Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem, in his first public address since Israel assassinated the group’s chief Hassan Nasrallah last week, said the movement is ready to confront any Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.
Israel will not achieve its goals, he said.
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“We will face any possibility and we are ready if the Israelis decide to enter by land and the resistance forces are ready for a ground engagement,” he said.
Israeli forces have dealt multiple blows to Hezbollah in a two-week wave of attacks on targets in Lebanon that has eliminated several commanders. The possibility that Israel’s next move might be to send ground troops and tanks over the border is on many minds.
In other developments, the Palestinian militant group Hamas said an Israeli airstrike killed its leader in Lebanon in the city of Tyre on Monday, and another Palestinian organisation said three of its leaders died in a strike in central Beirut – the first such hit inside the capital’s limits.
The killings were the latest in a wave of intensified Israeli attacks on militant targets in Lebanon, part of a conflict also stretching from the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, to Yemen, and within Israel itself.
