The head of the terror group Hezbollah on Wednesday called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews “from the river to the sea.”
“You want to stay here? That’s going to be very difficult for you,” Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said in a televised speech in Beirut, according to Al Jazeera’s translation. “If you want to feel secure, you have an American passport, go back to the United States. You have a British passport, go back to the U.K. Here, you don’t have a future, and, from the river to the sea, the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian people only.”
He also said the group “cannot be silent” after the killing of Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, in Beirut and warned that his heavily armed forces would fight to the finish if Israel chose to extend war from Gaza to Lebanon.
Arouri’s killing was a further sign that the nearly three-month-old Israel-Hamas war was spreading well beyond Gaza, drawing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Hezbollah forces on the Lebanon-Israel border, and even Red Sea shipping lanes.
Arouri, 57, who lived in Beirut, was the first senior Hamas political leader to be assassinated outside Palestinian territories since Israel began its offensive against the Palestinian Islamist group in response to its deadly rampage from Gaza into Israeli towns on Oct. 7.
Nasrallah vowed that his powerful Iran-backed Shi’ite militia “cannot be silent” in the wake of Arouri’s killing, which he called “a major dangerous crime,” though he made no concrete threats of action against Israel.
Nasrallah said there would be “no ceilings” and “no rules” to Hezbollah‘s fighting if Israel launched full war on Lebanon.
“Whoever thinks of war with us, in one word, he will regret it. If war is launched against Lebanon, then Lebanon’s national interests require that we take the war to the end.”
Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, has been embroiled in nearly daily exchanges of shelling with Israel across Lebanon’s southern border since the Gaza war began. More than 120 Hezbollah fighters and two dozen civilians have been killed on Lebanese territory, as well as at least nine Israeli soldiers in Israel.
Hezbollah and Israel last fought a major war in 2006, and it ended in essentially a stalemate. Analysts say Hezbollah has become a more formidable fighting force since with thousands of rockets, missiles, and other heavy weaponry.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon warned that any escalation “could have devastating consequences for people on both sides of the border”.
Arouri’s death removes a big name from Israel’s most-wanted list of top Islamist foes, but could drive Hamas’s exiled leaders deeper into hiding, hampering efforts to negotiate further Gaza ceasefires and hostage releases.
Hamas politburo member Hossam Badran said in a eulogy for Arouri: “We say to the criminal occupation (Israel) that the battle between us is open.”
Israel had long accused him of orchestrating attacks on its citizens. But a Hamas official said he was also “at the heart of negotiations” conducted by Qatar and Egypt over the outcome of the Gaza war and the release of Hamas-held Israeli hostages.
Nasrallah also said Hamas’s lightning incursion on Oct. 7 dealt a severe and deliberate blow to a process of normalisation between Israel and various U.S.-backed Arab governments unfolding since 2020, even after the collapse of talks on a Palestinian state in Israeli-occupied territory.
Nasrallah spoke to commemorate four years since the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guards top commander Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq. Two explosions on Wednesday during a memorial ceremony at a cemetery in southeastern Iran where Soleimani is buried killed over 100 people, at a time of high tension between arch-enemies Iran and Israel.
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks, several anti-Israel demonstrations in America have featured slogans with variants of the phrase, “from the river to the sea,” which critics have roundly denounced as anti-Semitic, given that Hamas has also used it to call for the destruction of the state of Israel.
The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at George Washington University in late October projected the slogan onto a building on campus, and students at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a similar display weeks later. The administrations of both schools condemned their campus’s respective demonstrations.
Several Democrats in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) for her use of the slogan, which she said was “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”
