Will Hezbollah declare war on Israel? The leader of the Lebanese Shiite party supported by Iran Hassan Nasrallah speaks this Wednesday January 3 at 4 p.m. GMT (5 p.m. in France, 6 p.m. in Lebanon). This expected speech, which could set the sub-region ablaze, comes the day after the death of Hamas number two, Saleh al-Arouri, killed in an Israeli drone strike on the suburbs of Beirut. The shooting targeted the offices of the Palestinian Islamist movement, responsible for the terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, which left more than 1,140 dead in Israel, mostly civilians. As of yesterday evening, the powerful pro-Iranian party affirmed that this “assassination would not go unanswered or unpunished”, calling it a “serious aggression against Lebanon”.
Since October 7, fear and the risk of the conflict spreading have hovered over the Land of the Cedars. Its border with Israel is the scene of exchanges of fire, mainly between the Jewish state and Hezbollah. More than 160 people were killed in Lebanon, most of them fighters from the “Party of God” but also more than 20 civilians including three journalists, according to AFP.
On November 3, the secretary general of Hezbollah since 1992 spoke for the first time since October 7. A surprise speech in which he refrained from directly declaring war on the Jewish state. “An escalation on the (Lebanese) front depends first on the evolution of the situation in Gaza, then on the behavior of the Zionist enemy towards Lebanon (…) We say to the enemy “Whoever can think of attacking Lebanon or carrying out a preventive operation would be the biggest stupidity of their existence,” he warned, making his party’s entry into the war conditional on Israeli action on Lebanese territory.
A week later, on November 11, the Sayyed, an honorary title reserved for the descendants of the prophet whose supporters honor him, affirmed in a second speech that his formation was beginning to use new weapons in its daily attacks against Israel – notably drones. suicides and Burkan missiles “capable of carrying explosive charges of 300 to 500 kilos”.
The armed wing of Hezbollah, which congratulated Hamas for its deadly attack, presents itself as one of the spearheads of the “axis of resistance” to Israel and the United States in the Middle East. If its arsenal on Israel’s border can target key infrastructure or cities in the Jewish state, the Israeli army, supported by Washington, remains clearly superior.
