Hezbollah deputy chief says ready for any Israeli ground invasion Israeli airstrike kills one Hamas, 3 PLFP leaders in Lebanon

BEIRUT: Hezbollah fighters are ready to confront any Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, the group’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said on Monday in his first public address since Israel killed its chief Hassan Nasrallah last week. Israel will not achieve its goals, he said. “We will face any possibility and we are ready if the Israelis decide to enter by land and the resistance forces are ready for a ground engagement,” he said in an address from an undisclosed location. He was speaking as Israeli airstrikes on targets in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon continued, extending a two-week long wave of attacks that has eliminated several Hezbollah commanders but also killed about a 1,000 Lebanese and forced one million to flee their homes, according to the Lebanese government. “We will choose a secretary-general for the party at the earliest opportunity…and we will fill the leadership and positions on a permanent basis,” Qassem said. Qassem said Hezbollah’s fighters had continued to fire rockets as deep as 150 km (93 miles) into Israeli territory and were ready to face any possible Israeli ground incursion. “What we are doing is the bare minimum…We know that the battle may be long,” he said. “We will win as we won in the liberation of 2006 in the face of the Israeli enemy,” he added, referring to the last big conflict between the two foes. The possibility that Israel’s next move might be to send ground troops and tanks over the border is on many minds and it has given no indication it will rein in the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the region. Israel says it will do whatever it takes to return its citizens to evacuated communities on its northern border safely. It has not ruled out a ground invasion and its troops have been training for it. Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Monday his government was ready to fully implement a UN resolution that had aimed to end Hezbollah’s armed presence south of the Litani River as part of an agreement to stop the war with Israel. Mikati said the Lebanese army could deploy south of the river, which lies about 30 km from the country’s southern border. Hours before Hezbollah’s Qassem spoke, Hamas said an Israeli airstrike killed its leader in Lebanon in the southern city of Tyre on Monday. Another Palestinian organisation said three of its leaders died in a strike in central Beirut - the first such hit inside the capital’s limits. Hamas said its leader in Lebanon, Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin was killed along with his wife, son and daughter, in a strike on their house in a refugee camp in Tyre in the early hours of Monday. Another group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), said three of its leaders were killed in a strike on Beirut’s Kola district.