Hezbollah leader says his group must retaliate
BEIRUT (AP) — The leader of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah said Friday that his group must retaliate after a presumed Israeli strike hit a Beirut neighborhood this week, killing a senior Hamas official, or else all of Lebanon would be vulnerable to Israeli attack.
Hassan Nasrallah appeared to be making the case for a response to the Lebanese public, even at the risk of escalating the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. But he gave no indication of how or when the militants would act.
The strike that killed Hamas’ deputy political leader, Saleh Arouri, threatened months of efforts by the United States to prevent the war in Gaza from spiraling into a regional conflict.
Nasrallah said it was the first strike by Israel in the Lebanese capital since 2006.
“We cannot keep silent about a violation of this seriousness,” he said, “because this means that all of our people will be exposed (to targeting). All of our cities, villages and public figures will be exposed.”
The repercussions of silence are “far greater” than the risks of retaliating, he added.
Tensions are rising on multiple fronts as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in the region. Iraqis are furious after an American airstrike killed a militia leader in Baghdad. At the same time, the US is struggling to deter attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels on commercial Red Sea shipping.
In Gaza, Israel is moving to scale down its military assault in the north of the territory and pressing its heavy offensive in the south, vowing to crush Hamas. In the south, most of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians are being squeezed into smaller areas in a humanitarian disaster, while still being pounded by Israeli airstrikes.
Since the start of the Gaza war, Hezbollah has fired rockets and missiles into northern Israel, bringing a return bombardment from the Israeli military in near daily cross-border exchanges.
After the strike Tuesday in Beirut, the Lebanon-Israel front appeared to be at a critical juncture, with the potential to veer into an all-out war.
But Hezbollah has held back from a dramatic escalation, wary of a repeat of the two sides’ 2006 war in which Israeli bombardment wreaked destruction in Lebanon.