A brief statement following the meeting said that Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah agreed with Hamas’s Saleh al-Arouri and Islamic Jihad’s leader Ziad al-Nakhaleh on the next steps that the three — along with other Iran-backed, non-state actors — should take at this “sensitive stage.”
Nasrallah is known as a reclusive leader who rarely ventures beyond the confines of Hezbollah’s fortified zones in south Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed jihadi group has an extensive network of underground bunkers.
Their goal, according to the statement that was carried on Hezbollah-run and Lebanese state media, was to achieve “a real victory for the resistance in Gaza and Palestine” and halt Israel’s “treacherous and brutal aggression against our oppressed and steadfast people in Gaza and the West Bank.”
No other details were provided. The discussions in Beirut came as the war between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip, is now in its third week. The fighting was triggered by Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Hamas also took more than 200 hostages, including young children, women, and the elderly. READ MORE