Nasrallah calls Israel a ‘tool of American occupation’

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday made a rare public appearance and spoke against the United States and Israel, which he called “the West’s instrument in the Middle East.”

Nasrallah said Western countries were protecting Israel because the country was a tool in the West’s “project of control in the Middle East.”

“The Palestinian people and the peoples of the region, chiefly the Lebanese people, suffering Israeli occupation and massacres, are the main bearers of the weight of the American project of occupation,” said the Shiite cleric. He added that the US was “responsible for the crimes in Palestine.”

Nasrallah said his group “confronted Israel when we needed to choose between war and humiliation. We will not choose war unless our other option will be humiliation.”

The Hezbollah leader said the US was the “inheritor” of colonialist forces and aimed to take over the entire Middle East “politically, socially, from a security perspective and culturally.” He said the US intended for every Muslim to be under American control so that the nations of the region will finally recognize Israel.

Referring to the Syrian civil war, where Hezbollah is estimated to have lost upwards of 1,000 fighters in battles against Islamic State and other rebels fighting the Assad regime, Nasrallah said Washington was running the war there through terrorism and added that the US was fighting in Syria not for democracy and reforms but in order to vanquish anyone opposing America.

Hinting at US support of Saudi Arabia, Nasrallah said the US was favoring the “darkest dictatorships” and “most corrupt” countries in the Middle East, where there is no constitution or elections and the citizens have no access to the internet.

The Hezbollah leader, whose public appearances have become rare since the Second Lebanon War with Israel in 2006, was speaking on the eve of the tenth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, known also as the Day of Ashura.