All of Lebanon will be exposed if we don’t react to Hamas leader killing: Nasrallah

Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech on Friday that all of Lebanon would be exposed if the group did not react to the assassination of deputy Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut.

Nasrallah added that its current operations on the southern borders opened a “historic opportunity” for Lebanon to liberate its land occupied by Israel and that the Islamic resistance in Iraq also has a “historic opportunity” to get rid of the US presence in that country.

The head of Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group warned that it will respond swiftly “on the battlefield” to the killing of Hamas’s deputy leader in one of its Beirut strongholds.

“The response is inevitably coming. We cannot remain silent on a violation of this magnitude because it means the whole of Lebanon would be exposed,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

“The decision is now in the hands of the battlefield,” he said in his second speech since the killing of Saleh al-Aruri.

“Fighters from all areas of the border… will be the ones responding to the dangerous violation in the suburbs,” he added.

Nasrallah also said that the Iran-backed militia had conducted around 670 military operations on the Lebanese-Israeli border since Oct. 8.

He added that Hezbollah destroyed a “large number of Israeli vehicles and tanks.”

A strike on Tuesday, widely assumed to have been carried out by Israel, killed Arouri in Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold.

He is the most high-profile Hamas figure to be killed during the war, and his death came in the first strike on the Lebanese capital since hostilities began.

In a speech on Wednesday, Nasrallah warned Israel against waging war on Lebanon, threatening that the group’s response would be “without limits.”