Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday said that his powerful militia is already engaged in unprecedented fighting along the Lebanon-Israel border and threatened a further escalation as Israel’s war with Hamas nears the one-month mark.
In televised remarks — his first since the Palestinian militants’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel — Nasrallah stopped short of announcing that Hezbollah would fully enter the war, a move that would have devastating consequences for Lebanon and Israel.
The US, Israel’s strongest backer, has warned Hezbollah and its patron Iran against entering the fray and has sent warships to the Mediterranean, a move Nasrallah said “will not scare us.”
Photo: Reuters
Hezbollah is prepared for all options, “and we can resort to them at any time,” he said, adding that the fighting would “not be limited” to the scale seen so far.
In the past few weeks, Hezbollah has fired rockets across the border daily, mainly hitting military targets in northern Israel, but it has a substantial arsenal capable of hitting anywhere in Israel and thousands of battle-hardened fighters.
Nasrallah’s speech had been widely anticipated throughout the region as an indication of whether the Israel-Hamas conflict would spiral into a regional war.
“Some say I’m going to announce that we have entered the battle,” Nasrallah said on Friday. “We already entered the battle on Oct. 8.”
He said that Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes have pulled away Israeli forces that would otherwise be focused on Hamas in Gaza.
Celebratory gunshots rang out over Beirut as thousands packed into a square in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital to watch Nasrallah’s speech broadcast on a massive screen.
The Israeli military said that seven of their soldiers and one civilian had been killed on the northern border as of Friday. More than 50 Hezbollah fighters and 10 militants with allied groups, as well as 10 civilians, including a Reuters journalist, have been killed on the Lebanese side.
Separately on Friday, a UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) official said that the average Palestinian in Gaza is living on two pieces of Arabic bread pmade from flour the global body had stockpiled in the region, yet the main refrain now being heard in the street is “water, water.”
Director of UNRWA Affairs Thomas White, who said he traveled “the length and breadth of Gaza in the last few weeks,” described the place as a “scene of death and destruction.”
No place is safe now and people fear for their lives, their future and their ability to feed their families, he said.
The UNRWA is supporting about 89 bakeries across Gaza, aiming to get bread to 1.7 million people, White told diplomats from the UN’s 193 member nations in a video briefing from Gaza.
However, “now people are beyond looking for bread. It’s looking for water,” he said.
Lynn Hastings, deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process and UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian Territory, said that only one of three water supply lines from Israel is operational.
“Many people are relying on brackish or saline ground water, if at all,” she said.
In the briefing, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said that intense negotiations are taking place among authorities from Israel, Egypt, the US and the UN on allowing fuel to enter Gaza.
Fuel is essential for the functioning of institutions, hospitals and the distribution of water and electricity, he said.
“We must allow these supplies reliably, repetitively and dependently into Gaza,” he said.
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