Despite the bellicose rhetoric, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah, ruled out the extension of the Gaza war to the rest of the region in a long-awaited speech, the first statement by this influential Shiite figure linked to Iran since the beginning of the war. . At the same time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed in Tel Aviv that the US is doing everything possible “to prevent escalation in other areas.”
Over the course of two hours, recorded from an unknown location and broadcast at a rally in Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah ruled out the most feared option – extending the war to the region thanks to Iran's network of armed allies – and limited himself to a kind of ultimatum to the United States, which he urges to end “the aggression in Gaza” if they want to prevent a large-scale war. This vagueness does not mean – he stressed – that Hizbullah is satisfied with the current order of things since the prospect of “a total war is realistic. “We are prepared to confront your fleet,” in relation to the two US aircraft carriers anchored off the coast of Lebanon.
Hizbullah will continue its hostilities from southern Lebanon, in which it has already lost “fifty martyrs”, an admission that it maintains an open front with Israel although on a scale still manageable for both sides.
In a first passage, “reassuring” regarding the spread of war, the Shiite leader pointed out that the massacre of October 7 was an operation “one hundred percent carried out and planned by Hamas,” which kept it “secret” even from his allies of Hizbullah, which is equivalent to saying that Iran was oblivious to the massacre of 1,400 Israeli civilians in a matter of hours.
