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Hezbollah backs Lebanon Speaker's efforts to reach ceasefire with Israel

October 8, 2024 at 4:59 pm

Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s Parliament Speaker and leader of the Shiite Amal movement. [Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images]

Lebanese group, Hezbollah, said Tuesday it backs political efforts by Parliament Speaker, Nabih Berri, to reach a ceasefire with Israel, Anadolu Agency reports.

“We have full confidence in the big brother Berri,” Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General, Naim Qassem, said in a televised speech.

He said Hezbollah’s military capabilities are still “intact”.

“The group is strictly organised. We have overcome the painful blows and alternatives have been secured in all locations without exception,” he added.

Hezbollah has been the target of massive Israeli air strikes since last month, which killed the group’s top leadership, including Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah.

Qassem said Lebanon was targeted by Israel even before Hezbollah joined the fight against Tel Aviv.

“(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu wants a new Middle East,” he said. Israel wants to subject countries of the region and their peoples to their policy.”

The Hezbollah leader said that Israeli losses in Lebanon “are big, but not announced” by Tel Aviv.

“Without US and Western support, the Israeli war on Gaza would have stopped within a month,” Qassem asserted.

Israel has mounted massive air strikes across Lebanon against what it claims Hezbollah targets since 23 September, killing more than 1,250 people, injuring 3,618 others, and displacing more than 1.2 million people.

The aerial campaign was an escalation in a year-long cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of Tel Aviv’s brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 42,000 people, mostly women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.

At least 2,083 people have since been killed and 9,869 others injured in Israeli attacks in Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.

Despite international warnings that the Middle East region was on the brink of a regional war amid Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, Tel Aviv expanded the conflict by launching, on 1 October, a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

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