TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Hezbollah that Israel would deal a “crushing” blow to Lebanon if it attacks, after the terror group’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, warned that Israel would be “wiped out” in any conflict between the U.S. and Iran.
“Over the weekend we heard Nasrallah’s remarks on his attack plans,” Netanyahu said at the start of Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting.
“It should be clear that if Hezbollah dares to do some nonsense and attacks Israel, we will hit him and Lebanon with a crushing military blow,” he added.
In a Friday interview broadcast on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television, Nasrallah laughed as he pointed to various military and civilian targets on a map of Israel, including Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, desalination plants, and the port of Ashdod, warning that they were “within range of our rockets.”
“Iran is able to bombard Israel with ferocity and force,” Nasrallah said. “When the Americans understand that this war could wipe out Israel, they will reconsider.”
Nasrallah also warned that Hezbollah, a Iranian terror proxy, had significantly bolstered its military capabilities since the last war with Israel 13 years ago, with “game-changing offensive capabilities and weapons.”
“Our weapons have been developed in both quality and quantity, we have precision missiles and drones,” he said.
A missile strike on Haifa’s ammonia storage tanks would cause tens of thousands of casualties, the terror chief boasted. He could even hit the southern Israeli city of Eilat. The only question that remained was “which of us would send the other back to the Stone Age.”
He also hinted that Hezbollah had procured anti-aircraft missiles.
In his comments Sunday morning, Netanyahu said that, “In contrast to Nasrallah, I do not intend to detail our plans.”
“It is enough to recall that Nasrallah had — for years — dug terrorist tunnels, which we destroyed within days,” the prime minister added, referring to the IDF’s operation earlier this year to destroy Hezbollah-dug cross-border tunnels.
Netanyahu last week said that “Iran has been threatening the destruction of Israel” and warned that Israel’s fighter planes “can reach anywhere in the Middle East, including Iran.”
Nasrallah has often repeated the claim that Hezbollah’s rockets could strike all of Israel.
A Forbes report last year claimed that Hezbollah is the richest terror organization in the world, with an estimated annual income of $1.1 billion.
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