BEIRUT (Reuters) -Hezbollah fighters are ready to confront any Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, the group’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said on Monday in his first public address since Israel killed its chief Hassan Nasrallah last week.
Israel will not achieve its goals, he said.
“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 in an address from an undisclosed location.
He was speaking as Israeli airstrikes on targets in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon continued, extending a two-week long wave of attacks that has eliminated several Hezbollah commanders but also killed about a 1,000 Lebanese and forced one million to flee their homes, according to the Lebanese government.
The losses were Hezbollah’s heaviest since Iran’s Revolutionary Guards created the group in 1982 to counter an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Nasrallah had built it up into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political force, with wide sway in the Middle East.
Now it faces the challenge of replacing a towering leader who was a hero to supporters because he stood up to Israel even though the West branded him a terrorist mastermind.
“We will choose a secretary-general for the party at the earliest opportunity…and we will fill the leadership and positions on a permanent basis,” Qassem said.
Qassem said Hezbollah’s fighters had continued to fire rockets as deep as 150 km (93 miles) into Israeli territory and were ready to face any possible Israeli ground incursion.
“What we are doing is the bare minimum…We know that the battle may be long,” he said. “We will win as we won in the liberation of 2006 in the face of the Israeli enemy,” he added, referring to the last big conflict between the two foes.
The possibility that Israel’s next move might be to send ground troops and tanks over the border is on many minds and it has given no indication it will rein in the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the region.
Israel says it will do what ever it takes to return its citizens to evacuated communities on its northern border safely.
It has not ruled out a ground invasion and its troops have been training for it.
Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Monday his government was ready to fully implement a U.N. resolution that had aimed to end Hezbollah’s armed presence south of the Litani River as part of an agreement to stop the war with Israel.
Mikati said the Lebanese army could deploy south of the river, which lies about 30 km from the country’s southern border.
OTHER MILITANTS HIT
Hours before Hezbollah’s Qassem spoke, the Palestinian militant group Hamas said an Israeli airstrike killed its leader in Lebanon in the southern city of Tyre on Monday. Another Palestinian organization said three of its leaders died in a strike in central Beirut – the first such hit inside the capital’s limits.
The wave of Israeli attacks on militant targets in Lebanon are part of a conflict also stretching from the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, to Yemen, and within Israel itself.
Hamas said its leader in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was killed along with his wife, son and daughter, in a strike on their house in a refugee camp in Tyre in the early hours of Monday.
Another group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), said three of its leaders were killed in a strike on Beirut’s Kola district.
The attack against the PFLP was the first time Israel had struck Beirut beyond its southern suburbs. It hit the upper floor of an apartment building, Reuters witnesses said. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
MULTIPLE FRONTS
The latest actions indicated Israel has no intention of slowing down its offensive on multiple fronts even after eliminating Nasrallah, who was Iran’s most powerful ally in its “Axis of Resistance” against Israeli and U.S. influence in the region.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said Tehran would not leave any of Israel’s “criminal acts” go unanswered. He was referring to the killing of Nasrallah and an Iranian Guard deputy commander, Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, who died in the same strikes on Friday.
Russia said Nasrallah’s death had led to a serious destabilization in the broader region.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the bombing of residential areas in Lebanon had caused heavy casualties and would create a humanitarian catastrophe akin to the one in Gaza, where tens of thousands of people have died in the war between Israel and Hamas.
Lebanon’s Health Ministry says more than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and 6,000 wounded in the past two weeks, without specifying how many were civilians. One million people – a fifth of the population – have fled their homes, the government says.
The escalation has put Beirut on edge, with Lebanese fearful that Israel will expand its military campaign.
“There is nothing else to say or add, except God save Lebanon,” Beirut resident Nawel said. “What will happen to me is the same as what can happen to anyone.”
(Reporting by Maya Gebily, Laila Bassam, Ali Sawafta, Yomna Ehab, Mohammed Al Gebaly and Emma Farge and Elwely Elwelly and Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Angus MacSwan)
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