ended,” the Israeli source says.

“We got the message from three countries that told us there’s no reason to respond,” the defense official relates. “They turned to us. To us it was clear that from Nasrallah’s perspective he was interested in concluding the fighting, because he wanted to end it with his dignity intact. That doesn’t bother me, Nasrallah’s calculations, as long as our efforts to tackle the threats we face are advanced. The bottom line is that Hezbollah sent us word asking us to stop.”

The source also says Israel has shifted its strategic priority from preventing Iranian entrenchment in Syria to dismantling Hezbollah’s precision missile program, a decision made some five months ago by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We changed the prioritizing of the threats, because we understood that we can’t allow precision missiles in Lebanon,” the official says.