Nasrallah says terror group will expand its operations; warns it has precision-guided missiles that can ‘reach from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat’
The Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group signaled on Friday it would escalate attacks on Israel in response to the deaths of 10 Lebanese civilians killed in Israeli strikes on terror targets this week, while Israel said it would remove Hezbollah from the border if diplomacy failed.
In a televised speech, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Israel would pay a price “in blood,” indicating the risk of an intensification of the conflict that has been rumbling across the Lebanese-Israeli border since the Gaza war erupted in October.
Nasrallah accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians, saying Israel could have avoided killing them. The dead included five children.
The Israeli military said it carried out a “precise airstrike” on Lebanon on Wednesday that killed Hezbollah commanders and operatives. It has not commented on civilian deaths. It has previously said it does not target civilians.
“The response to the massacre should be continuing resistance work at the front and escalating resistance work at the front,” Nasrallah said. “Our women and our children who were killed in these days, the enemy will pay the price of spilling their blood in blood,” he said.
Nasrallah warned that if Israel expanded the war, Hezbollah has a “huge arsenal” of “precision-guided missiles that can reach everywhere in Israel “from Kiryat Shmona [on the northern border] to Eilat [Israel’s southernmost city].
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there. This has led to Israeli retaliations and regular cross-border fire, and has displaced tens of thousands of Israelis in border communities.
Israel has warned it will no longer tolerate the presence of Hezbollah along the Lebanon frontier, where it could attempt to carry out an attack similar to the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7.
It has warned that a failure of international diplomacy to force Hezbollah away from the border will necessitate an Israeli offensive.
In a signal that it was prepared for any escalation, the Israeli military released a statement on Friday that said that its ground forces were “training on terrain that simulates the northern borders in winter weather conditions.”
Foreign Minister Israel Katz told the Munich Security Conference that Hezbollah was just a proxy that Iran was maneuvering as it saw fit and that Israel would not let instability in the north continue endlessly.
“If a diplomatic solution is not found, Israel will be forced to act in order to remove Hezbollah from the border and return our residents to their homes,” he said, referring to some 70,000 displaced Israelis.
“In such a case, Lebanon will also pay a heavy price.”
France has delivered a written proposal to Beirut and Israel aimed at ending hostilities and settling the disputed Lebanon-Israel frontier, but there are few signs that those efforts will bear fruit in the immediate term.
“Lebanon will be destroyed if we attack. Pressure Hezbollah and Iran,” Katz said.
Speaking in Munich earlier in the day, Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, urged calm, while saying attacks on civilians needed to end.
The Israel Defense Forces said Thursday it had eliminated a senior Hezbollah commander in the terror group’s elite Radwan Force responsible for a March 2023 bombing in northern Israel, along with his deputy, in a strike in southern Lebanon the previous night.
The IDF said its fighter jets struck a building used by Hezbollah in Nabatieh, killing Ali Muhammad al-Debes and his deputy Hassan Ibrahim Issa.
According to the IDF, al-Debes, a commander in the terror group’s elite Radwan Force, was one of the masterminds behind a bombing attack at Israel’s Megiddo Junction that seriously injured a man, and planned and carried out other attacks against Israel, including amid the ongoing border conflict.
Lebanese officials have said 10 people were killed in the strike, including three Hezbollah men and seven civilians in one family. A Lebanese security official said the Hezbollah members were on the ground floor of the building hit, while the family was on the floor above.
The wave of strikes on Wednesday came in response to a Hezbollah rocket attack on an army installation and city in northern Israel that killed an IDF soldier and injured eight others.
Fighting persisted on Thursday, with a barrage of 14 projectiles fired at Kiryat Shmona in the evening, including two anti-tank missiles and 12 rockets, Channel 12 news reported
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday that the military had stepped up its attacks against Hezbollah by “one level out of 10,” warning that “the IDF possesses very significant further strength” and “Air Force jets currently flying in the skies of Lebanon have heavier bombs for more distant targets.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hezbollah-says-israel-will-pay-in-blood-for-civilian-deaths-during-strikes/.
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