Nasrallah: Israel to ‘pay with blood’ price of killing Lebanese civilians
The secretary general of Lebanon’s Hezbollah says the Israeli regime will “pay with blood” the price for the recent killing of civilians in the country’s south, stressing that the massacre will not force the resistance movement to back down from supporting Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised speech broadcast live from the Lebanese capital city of Beirut on Friday on the occasion of Hezbollah’s Martyred Leaders Day, which annually falls on February 16, Press TV reported.
The speech came two days after an Israeli strike targeted a building in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh, claiming the lives of seven members of a family, including a child.
In a separate attack by the illegal entity, a woman and her two children were also killed in the village of As-Sawana in southern Lebanon.
Nasrallah condemned the Israeli strikes on Nabatiyeh and as-Sawana as "deliberate massacres," and said Tel Aviv must know that it “went too far” by its targeting of civilians.
“The enemy will pay the price for the killing of our women and children with blood. The price of this blood will be blood, not sites, spy devices, and vehicles, and I will leave the matter to the battlefield,” the Hezbollah chief asserted.
“The enemy is killing our leaders, fighters and families and it is destroying our homes, but this will not push us to retreat or give up on our responsibilities.”
Stressing that the Israeli regime’s goal from killing civilians is to pressure the resistance to stop, Nasrallah said, “We are in the heart of a real battle on a front that extends more than 100 kilometers, and the martyrdom of our fighters is part of the battle.”
The Hezbollah leader said the recent targeting of the Kiryat Shmona settlement in the north of the occupied territories with dozens of Katyusha rockets was an “initial response” to Wednesday’s bloodshed, adding that the Lebanese resistance has enormous and precision-guided missiles that can extend from Kiryat Shmona in the north to Eilat in the south.