Speaking live in a video feed, Nasrallah demanded an end to Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip and said any decision by Hezbollah to escalate — from what, for the past few weeks, have been intensifying border skirmishes — would depend on Israel’s military decisions in both Gaza and southern Lebanon.
There has already been spillover. Other Iranian-backed groups allied with Hezbollah, in Iraq and Yemen, have launched attacks against Israel and U.S. bases. Israel has carried out airstrikes in Syria. But a decision to escalate by Hezbollah — one of the most heavily armed militias in the world — would transform the conflict and could further draw in the United States, Israel’s main military ally.
The Israeli military offensive in Gaza has killed more than 9,000 people, including nearly 4,000 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. On Friday, an Israeli strike on an ambulance outside Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital killed at least 13 people and injured dozens more, among them bystanders passing by the hospital’s gate, according to the hospital director. Israel’s military later confirmed the strike, saying it had targeted a “Hamas terrorist cell.”
War erupted on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants from Gaza launched an attack inside Israel, killing more than 1,400 people and taking more than 200 back into Gaza as hostages.
Nasrallah addressed a significant portion of his speech to the United States, which has sent warships to the region, including the eastern Mediterranean close to Lebanon’s coastline. “Your fleets in the Mediterranean Sea, these do not scare us, nor have they ever scared us,” Nasrallah said. The only path Washington could take to reduce tensions, he continued, was reining in Israel.
“You Americans can stop the aggression on Gaza, because it is your aggression. Whoever wants to stop the start of a regional war — and the message is to the Americans — then you have to rush to stop the aggression on Gaza,” Nasrallah said in the nearly 90-minute speech.
Hezbollah, a major political force in Lebanon, has faced competing pressures. Lebanese political groups worry about the country’s being drawn into a full-scale war with Israel even as Lebanon reels from a devastating economic crisis. But some within Nasrallah’s own movement, as well as armed factions around the region, seek to open a new front against Israel.
In Iraq, members of Iranian-backed militias gathered to hear Nasrallah. Ali Al-Yassiri, a member of one of the groups, the Badr Organization, said he was expecting something “stronger” — a speech that “draws a road for the resistance to begin achieving the dream, liberating the Arab land of Palestine,” he said.
“All he did was give a brief account of what happened since October 7,” he said.
In the northern Israeli city of Tiberias, where hotels are packed with evacuees from Israel’s border with Lebanon, people checked their phones or asked others whether there was news about Nasrallah’s speech. One, Lliron Ziv, from Hanita, a stone’s throw from the Lebanese border, said, “We all just want to go home.”
“This all seems so stupid. We have evacuated. They have evacuated,” she said, referring to residents of southern Lebanon. “There is a tank parked in my driveway.” The evacuees heard that Nasrallah had recited old grievances but did not call for an escalation in the fighting. “So that’s something,” Ziv said.
In Beirut, around the corner from a rally held by Hezbollah, a cafe was filled with a few dozen men and women smoking hookahs and watching the speech on two TV screens. When it ended, the cafe was silent, in contrast to the thundering applause echoing from the rally. Three men clapped and urged others to join, but no one else did. Groups that had cheered at points during the speech packed up slowly and left.
Ali, a 31-year-old man with a Hezbollah bandanna on his head, paused when asked whether he had expected more from Nasrallah or felt relief at the absence of a formal declaration of war.
“When we see Palestinian fetuses dying, and the children bleeding on hospital floors … no state accepts this,” he said, speaking on the condition that only his first name be used because of the sensitivity of the topic. “When we see this, of course we get agitated. We think, ‘Maybe we’ll be heading to a war, a big one, a wide one.’”
But Nasrallah, Ali added, “knows what he’s doing. We have trust in the leadership.”
In another cafe, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, a man who gave his name as Abu Moussa, 48, watched with patrons who played cards or smoked in silence. The cafe was one of the few open on a day when a general strike was called, to protest Israel’s military offensives in Gaza and the West Bank.
“We can’t expect much from the speech,” said Abu Moussa, who had bullet wounds he said he suffered during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation in the late 1980s and early ’90s. He also showed marks on his wrists that he said came from a beating he received from Israeli soldiers.
“Nasrallah isn’t capable of helping us, but it feels like this new war is shifting something,” he said. “If something doesn’t change at the end of all this, then this cycle will be doomed to repeat itself forever.”
Booth reported from Tiberias and Francis from London. Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut, Mustafa Salim in Baghdad and Louisa Loveluck in Ramallah contributed to this report.
