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.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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