Hezbollah deputy delivers chilling message to the West as thousands attend funeral

Hezbollah’s deputy chief signalled the group had entered a “new phase” in its battle with Israel as thousands gathered in Beirut for the funeral of a key commander killed in an airstrike on Friday.

The militant group’s second in command, Naim Qassem, vowed to press on with greater intensity with rocket attacks into northern Israel until there’s a ceasefire in Gaza.

Thousands listened in the Lebanese capital as he said Hezbollah had entered an “open-ended battle of reckoning” with its neighbour and vowed to hit back at Israel with even more power and force.

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“Israel has targeted not only fighters but also children, paramedics, pharmacies, homes and all innocent lives,” he said. “Such actions cannot be justified.”

His tough rhetoric matched that of the Israeli prime minister – who promised in a video message: “Over the past few days, we hit Hezbollah with a string of strikes that it didn’t imagine.

“If Hezbollah didn’t get the message, I promise you, it will get the message,” Benjamin Netanyahu warned.

“We will do everything necessary to restore security” to the north, he said.

Hezbollah is the strongest militant group allied with Iran and is also an ally of Hamas.

It opened up a new front in the war when it started firing rockets into Israel the day after October’s Hamas attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,000 people and saw 250 taken hostage.

It has repeatedly said it will not stop firing into Israel until there’s a ceasefire.

Friday’s Israeli airstrikes in the Hezbollah heartland of Beirut killed Ibrahim Aqil – one of its most senior military commanders and founder of the elite Radwan Force.

He was a man who had been on the US most-wanted list for decades and whom Israeli forces said “had the blood of many people on his hands”.

But women sobbed and the Hezbollah fighters acting as funeral bearers cried as they mourned the loss of a man many loyalists see as a hero.

They chanted for revenge and marched towards the burial ground known as the “Martyrs’ graveyard”, professing loyalty to the group which is a proscribed terror organisation in the US and UK.

At the same time further south in Lebanon, there were several funerals for civilians – mothers, children, whole families who were killed in the same airstrikes.

They were in one of two residential apartments hit by the strikes.

Israeli forces say the attack was targeted at the commander and a group of his elite forces meeting deep underneath one of the high-rise blocks. But multiple civilians including children were also killed alongside 16 Hezbollah fighters.

The death toll at the time of writing is more than 40.

Real fear after triple attack

The airstrikes in a densely populated part of Beirut followed two days of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members exploding around the country.

The three attacks inside a week seem to have drawn the country together in grief and defiance – but there is also a real sense of fear among millions of people across Lebanon.

However, even as global leaders urged restraint and politicians in UK and America urged their citizens to leave the country while they still can, both Israel and Lebanon intensified their exchanges along the border.

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Israeli warplanes launched hundreds of airstrikes over the weekend, pounding Lebanese villages in the south, while Hezbollah fired a salvo of long-range rockets reaching the deepest into Israeli territory in nearly a year.

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Lebanese government ministers who are not Hezbollah have denounced Israel’s actions as “war crimes”.

Its foreign minister said the attacks had resulted in a collective feeling that “no one is safe” and the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, warned of the risk of “transforming Lebanon into another Gaza”.

But perhaps the most telling comments came from one of those who turned out at the commander’s funeral in Beirut .

A young 18-year-old university student called Hussein told us: “We are in a war… it is an open war… They [Israelis] bombed us three times this week… including the pager and walkie-talkie thing.”

He went on: “You can’t blame us for being negative… they are bombing us… If you were bombed in Britain or America, you would say that’s terrorism…We can also say this is terrorism… we are being killed, my future is being broken in front of my eyes… and I hate it.”

Alex Crawford reports from Beirut with camera Jake Britton, producer Chris Cunningham and Lebanon producers Jihad Jneid, Sami Zein and Hwaida Saad