The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group held talks on Wednesday in Beirut with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad figures in a key meeting of three top anti-Israel terrorist groups amid the war raging in Gaza.
In neighboring Syria, meanwhile, state media said an Israeli airstrike hit the international airport in the northern city of Aleppo on Wednesday, damaging its runway and putting it out of service.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the reported strike.
Following the meeting in Lebanon, a brief statement said Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah agreed with Hamas’ Saleh al-Arouri and Islamic Jihad’s leader Ziad al-Nakhleh on the next steps that the three — along with other Iran-backed terrorists — should take at this “sensitive stage” in the Middle East.
Their goal, according to the statement carried on Hezbollah-run and Lebanese state media, was to achieve “a real victory for the resistance in Gaza and Palestine” and halt Israel’s “treacherous and brutal aggression against our oppressed and steadfast people in Gaza and the West Bank”.
No other details were provided.
Nasrallah has yet to publicly speak about the war in Gaza and clashes along the Lebanon-Israel border. However, other Hezbollah top terrorists have warned Israel against its planned ground invasion into Gaza.
Israeli officials have said they would retaliate aggressively in case of a cross-border attack by Hezbollah from Lebanon.
“We will cripple it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the consequences for it and the Lebanese state (will be) devastating,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said while visiting Israeli troops along the border with Lebanon on Sunday.
Lebanon’s cash-strapped caretaker government, along regional and international figures, has been scrambling to keep the country out of the war.
Hezbollah and Israel fought a monthlong war in 2006 that ended in a tense stalemate. Israel sees Iran-backed Hezbollah as its most serious threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel.
In its report on the airstrike on Syria’s Aleppo, the state-run SANA news agency cited an unnamed military official as saying the strike came from the west, over the Mediterranean Sea near the coastal city of Lattakia. The report did not mention any casualties.
If confirmed, the attack would be the fourth time Israel has targeted the airport in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and financial hub, since the onset of the latest Hamas-Israel war.
The first attack took place on Oct. 12, when Israeli missiles struck international airports in both Aleppo and Syria’s capital of Damascus, putting them both out of commission. The Aleppo airport was later repaired.
Israel targets airports and sea ports in government-held parts of Syria in an apparent attempt to prevent arms shipments from Iran to terrorists backed by Tehran, including Hezbollah.
Israel has carried out hundreds of such strikes in recent years, including on the Damascus and Aleppo airports, but rarely acknowledges or discusses the operations.
(AP)
3 Responses
Could the Lebanese government put pressure on Hezbollah not to get involved? I have to guess that the average citizen in Lebanon does not want to get involved in this war.
“..brutal aggression against our oppressed and steadfast people in Gaza and the West Bank”
So PIJ and hamas are concerned for the well being of gazans and palestinians? is that right
Yet they have no issue launching their rockets from residential neighborhoods of “innocent” gazans knowing many of their rockets fail, and can fall on a hospital.
Gehinnon koleh veheim einom kolim
how much evil can be packed in one room