BEIRUT: Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said on Monday that any attack on the group’s backer Tehran would also be an attack and warned that any new war on Iran would ignite the region.
Last week, President Donald Trump said a US “armada” was heading toward the Gulf and that Washington was watching Iran closely after a bloody crackdown on protesters.
He had appeared to step back from military intervention, but has since insisted it remains an option.
“Faced with aggression that does not distinguish between us… we are targeted by any potential aggression and determined to defend ourselves,” Qassem said in a televised address to supporters at a solidarity rally for Iran.
“A war on Iran this time will ignite the region,” he warned.
“We will choose at that time how to act… but we are not neutral,” he said, adding that “on how we act, these are details that the battle determines, and we will decide according to the interests at stake”.
READ MORE: Hezbollah chief thanks Iran for ongoing support to face Israel
Iran is Hezbollah’s main supporter, providing it with funding and weapons since its creation in the 1980s.
Qassem said in the past two months, his party had received via mediators “a clear and explicit question” about whether Hezbollah would intervene if the United States and Israel went to war with Iran.
He said they sought a “pledge from the party that it would not intervene”.
More than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, which largely ended with a November 2024 ceasefire, badly weakened the group, and the Lebanese government has begun implementing a plan to disarm the starting in the country’s south.
New deadly strike
Hezbollah had called on supporters to gather on Monday in its strongholds across Lebanon to express support for Iran “in the face of American-Zionist sabotage and threats”.
Some supporters in Beirut’s southern suburbs held pictures of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as Hezbollah and Iran flags, while also chanting “death to America”.
Qassem also warned against any attempt to assassinate Khamenei.
Trump last week reiterated a warning that Iran would be wiped “off the face of this earth” if Tehran ever succeeded in assassinating the US leader, while Tehran and Washington both threatened broadscale wars if the leaders of either country were assassinated.
Any killing of Khamenei would be an “assassination of stability in the region and the world”, Qassem said, adding that Hezbollah considered such a threat “directed at us as well, and we have full authority to act as we see appropriate”.
Despite the ceasefire, Israel has kept up regular strikes on what it says are Hezbollah targets and has maintained troops in five south Lebanon locations it deems strategic.
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike killed one person on Monday and wounded two others in the southern city of Tyre, while Israel’s army said it targeted a Hezbollah member.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television said the strike killed Sheikh Ali Noureddine “who previously worked at Al-Manar channel as a presenter of religious programmes”.
Hezbollah’s media office said in a statement that Noureddine was the imam of Al-Hawsh, in the suburbs of Tyre, calling his killing a “treacherous assassination”.
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