Above photo: Marwan Naamani/dpa/Getty Images.
Nasrallah pledged that Hezbollah’s response to Israel killing a top commander in Beirut ‘will not be symbolic or a formality.’
NOTE: The Cradle also reports that concerns about a regional war escalating has caused major international airlines such as Delta, United and British Airways to suspend all flights to Tel Aviv. “Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to retaliate for Israel’s killing of Haniyeh and Shukr. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has previously vowed to attack Tel Aviv if Beirut is attacked. Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport is a possible target for Hezbollah’s massive stock of missiles, rockets, and drones. The Israeli Airports Authority stated, “The security situation allows flights from and to Israel. Some foreign carriers are suspending and reducing their flights to Israel for internal reasons.” The Cradle also writes, “On 1 August, a Lufthansa flight from Munich to Tel Aviv landed in Larnaca, Cyprus, leaving passengers stranded. According to the Israeli Channel 12, the crew refused to fly to Israel. The plane then returned to Germany.”
The Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, announced on 1 August that the Lebanese resistance is no longer just “a support front” in the fight against Israel and that the response to the assassination of top war commander Fuad Shukr “is a foregone conclusion.”
“We are beyond the stage of being a ‘support front’; we are now in an open battle against the Israeli enemy, on all frontiers – we have entered a new stage,” Nasrallah said, stressing that operations during the next several days “are not a response to the martyrdom of Mr Fuad Shukr.”
“The enemy and those behind the enemy must await our inevitable response [to Shukr’s killing], no discussion or debate, and between us are the days, nights, and the battlefield,” the resistance leader added, calling the attack on Dahye “part of the US-Israeli war on our region” and stressing that “there will be no solution except to stop the aggression on Gaza.”
“The enemy does not know where our response will come from, whether from the north or south of Palestine, and whether it will be separate or simultaneous [with the rest of the Resistance Axis] … We will carry out a real, practical response – it will not be a symbolic response or a formality.”
“You (Israel) will cry a lot because you do not know which red lines you have crossed,” Nasrallah said during a televised speech delivered as part of the funeral proceedings for Shukr, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburbs of Beirut earlier this week.
He then reminded Israeli authorities that the resistance could “quickly fill any vacancy in our organizational structure, we have a generation of well-trained commanders … Assassination of the leaders doesn’t affect us; experience shows that the resistance grows and thrives.”
Nasrallah also spoke out against the Israeli claim that Shukr was behind the attack that killed 12 civilians over the weekend in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, saying Tel Aviv “refuses to accept that what happened in Majdal Shams would be caused by an Israeli interceptor missile.”
“We have enough courage to admit if [the Majdal Shams incident] was our mistake,” Nasrallah highlighted.
The Hezbollah leader later spoke about the assassination of Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, saying that the Islamic Republic “considers Haniyeh’s assassination as an attack on its national security and sovereignty.”
“Do [the Israelis] really imagine that they would kill Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Iran would keep mum?” Nasrallah wondered, stressing that “Imam Khamenei’s words after the assassination of Haniyeh are harsher than those after the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus because it was an attack inside Iran. Imam Khamenei considers it an issue of honor.”
Nasrallah finished his speech by reminding supporters and adversaries of Hezbollah that “Our commanders, fighters, women, and children will be martyred; we are united in sacrifice – this is the reality of resistance, and this is our path until the day of judgment.”