First Published 2010-01-15
Lebanon's Nasrallah: Israel again beating drums of war to try to restore its military's reputation.
BEIRUT - Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said Friday he was confident that any new conflict with Israel would see his powerful group emerge victorious and change the face of the region.
"I promise you, in view of all the threats you hear today... that should a new war with the Zionists erupt, we will crush the enemy, come out victorious and change the face of the region," he said via video link to an Arab and international forum for resistance movements in Beirut.
"The future of this region is the resistance, dignity, freedom," Nasrallah told an audience that included representatives from Iran, Syria and other countries, as well as Hamas's exiled leader Khaled Meshaal.
"God willing, Israel, the occupation, hegemony and arrogance are in the process of disappearing."
Nasrallah said that Israel was again beating the drums of war to try to restore its military's reputation as an invincible regional force.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
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