On the anniversary of the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah announced to his followers that Israel “fears” the Lebanon-based terror group’s growing power.
Addressing crowds on Sunday in a ceremony marking the 11th anniversary of what Hezbollah calls the “Divine Victory,” the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Nasrallah warned that the cost of an Israeli war on Lebanon would be “very high.” He called on “the Israeli enemy” to consider dismantling the Dimona reactor, which he has threatened to attack in the past.
“The sample which Israelis had seen during [the] July [2006] war, they will see it multiplied by 100 times in any future confrontation on all levels,” Nasrallah threatened.
Nasrallah said that despite the fact that 11 years have passed since that war, it is “still in the Israeli conscience,” and Israel is still studying the war and “looking deep into its lessons.”
“July war’s goal was to crush Hezbollah, but since that time the Israeli enemy has been talking about Hezbollah’s growing power, and this is an acknowledgment that the war had failed to reach its goal,” he asserted.
Hezbollah’s “power is growing every day and this is what both enemy and friend know and say,” he underscored. “Any new war, whatever its goals were, is not worth the cost which the Israeli enemy will pay.”
Nasrallah voiced satisfaction that Haifa’s ammonia tank is being emptied, calling on Israel to dismantle the Dimona reactor because “it is more dangerous.”
“Israel knows we can turn the reactor in Dimona from a threat to us into a threat against itself, with our missiles,” Nasrallah stated in February.
A year ago, Nasrallah threatened to use Israel’s chemical storage facilities and ammonia containers, which contain more than 15 thousand tons of gas, as a “nuclear bomb” against the Jewish state in the event of a future conflict.
“This would be exactly as a nuclear bomb, and we can say that Lebanon today has a nuclear bomb, seeing as any rocket that might hit these tanks is capable of creating a nuclear bomb effect,” he warned.
“We have to be powerful; the era when the Israeli enemy can threaten and carry out is over,” he declared. “The Israeli enemy has reached the rock bottom, while we have reached the peak.”
Hezbollah launched several rocket attacks on Haifa during the Second Lebanon War, but did not cause widespread damage.
The IDF has been training and preparing for a future war with Hezbollah, which currently has a stockpile of over 130,000 rockets – more than the combined arsenal of all NATO countries, with the exception of the United States.
“You don’t collect 130,000 missiles if you don’t intend to use them,” said Matthew Levitt, an expert on counter-terrorism and intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Source: World Israel News