Hezbollah Ready to Confront Any ‘Israeli’ Aggression – Deputy SG

By Staff, Agencies

Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General His Eminence Sheikh Naim Qassem reiterated the Lebanese resistance movement's readiness to confront any ‘Israeli’ aggression.

Sheikh Qassem declined to clarify Hezbollah’s response to an ‘Israeli’ attack that killed one of its fighters in Syria last week.

"Let the ‘Israelis’ have their own estimations and calculations in this regard," he told al-Mayadeen TV channel on Sunday.

Hezbollah announced the martyrdom of Ali Kamel Mohsen, one of its members, in an ‘Israeli’ airstrike in Damascus on July 20 and promised retaliation.

Sheikh Qassem also played down recent ‘Israeli’ threats, saying there were "mere chest-beating.”

His remarks came after Zionist war minister Benny Gantz warned Syria and Lebanon that they would be held responsible for any attacks against ‘Israel’ coming from their territory.

“We don’t want any unnecessary escalations, but anyone who tests us will be met by a very high capability to take action, and I hope we won’t need to use it,” Gantz said.

Sheikh Qassem dismissed the prospect of an all-out war with the Zionist entity in the next few months.

“‘Israel’s political confusion and low expectation from war outcomes as well as US President Donald Trump’s quagmire eliminate the possibility of an imminent eruption of the war,” Sheikh Qassem said.

But he promised Tel Aviv will be delivered yet another defeat if it launched an aggression.

“If ‘Israel’ decides to go to war with us, then we will confront them, and the 2006 War will be the model for our response,” Sheikh Qassem said.

The Zionist military went into high alert near the Lebanese border, amid concerns that Hezbollah would conduct a retaliation.

Gantz made his threats during a visit to the border between the occupied territories and Lebanon on Sunday, where he claimed that the ‘Israeli’ regime was “prepared for all possibilities”.

Shortly later, an ‘Israeli’ spy drone crashed inside Lebanon, the Zionist military admitted.

Elsewhere, Sheikh Qassem touched on the US harassment of an Iranian passenger plane over Syria, saying Washington wants to wreck a strategic pact between Iran and Syria.

The move by the US warplanes was similar to ‘Israeli’ tactics in the past, when the Zionist entity’s aircraft used civilian planes as a shadow to draw fire from Syrian air-defense systems.