asiafifaworldcup2022qualifiers|Hezbollah vows to continue supporting Gaza from Lebanon

BEIRUTasiafifaworldcup2022qualifiers, Aug. 25 (Xinhua) -- Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Sunday that his group will continue supporting Gaza from Lebanon.

"Any hopes of silencing the support fronts, especially the Lebanese front, will fail; We will continue to support Gaza, regardless of the sacrifices involved," Nasrallah said in a televised speech addressing the latest developments on Lebanon's border with Israel.

Earlier in the day, Hezbollah announced it had launched hundreds of rockets into Israel in retaliation for the killing of its commander, Fouad Shokor, in an Israeli airstrike on Dahieh in Beirut's southern suburbs last month. Meanwhile, Israel announced that it had conducted preemptive airstrikes targeting Hezbollah's rocket launchers in southern Lebanon.

Previously, Hezbollah has threatened a definite and painful response to the killing of Shokor at the appropriate time and place.

Nasrallah noted in his televised speech that Hezbollah is committed and determined to responding to the "brutal aggression" on Dahieh, but has delayed the response due to U.S. and Israeli mobilization as well as to give sufficient time for the ongoing Gaza ceasefire talks.

"We established guidelines for our response, ensuring that targets would not be civilians' or the enemy's infrastructure, but rather military sites directly linked to the assassination operation," he said.

Nasrallah said one of the Lebanese arm group's two main targets in its Sunday rocket attacks was the "Galilot" base situated 110 km from the Lebanese border and just 1,500 meters from the border of Tel Aviv, as it houses Unit 8200 that specializes in intelligence gathering and espionage.

Regarding Israel's claimed preemptive airstrikes on Hezbollah's rocket launchers, Nasrallah said they "had no impact on our operation today or our fighters," as they only hit two missile launch pads.

"We had already evacuated all the valleys containing precision and ballistic missiles, so what the enemy bombed today were empty valleys," he said.

The armed group "will consider the response process complete" if it finds the result of Sunday's attacks satisfactory, but "will reserve the right to respond later" if it is not, he said.

Tensions along the Lebanon-Israel border escalated on Oct. 8, 2023, following a barrage of rockets launched by the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah toward Israel in solidarity with Hamas' attack on Israel the day before. Israel then retaliated by firing heavy artillery toward southeastern Lebanon.■