The head of Hizbullah in Lebanon said it could escalate attacks on Israel. Hassan Nasrallah said on Saturday that the 19 rockets it fired on Israel on Friday were aimed at open areas, and not populated ones, so as not to escalate the situation.
Israel retaliated for the rocket strikes, also targeting unpopulated areas. The Israeli airstrikes last week were the first Israeli attacks on Lebanese territories since the second Lebanon war in 2006. Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the Friday attacks on Israel’s Golan. No group claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks on Wednesday in the northern Israel city of Kiryat Shmona, though it is believed to have been a Palestinian group in Lebanon.
Nasrallah said that any Israeli air strike would be responded to in “the appropriate and proportional way.”
On Friday, Druze residents of the southern Lebanese village of Chouya stopped a Hizbullah crew and its mobile rocket launchers after it fired rockets into Lebanon, blaming Hizbullah for the retaliatory attacks hitting them. They detained the Hizbullah rocket crew until the Lebanese Army arrived to confiscate the launcher and arrest the four=member crew.
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami on Saturday during a meeting in Tehran with Hizbullah deputy secretary-general Nami Qassem said that the rocket attacks from Lebanon on Israel were a “message” to new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett “that the equation of response has not changed” and that Israel does not set the agenda in the region.