BEIRUT — Hezbollah’s leader threatened Thursday to strike Israel anywhere in the world in retaliation for what he said was its role in assassinating Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah commander blamed by the United States and Israel for killing hundreds in bombings, kidnappings and hijackings over a quarter-century.
In a video speech broadcast to thousands of mourners in a spare but sprawling tent in southern Beirut, Hasan Nasrallah said that because Israel had struck beyond what he called the “traditional battlefield” of Lebanon and Israel, it risked a borderless war with the Shiite Muslim group.
Israel has denied involvement in the car bombing Tuesday that killed the 45-year-old Mughniyeh in Damascus.
“Sacred right to defend”
“You have crossed the borders,” he said in the speech, which was vehement even by Nasrallah’s fiery standards. “Zionists, if you want this type of open war, then let it be, and let the whole world hear: We, like all other people, have a sacred right to defend ourselves, and everything we can do to defend ourselves, we will do.”
“At your service, Nasrallah!” the crowd shouted to the cadence of fists in the air.
Israel put its embassies and other interests abroad on alert Thursday, reinforced its troops on the Lebanese border and warned its citizens of the prospect of kidnapping.
Hezbollah was last accused of attacking Israeli interests abroad in the 1990s, when Argentina implicated the group and its Iranian backers in bombings of the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Many Lebanese believe the attacks were in retaliation for Israel’s 1992 assassination of Abbas Musawi, Nasrallah’s predecessor.
Hours before Mughniyeh’s funeral, tens of thousands of government supporters gathered in downtown Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square to mark the third anniversary of the killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. His followers blame his assassination on Syria, which denies the allegation.
Unlike in past demonstrations downtown, the crowds felt perhaps more dutiful than inspired, soaked as they were by a driving rain. But everywhere, there were the signs of crisis. Followers of Hariri donned paramilitary outfits similar to those worn by Hezbollah’s men, and supporters casually discussed the prospect of a renewal of the country’s civil war.
Ready for anything
“If they want war, we want war. If they want peace, we want peace,” said Moussa Khader, a 55-year-old pro-government demonstrator. “We’re just waiting for an order.”
He then quoted a proverb: “Things have to get bigger if they’re going to get smaller.”
The men venerated at both events encapsulated the contest between the two cultures that have often defined the crisis. Hariri envisioned Lebanon returning to its place as a commercial hub of the Levant, albeit one infused with often spectacular corruption in the service of deal-making. Mughniyeh sought to fulfill Hezbollah’s vision of a country engaged in an ongoing confrontation with Israel that, as Nasrallah put it, made Lebanon “a land of resistance.”
Neither culture offered much room for the other.
“Our hand is extended and will remain extended, no matter what the difficulties,” Hariri’s son, Saad, told the crowd, many bearing banners that celebrated “Our Lebanon.”
“When we see that the extended hand is sincere, it will only be met by an extended hand,” Nasrallah answered hours later in a stentorian voice at Mughniyeh’s funeral.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki attended the funeral and read a message of condolence from Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Portraits of Mughniyeh were the first time nearly anyone in attendance had seen the face of a man whose elusiveness over the years had made him a ghostlike figure.
His supporters, who knew him as Hajj Radwan, his nom de guerre, revered him for helping drive U.S. forces out of Lebanon in the early 1980s.
The United States blamed him for the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon in 1983 and 1984, and the 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. service members.
