Hezbollah will slaughter an Israeli soldier for every militant killed as a means of “deterrence,” the Iran-backed terror group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah said on Sunday.
“Let the Israelis understand that whenever they kill one of our mujahideen [jihadists], we will kill one of their soldiers,” he said in a televised speech. “We are committed to an equation. Our objective is not revenge but punishment and to establish a balance of deterrence.”
Recent weeks have seen an escalation in provocations by the Lebanon-based group, triggered by the alleged killing of Hezbollah commander Ali Kamel Mohsenwith on July 20 by the Israel Defense Forces. Since then, the IDF has thwarted at least three infiltrations as well as bringing down a Hezbollah drone flown into Israeli territory.
Overnight on Tuesday, Hezbollah terrorists fired shots at Israeli troops along the border, prompting Israeli attack helicopters and aircraft to strike Hezbollah targets in the area, marking the first such raids since the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
The rise in attacks, Nasrallah said, “is part of the punishment” to avenge Mohsenwith’s death.
He said the attacks would not stop until an Israeli soldier is killed and the balance is restored.
“If the resistance fighters carried out 100 operations and have not killed a Zionist soldier, the attacks will continue until the equation is equal again,” he said.
He added his terror group was “in no hurry” to kill a solder: “Your soldiers will eventually appear on the roads,” he said.
Addressing the recent UAE-Israel normalization deal, Nasrallah called it an “act of treason.”
“We condemn all attempts to acknowledge Israel and all forms of normalization with this enemy,” he said. “We renew our condemnation of the stance of the officials in the UAE. Any such agreement is treason.”
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