TEL AVIV – Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned the Arab world not to play into Israel’s hands and become its “tool,” amid news of warming ties between Israel and Gulf states following the U.S.-led Mideast conference in Warsaw.
Nasrallah called the conference “weak and stale” in a speech marking the terror group’s annual “martyrs” remembrance day on Saturday. He continued by saying that the summit’s aim was to “rally against Iran and the resistance movements in the region.”
“The enemies are trying to rally the world to conspire against the resistance after their wars failed to eradicate it,” he said.
He also charged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with “speaking from the heart” when the latter said Israel and Arab nations sought “war with Iran,” a statement that was later clarified as a mistranslation of Netanyahu’s original Hebrew comments to mean “struggle against Iran.”
Nasrallah said that “today Iran is a strong state and stronger than anyone who targets it with war.”
The summit in Poland had “brought out into the open Israel’s relations with the Gulf states,” he added.
“We knew about normalization between Israel and Oman and the United Arab Emirates, but at the summit we also clearly saw normalization with the Saudis,” he said.
He accused the UAE and Saudi Arabia of conducting the war in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels on behalf of the U.S. and Israel.
Israel, he said is the “head of terror” in the region.
He claimed the summit was also intended to “eliminate the Palestinian cause,” noting it “missed any reference to Palestine, even though Israel is the head of terror” in the region.
The Hezbollah chief also addressed claims by Israeli officials that Israel’s ground troops are not prepared for war with the terror group.
“They don’t believe in their army,” the Hezbollah chief said. “They know our fighters can enter the Galilee, but they’re not sure their Ground Forces can enter our land.”
Last month, Nasrallah warned Israel that Hezbollah’s rockets would strike all of Israel.
“In a future war, all of occupied Palestine will be struck by our rockets,” Nasrallah said.
“Any Israeli aggression, whether it is war or the assassination of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon or Syria, we will respond to it. Any attack or aggression is, in our view, a declaration of war,” the terror chief said.
The Hezbollah chief also mocked the IDF for its failure to discover the Hezbollah-dug cross-border attack tunnels, saying they had “existed for years.”
In January, the IDF wrapped up its operation to locate and destroy the tunnels, dubbed Northern Shield.
“They were dug before the Lebanon War,” Nasrallah claimed. “It took Israelis a long time to expose them.”
“One of the tunnels discovered recently is 13 or 14 years old,” he said, “and was located entirely in Israeli territory, meaning all of Israel’s technology and capabilities failed to detect this tunnel.”
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