Hezbollah says Israel will pay ‘in blood’ for civilian deaths during air strikes

Hezbollah says Israel will pay ‘in blood’ for civilian deaths during air strikes

By REUTERS and TOI STAFF

The Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group signaled on Friday it would escalate attacks on Israel in response to the deaths of 10 Lebanese civilians killed in Israeli strikes on terror targets this week, while Israel said it would remove Hezbollah from the border if diplomacy failed.

In a televised speech, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Israel would pay a price “in blood,” indicating the risk of an intensification of the conflict that has been rumbling across the Lebanese-Israeli border since the Gaza war erupted in October.

Nasrallah accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians, saying Israel could have avoided killing them. The dead included five children.

The Israeli military said it carried out a “precise airstrike” on Lebanon on Wednesday that killed Hezbollah commanders and operatives. It has not commented on civilian deaths. It has previously said it does not target civilians.

“The response to the massacre should be continuing resistance work at the front and escalating resistance work at the front,” Nasrallah said. “Our women and our children who were killed in these days, the enemy will pay the price of spilling their blood in blood,” he said.

Nasrallah said the deaths had increased Hezbollah’s determination. Hezbollah would increase its “presence, strength, fire, anger” and expand its operations, he said. Israel “must expect that and wait for that.”

Nasrallah warned that if Israel expanded the war, Hezbollah has a “huge arsenal” of “precision-guided missiles that can reach everywhere in Israel “from Kiryat Shmona [on the northern border] to Eilat [Israel’s southernmost city].

Israel has warned it will no longer tolerate the presence of Hezbollah along the Lebanon frontier, where it could attempt to carry out an attack similar to the massacres committed by Hamas on October 7.

It has warned that a failure of international diplomacy to force Hezbollah away from the border will necessitate an Israeli offensive.

In a signal that it was prepared for any escalation, the Israeli military released a statement on Friday that said that its ground forces were “training on terrain that simulates the northern borders in winter weather conditions.”

Foreign Minister Israel Katz told the Munich Security Conference that Hezbollah was just a proxy that Iran was maneuvering as it saw fit and that Israel would not let instability in the north continue endlessly.

“If a diplomatic solution is not found, Israel will be forced to act in order to remove Hezbollah from the border and return our residents to their homes,” he said, referring to some 70,000 displaced Israelis.

“In such a case, Lebanon will also pay a heavy price.”