The great, brave leader of Hezbollah, who was hiding in some underground bunker somewhere, afraid to show his face, told Israel that she had achieved none of her objectives during last year’s war. Proof again that the Arab/Muslim world seems utterly immune to irony.
But Hezbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, said the U.S. vision aimed at reinforcing Israel.
“There is no new Middle East,” Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah told a mass rally in the southern town of Bint Jbeil, one of the towns hardest hit by the war. “It’s gone with the wind.”
Nasrallah did not personally attend the rally to mark the first anniversary of the war which Hezbollah calls “a divine victory. His speech was relayed to the crowd on a giant screen set up in the main square of Bint Jbeil.
Yes, brave man, addressing the rally from somewhere else for fear of an IDF Hellfire salute to Nasrallah.
There is, of course, the obligatory AP anti-Israel bias:
The offensive killed more than 1,000 Lebanese, most of them civilians, according to tallies by the Lebanese government, human rights groups, and The Associated Press. Hezbollah launched nearly 4,000 rockets at Israel during the war, which killed 119 Israeli soldiers and 39 civilians
The IDF reckons that more than half the Lebanese killed were members of Hezbollah. These figures are never cited as an alternative, however.
Israel identified 440 dead guerrillas by name and address, and experience shows that Israeli figures are half to two-thirds of the enemy’s real casualties. Therefore, Amidror estimated, Hezbollah’s death toll might be as high as 700.
There’s also word out today that one of the two kidnapped soldiers is dead. But we’re not going to know unless there is a deal made with Hezbollah, and so far, that shows no sign of happening.