Terror group’s leader Nasrallah says organization still committed to avenging its fighter killed in Syria and Iran’s slain top general; claims Saudi-Israeli plot to assassinate him
Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group has doubled the number of its precision missiles over the past year, the organization’s leader Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview published Sunday.
In a wide-ranging interview with the pro-Hezbollah Al Mayadeen news website, Nasrallah also claimed his Iran-backed Shiite group has the ability to accurately hit any part of Israel.
“The number of precision missiles at the resistance’s disposal has now doubled what it was a year ago,” he said. “Any target across the area of occupied Palestine that we want to hit accurately, we are able to hit accurately.”
Tensions in the region are high following the recent assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in a raid attributed to Israel, and amid fears of further attacks at the tail end of US President Donald Trump’s White House term.
Israel’s Channel 13 reported last month that Nasrallah was sheltering in place amid fears that he may be next on a US-Israeli hit list. The report said Nasrallah was staying put and canceling any “movements” following Fakhrizadeh’s assassination.
The terror leader has been thought to be a target of Israel for years, and some officials have mocked him for staying in a “bunker” and only making very rare public appearances. Such a hit by Israel would likely seriously inflame the region.
In his Sunday interview, Nasrallah said his group still intends to avenge the July death of its fighter, Ali Kamel Mohsen Jawad, in a series of airstrikes in Syria that were attributed to Israel, as well as for the US assassination in January of Iranian top general Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, a pro-Iran militia leader in Iraq.
He alleged that Israel operating drones in Lebanese skies reflects “confusion,” adding that Hezbollah has adequate weapons against the drone and that the group has fired at them on several occasions.
Earlier this month, Hezbollah claimed its own drone had managed to enter Israeli airspace undetected by the Israel Defense Forces and took footage of alleged army bases in the Upper Galilee.
In the interview, Nasrallah claimed that its regional foe Saudi Arabia has been seeking to assassinate him for a long time and that the kingdom has involved the United States and Israel in the plan.
“Our data indicates that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman raised the issue of my assassination during his visit to Washington,” he said, adding that the Americans “agreed to a Saudi request to assassinate me, that Israel would implement it.”
Regarding the recent decisions by a series of Arab states to normalize their ties with Israel, Nasrallah said he was “not surprised by the Arab letdown, because most of the Arab regimes used to sell the Palestinians only words.”
He said that the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco establishing ties with Jerusalem means that a period of “hypocrisy” has ended and “the masks have fallen.”
“As an Islamist, I find the position of the Justice and Development Party in Morocco more painful and more dangerous than the normalization of regimes,” Nasrallah added. “Nothing in the world justifies anyone in the world giving up Palestine.”
Tensions have recently also been rising between Israel and Iran, with an IDF spokesman telling a Saudi newspaper over the weekend that Israeli submarines are quietly operating “everywhere” and an unnamed Iranian official subsequently telling Al Jazeera that “Tehran’s response to any attack on national security will be strong and wide.”
The anonymous source claimed that Israel “is looking for excuses to drag the region into tension that will create chaos” in the final days of Trump’s term.
Iran has suffered several devastating attacks this year, including the killing of Soleimani in a US drone strike in January, and a mysterious explosion and fire that crippled an advanced centrifuge assembly plant at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, which is widely believed to have been an act of sabotage.
As reported by The Times of Israel