Iran Envoy Meets Hezbollah Chief As Rockets Hit Israel
By Worthy News’ George Whitten and Stefan J. Bos
BEIRUT/JERUSALEM (Worthy News) – Iran’s foreign minister has warned that the Gaza war will expand unless the truce between Israel and Hamas, entering into force Friday, is maintained.
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks while meeting Iran-backed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah whose forces intensified attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon.
Thursday’s attacks came after Israeli bombardments killed seven fighters, including elite unit members of Hezbollah, which Israel has condemned as a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah also supports Hamas fighters who killed some 1,200 people, including women and children, while kidnapping some 240 others in the worst terror attack in Israel’s recent history.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, and its retaliatory air and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed nearly 15,000 people, including thousands of children, claims Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
However, the death toll given by Hamas has been difficult to verify independently, and it hasn’t provided figures of fighters killed by Israel.
In Tehran, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said Thursday that Israel had failed to achieve its war objectives and “the Palestinian people and resistance won a great victory,” the official IRNA news agency reported.
TEMPORARY CEASEFIRE
Israel and Hamas agreed on a temporary ceasefire to allow the release of dozens of hostages in exchange for Israel freeing Palestinian prisoners, but Amir-Abdollahian demanded a permanent end to Israeli attacks.
“If this ceasefire starts [Friday], if it does not continue… the conditions in the region will not remain the same as before the ceasefire, and the scope of the war will expand,” he said after arriving in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital.
Besides meeting with the Hezbollah chief, the Iranian foreign minister also spoke there with Ziad al-Nakhaleh, secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Khalil Al-Hayya, a politburo member of Hamas and other officials “from the two terror groups,” sources said.
His visit came as Iran stepped up its support for these and other groups seeking the destruction of Israel. As the talks continued, Hezbollah said it carried out more than 20 attacks on Israeli military positions and claimed to have caused casualties.
In one of the attacks, it claimed that it fired 48 rockets at a military base at Ein Zeitim, near the town of Safed in northern Israel, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from the border.
The attacks marked the most significant rocket salvo to be fired by Hezbollah since violence broke out last month. Israel’s army said that, in response to fire towards Israel, its helicopters and fighter jets had struck “terrorist infrastructure” belonging to Hezbollah, as well as rocket launch sites.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency said the Israeli army had shelled several locations in southern Lebanon.
ISRAEL-HEZBOLLAH CLASHES
The violence between Israel and Hezbollah since early October has reportedly claimed at least 109 lives in Lebanon, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but also at least 14 civilians, including three journalists.
Six Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed on the Israeli side, authorities said.
Hezbollah held funerals on Thursday for militants killed in southern Lebanon, including the son of a member of parliament.
Abbas Raad, the son of Hezbollah legislator Mohamed Raad, was killed with four others in an Israeli strike on a house in Beit Yahoun village on Wednesday evening, a source close to the family told media.
Two leaders of Hezbollah’s elite Al-Radwan force were reportedly among the five killed.
Two more fighters were subsequently announced dead by Hezbollah, and more deaths were expected as the fighting intensified.
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