Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Friday that his militia is already engaged in unprecedented cross-border fighting with Israel along the Lebanon-Israel border and threatened a further escalation as the four-week-long Israel-Hamas war rages on.
In televised remarks — Nasrallah's first since the beginning of the war sparked by the Palestinian militants’ deadly Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel — he stopped short of announcing his Lebanese militia would fully enter the conflict.
"Fear of the possibility that this front could escalate or go into full war, or that this front could lead to a wider war, it is a realistic possibility and it may happen,” he warned.
Nasrallah also said that Hezbollah, an ally of Gaza's militant Hamas rulers, is not deterred by U.S. warnings to stay out of the latest war.
Referring to U.S. military deployment in the region, he said American warships in the Mediterranean Sea "will not scare us.”
“I tell you with all honesty that those fleets that you are threatening us with, we have prepared options for them,” he added.
His speech had been widely anticipated throughout the region as a sign of whether the Israel-Hamas conflict would spiral into a regional war, following weeks of limited exchanges between the Lebanese militant group and Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border.
Celebratory gunshots rang out over Beirut as thousands packed into a square in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital to watch the speech broadcast via video-link on a massive screen.
Nasrallah's address to supporters came a day after the most significant escalation in clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces on the Israel-Lebanon border since the war started — and on the same day as a visit to Israel by the top U.S. diplomat.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge protections for civilians in the fighting with Hamas, as Israeli troops tightened their encirclement of Gaza City.
Nasrallah praised the Hamas' unprecedented incursion into Israel in which the militants attacked farming villages, towns and military posts, killing more than 1,400 people in Israel.
Israel considers the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militant group its most serious immediate threat, estimating that Hezbollah has around 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel, as well as drones and surface-to-air and surface-to-sea missiles.
But a full-on conflict would also be costly for Hezbollah, which fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006 that ended with a draw — but not before Israeli bombing reduced swaths of southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs to rubble.
A new all-out war would also displace hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah’s supporters and cause wide damage at a time when Lebanon is in the throes of a historic four-year economic meltdown.
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