US: If Hezbollah ended cross-border terror attacks, we’d tell Israel to halt counter-strikes

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller says that the US would urge Israel to halt strikes on Hezbollah if the terror group stopped launching attacks against the Jewish state first.

“Nasrallah could stop the terrorist attacks across Israel, and I guarantee you, if he did that, we would be impressing upon Israel the need to maintain calm on their end,” Miller says, in a somewhat uncharacteristically frank statement for a State Department spokesperson.

“The bottom line is, he hasn’t stopped those terrorist attacks, and so as long as Hezbollah is launching terrorist attacks across the border, of course, Israel is going to launch military action to defend itself as any country would,” he adds.

“What we continue to push to all the parties is not to escalate the conflict, not to let it spiral out of control into a war that we don’t think serves either side’s interests, and to ultimately try to get to a ceasefire in Gaza that would help bring calm across the Blue Line,” Miller says.