Nasrallah to Arab states: Don’t cozy up to ‘cancerous’ Israel

TIMES OF ISRAEL – Hezbollah chief accuses Jerusalem of taking advantage of turmoil to forge new regional ties

The head of the Hezbollah terror group, Hassan Nasrallah has called on the Arab world to resist normalizing ties with Israel, warning that that the “cancerous” Jewish state is milking the benefits of regional unrest by using the turmoil to improve its relations with moderate Arab states.

Nasrallah, who makes few public appearances, made the statements during a speech broadcast Tuesday at an international conference in Beirut.

“The Zionist entity is taking advantage of the events taking place in our region in a bid to normalize ties with several Arab states,” Hassan Nasrallah said according a report from Hezbollah mouthpiece Al-Manar.

“Right now, there are some Arab countries that have taken Israel out of the circle of threats,” he said, according to the Iranian Press TV. “This is something very dangerous.”

Israeli officials have pointed to a recent nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, opposed by Jerusalem and some Sunni states, as a platform for a quiet thaw with the Arab world.

Officials in Israel and elsewhere have lamented that the lifting of sanctions will give Tehran more money to pursue destabilizing maneuvers in the Middle East, including funding radical groups like Hezbollah, seen as an Iranian proxy, and the Houthi rebel group in Yemen.

“We should activate and boost all forms of the resistance against the Israeli normalization,” he said.

Nasrallah lamented that the Palestinian issue “is now out of the international and popular concerns, something which gave the enemy a historical chance in order to implement its scheme.”

This scheme, he said, “surpasses occupying Palestine. It is our duty to counter this scheme,” he said. “Israel, the cancerous tumor, is to be wiped out.”

The Hezbollah chief added that a great achievement of the resistance has been the “liberation” of the Gaza Strip. His comments came as Israel looks back at the ten years since the Gaza disengagement plan, when Israel evacuated 8,000 Jewish settlers from their Gaza communities, bringing an end to Israel’s presence in the coastal enclave.

Pledging support for the Palestinian cause, Nasrallah declared that “there is no rightful and legitimate cause like al-Quds [Jerusalem] and countering the Zionist enemy.”

Nasrallah called the recent clashes between police and Palestinian protesters on the Temple Mount “alarming.”

“The day in which we will pray in al-Quds is inevitably coming despite ordeals,” he said.

Dozens of masked Palestinian protesters hurled rocks, Molotov cocktails and firecrackers at police officers on the Temple Mount on Sunday morning, before being pushed back into the al-Aqsa Mosque by security forces who were rushed to the area.

The Temple Mount, considered the holiest site in Judaism, is the site of the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and is the third-most sacred shrine to Muslims.