He had already done it at the end of September, but this Tuesday he repeated it with more force: Israeli PM wants Lebanese to face new civil conflict. Benjamin Netanyahu put it this way in his second video about Israel’s northern neighbors last month: “You must take your country back. If you do not do this, Hezbollah will continue to attempt to fight Israel from densely populated areas, at its expense. […] You have the opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering, as we see in Gaza. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
The dilemma proposed by first Israel towards the Lebanese population is to either stop the Shiite party militia or be prepared to everyone pays for a war like the one we have been witnessing for a year.
Although Hezbollah, which controls an area where nearly a third of the Lebanese population lives, is the country’s most important political player, Netanyahu is urging Lebanese of other religious faiths – particularly Christians – to seize the opportunity to take action: Israel has done it. just decapitated the party leadership, and after the assassination of Hasan Nasrallah on September 27, no one was appointed general secretary.
The weakening of Hezbollah in recent weeks is evident. Naim Qasem, until now deputy secretary general of the party and Nasrallah’s predictable successor at the head of the Lebanese organization, also spoke on Tuesday.
For the first time since the start of the war in Gaza, a Hezbollah leader did not demand a truce in the Gaza Strip as a condition for achieving a ceasefire in Lebanon. Unlike Nasrallah, Qasem reneged on his promise to continue fighting on the southern border until Israel ends its offensive against Hamas in the Palestinian enclave.
Qásem’s appearance before the network Al-Manarproperty of Hezbollah, corroborated the enemy’s decline in tone in northern Israel. Attacks on walkie talkies and the “searches” of the week of September 17, the internal communication channels of the Lebanese armed organization were seriously affected. Today, Qasem says, Hezbollah “supports the political activity carried out by [Nabih] Berri, President of the Lebanese Parliament, under the title of ceasefire”.
Until now, a truce without preconditions was not Hezbollah’s preferred means of closing the war front on the border with Israel. Qásem’s speech suggests that the party is ready to play its cards in the diplomacy and find a cessation of hostilities with the help of Berri, partner of the majority Shiite Muslim party Amal.
This change in strategy comes at a time when no one knows how the party’s organization has evolved after the Israeli attacks of recent weeks.
However, Qasem assured that the leadership, control and leadership of the resistance – as the armed opposition to Israel in Lebanon is called – “is strictly organized and no position remains vacant.” Furthermore, despite the “painful blows from Israel”, Nasrallah’s number two has so far confirmed that Hezbollah’s military capabilities are “intact”.
Qasem also announced on Tuesday that Hezbollah would elect a new secretary general and announce it as soon as possible. Everything indicates that he will be Nasrallah’s successor: the big favorite to take over, Hachem Safieddin was assassinatedaccording to Israel, last week in a bomb attack in south Beirut.
Qasem, the only political leader of Hezbollah to survive the Israeli purge of recent weeks, was named deputy leader in 1991 by Abbas al-Musawi, then secretary-general of the armed group, who was killed in a helicopter attack Israeli the following year. He remained in his post when Nasrallah became leader and was long one of Hezbollah’s main spokespersons to the foreign press.
This Tuesday, Israel declared that it had launched a “limited, localized and selective” ground operation in southwest Lebanon and that he had “eliminated” Suhail Hussein Husseini, commander of Hezbollah headquarters, during a nighttime airstrike on Beirut.
The Israeli military also said it had discovered a Hezbollah tunnel in Lebanon that ran through Israel, and for the first time in this war, the Israel Defense Forces planted the Israeli flag in a town in southern Lebanon.
