The chief of Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed retaliation once again on Friday for the killing of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in an alleged Israeli strike earlier in the week in Beirut.
“The murder of al-Arouri … will certainly not go without reaction and punishment,” Nasrallah said during a speech via video link to commemorate the passing away of a Hezbollah official.
“If we remain silent about the killing of al-Arouri, Lebanon will be exposed …,” he said, adding that “the response will inevitably come.”
The killing of al-Arouri on Tuesday in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a stronghold of Hezbollah, raised fears that the Gaza war could spread to Lebanon.
However, Nasrallah refrained in his Friday speech from declaring war on Israel.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war following the massacre by terrorists from the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement and other extremists in Israel on October 7, there have been almost daily confrontations between Israel’s army and Hezbollah in the border region.
Israel and Hezbollah attacked each other again on Friday. Israeli fighter jets bombed Iranian-allied Lebanese militia facilities, the military said on Friday. These were Hezbollah military posts and places from which terrorists had prepared their attacks. Lebanese security sources confirmed the attacks.
Israel’s military said it also registered several rockets that were fired towards Israel. The army then attacked the launch points of the shelling and a Hezbollah command centre.
Israeli artillery shells hit Hula and the outskirts of Tayr Harfa, Jebbayn, Yarine and al-Bustan, Lebanese security sources said. An Israeli drone also shot at a residential building in Mhaibib. Nothing was initially known about possible victims. Hezbollah also claimed responsibility for several attacks on Israel.
Nasrallah said his group has carried out 670 operations against Israel since October 8 and that these military operations have consolidated a “balance of deterence” on the northern border with Israel.
He called on the residents of northern Israel to demand their government stop “the aggression on Gaza” in order to calm down the northern front.
“The solution for the settlers of the north is to go to their government and demand that it stop the aggression against Gaza,” Nasrallah said.
Nasrallah said when the war stops on Gaza and this page is turned Lebanon stands before the chance to liberate the rest of its land starting from Naqoura to Shebaa.
“We are now facing a historic opportunity to completely liberate every inch of our land” by opening the Lebanese front in south again, Nasrallah affirmed.
Israel has been demanding Hezbollah’s military apparatus withdraw north of the Litani river, which is bout 30 kilometres north of the border, arguing that UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended Israel’s 33-day war on Lebanon in 2006, had stipulated that.
A Lebanese military expert said that Hezbollah has refused to go back to the Litani river line but may reach a compromise of withdrawing between 7 to a maximum 7 kilometres from the Israeli border.
“But Hezbollah will not withdraw without benefits,” the expert said.
Israel wants to push Hezbollah away from its northern border to prevent a similar terrorist act like the one that took place on October 7.
Meanwhile the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that more than 76,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon since October due to growing tensions.
As of January 2, according to figures from the IOM Middle East office, there were 76,018 people who left their houses and apartments because of “armed confrontations,” the office wrote on the online platform X on Friday.
In the last week of 2023, some 3,000 people were newly displaced, with 94% of the displaced people coming from three districts directly on the border with Israel. According to this information, only some 1,000 of them were accommodated in emergency accommodation, the others live with relatives and friends.
On the Israeli side, according to Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, more than 80,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their hometowns in the border area.
