The Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah advises that all those favoring the liberation of the Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation stage a “battle of hope.”
The movement’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks during a speech marking the seventh day since Israel’s assassination of senior Hezbollah member Samir Qantar.
He said Israel resorts to all means, including deploying its army, one of the strongest in the world, which enjoys the support of the United States, putting every Palestinian into prison before releasing them, and maintaining a crippling siege on the Gaza Strip, so that Palestinians would reach a state of hopelessness.
The whole world has, meanwhile, opened its doors to migrating Palestinians so they easily depart from the occupied territories, he said.
The Hezbollah chief said such battle manifested itself in the assertion that it is the Zionists, who, instead, had to leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories not the Palestinians.
He cited a Palestinian female as telling an Israeli interviewer after release from an Israeli prison as saying, “This is our territory. This is our land. You must leave our land.”
“This is the battle of hope,” Nasrallah said and asserted that the main part of the resistance is the continued presence of Palestinians in the occupied lands.
He also revered Qantar, who was killed during an Israeli raid which targeted his home near the Syrian capital, Damascus, on December 20. He had been released from an Israeli prison during a prisoner swap between the Lebanese resistance movement and Israel in 2008 after serving 29 years in detention.
Nasrallah said Qantar represented the spirit of resistance and sacrifice.
The acts of sacrifice Qantar carried out to serve the cause of resistance against the Israeli occupation would end either in martyrdom or imprisonment, he said.
These acts therefore translated into ultimate sacrifice, Nasrallah said and described Qantar as the dean of all the prisoners in Israeli jails.