“Israel knows how to defend itself and how to pay back its enemies,” Netanyahu declares after Hezbollah charges that Israel dispatched a “suicide drone” into Lebanon.
By World Israel News Staff
“Enemy reconnaissance planes are currently being witnessed breaching the Lebanese airspace over South Lebanon’s Marjeyoun and neighboring villages,” reported the official Lebanese news agency, National News Agency (NNA), at midday on Tuesday.
The report came as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would “suggest” to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force Qassem Soleimani, “relax.”
The Hezbollah chief had warned Israel that the terror organization was “preparing an imminent response to the crash of two Israeli drones in a Beirut suburb,” reported NNA.
“He [Nasrallah] knows well that Israel knows how to defend itself and how to pay back its enemies,” Netanyahu countered on Tuesday.
“I want to tell him and the Lebanese state, which is sheltering this organization that aspires to destroy us,” declared Netanyahu, “and I also say this to Qassem Soleimani: Be careful with your words and be even more careful with your actions.”
Amid the war of words, a spokesperson for UNIFIL, a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, told NNA that “the situation in the region is calm,” indicating that the force was working “to guarantee the non-occurrence or misunderstanding of any incident that could jeopardize the cessation of hostilities.”
Nasrallah charged that Israel had carried out “a suicide drone attack on a target in Beirut’s southern suburb,” saying that it was the first “attack” of its kind since 2006, when Israel and Hezbollah waged the Second Lebanon War. Hezbollah reportedly issued a statement which charged that explosives were found in the drone that crashed near the terror group’s propaganda office in the Lebanese capital, a Hezbollah stronghold.
“We will do everything to prevent” such attacks, Nasrallah said in a speech, according to media reports. “The time when Israeli aircraft come and bombard parts of Lebanon is over,” he vowed.