The head of Hizbullah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called for armed operations against Israel to continue, during a rally at the Yarmuk refugee camp in Damascus.
Israel "wants to strike our will and our morale by murdering resistance fighters, but we will turn the blood into a cry of rage and of force" and carry out an "operation on the anniversary of the death of each martyr," he said, according to AFP.
Nasrallah was speaking at a joint rally with the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad. Friday was the seventh anniversary of the death, attributed to Israel, of the late Islamic Jihad chief Fathi Shkaki and also the 17th anniversary of the creation of his group.
"The resistance in Palestine and Lebanon has made the murders costly" for Israel, Nasrallah continued. Those murders "make us stronger," and "we should continue on the road of resistance," he said to an audience of some 1,000 people.
He said the Palestinian intifada which has been ongoing since September 2000 was "a victory for the Palestinian people and a defeat for the Zionists and their generals."
"The Lebanese should know that if they are drinking today water from the Wazzani (border spring), it is thanks to the youth who are carrying out martyrdom operations in occupied Palestine," said Nasrallah. "I tell the Palestinians: those who will make your future are these youths," he said.
Islamic Jihad secretary general Ramadan Abdallah Shalah also praised Nasrallah as the "master of victory" during the rally. "The enemy thinks it can crush resistance movements by killing their leaders, but every time there are new leaders who appear," he said, adding: "the resistance has invented cloning, well before the United States."
Shalah said "the battle will continue ... and the Palestinian people will continue on the path of jihad (holy war) and martyrdom until victory." He criticized Washington's foreign policy in the region "which has nothing humane," and said that "we cannot reconcile" with the United States.
He also denounced the recent formation of a new Palestinian government "when the (Palestinian) people are under an (Israeli) embargo and are drowning in blood." (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
