Hundreds of ardent Hezbollah supporters gathered in Beirut late Sunday afternoon amid promises of revenge attacks from a range of Israeli politicians, who blame the Lebanese group for the massacre of young football players in the Golan.
“We don’t fear death,” one Hezbollah loyalist told us. “We don’t care even if we all die. We don’t care.”
Far from cowing Hezbollah, the threats and accusations from their Israeli neighbours seem to have only hardened their attitudes.
Hezbollah has vehemently denied it carried out the rocket attack on a remote, predominantly Arab Druze town in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights – and the Hezbollah supporters we spoke to were just as vehement in their belief of this denial.
“If Hezbollah wanted to bomb civilians,” a young woman called Rawda Kassem told us, “they would bomb in Israel… why would Hezbollah want to make conflict between Arabs… I don’t believe this story.”
Hezbollah, which is a designated terror outfit by a string of countries including America and the UK. has been mounting attacks inside Israel since 8 October, insisting it’s supporting Palestinians in Gaza and exerting pressure for a ceasefire.
Israel has responded with about four times as many cross-border strikes inside Lebanon. The tit-for-tat exchanges have been gradually becoming deeper and wider and have forced nearly 200,000 people on either side of the border to flee their homes.
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Will attack tip region into all-out war?
But the football pitch attack and Israel’s insistence it was orchestrated by Hezbollah is the most serious escalation in nearly 10 months of exchanges largely along the border areas and has seen frantic diplomatic efforts to try to avert all-out war between the two which threatens to widen into a regional one.
In an interview with Sky News, Lebanon’s foreign minister Abdullah Bouhabib called for an independent investigation – and warned Israel against mounting widespread attacks on the country.
“Any attack on Lebanon is an attack on the Lebanese,” he cautioned if Israel does mount serious attacks in the country. “There’s no difference between Lebanese and Hezbollah.
“Most of the fighting is going to be with Hezbollah… but it will be supported by most Lebanese, not because we like war but because Israel is attacking Lebanon and we cannot accept it.”
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Speaking on behalf of the Lebanese government, he went on: “The Golan is not Israel. It is Syrian land occupied by Israel and therefore it’s not self-defence and therefore it doesn’t mean giving them a licence to kill and destroy like they did in Gaza… the world should not give them a licence to kill.
“The people who were killed were not Israelis. They were Syrians… I don’t know who did it and we ask for an investigation… a UN investigation and we are ready to accept the result.”
The war has entered a very dangerous stage and the Lebanese authorities who’re in direct contact with their Hezbollah partners are urging restraint whilst encouraging the Americans to leverage pressure on the Israelis to rein in their lust for revenge.