LEBANON: Hezbollah official says group close to ‘eradicating’ Israel

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Hezbollah is ‘closer than any time before to eradicating the Zionist regime and establishing a Palestinian state,’ the party’s International Relations chief Nawaf Moussawi told Al Manar today, just weeks before Lebanon’s hotly contested elections.

His comments were translated and posted on the website nowlebanon.com, a news site supported by the U.S.-backed March 14 alliance and affiliated with the New Opinion think tank, which maintains a media monitoring team.

“The security measures taken are not enough to face the enemy,’ said Moussawi, who is running for a parliamentary seat representing the southern city of Tyre.

‘We should reinstate the culture of hostility toward Israel” and ‘stop inventing [imaginary] enemies for Lebanon, because this strengthens Israel,’ he added.

Moussawi also blamed the recently discovered Israeli spy networks in Lebanon on the ‘culture of hatred’ towards the resistance, which encourages people to become spies.

Moussawi’s comments come just days after he attended a political meeting in the town of Barghalieh, where he tied the Lebanese elections to the larger struggle against Israel.

‘The nature of these elections is not a battle for one seat or a dispute over representation,’ he was quoted as saying on the Hezbollah website wa3ad.org (in Arabic).

‘Rather, the battle is with America, Israel and their [proxies], since they want to control the Lebanese decision in order to finish off the resistance, in order to finish off the Palestinian issue,’ he said.

— Meris Lutz in Beirut

Photo: Election banners for Hezbollah read in Arabic :’Division, settlement, displacement [struck out in red], Lebanon, one homeland for all its citizens, resist with your vote,’ are seen displayed at the airport highway in Beirut. Credit: Hussein Malla