‘Hezbollah can beat Israel better today’

A senior Hezbollah official says that the Lebanese resistance movement is more powerful today and can inflict a heavier defeat on Israel five years after the 2006 Lebanon War.

In a speech in Bint Jbeil, a town in southern Lebanon, on Thursday, the Head of Hezbollah Executive Council Sayyed Hashem Safieddin pointed to the military and non-military threats Hezbollah faces and said it has the power to defeat Israel more resoundingly now .

He went on to state that “All the attempts of the Zionist regime ended in defeat after the 33-Day War and it failed to achieve victory in its fight against the resistance.”

Zionist Israel’s offensives on southern Lebanon in July 2006, also known as the 33-Day War, killed about 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians. Hezbollah repelled the Israeli attacks and Tel Aviv was forced to withdraw its forces from the Lebanese territory without having attained any of its objectives.

Israel violates Lebanon’s airspace on an almost daily basis. Lebanon’s government, the Hezbollah resistance movement, and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, have repeatedly condemned the overflights, saying they are in clear violation of UN Resolution 1701 and the country’s sovereignty.

Referring to the Western efforts to hinder the formation of a new Lebanese government, Safieddin further explained that “The move of Lebanon’s new administration to fulfill its duties is the greatest reason for the failure of the US to undermine the resistance movement, as America and the West exerted enormous pressure to prevent the formation of a new Lebanese government.”