Demonstrators in Tehran’s Palestine Square on September 28, 2024, after Hezbollah confirmed the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah
ATTA KENARE
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ADDS Biden
Israel’s foes vowed revenge on Saturday after Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah announced its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike on Beirut suburbs.
Several world powers also warned of the killing’s potential repercussions, as the spectre of all-out war looms over the Middle East.
In the US, President Joe Biden welcomed “a measure of justice”.
First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref warned Israel that Nasrallah’s death would “bring about their destruction”, Iran’s ISNA news agency quoted him as saying.
The foreign ministry of Iran, which finances and arms Hezbollah, said Nasrallah’s work will continue after his death. “His sacred goal will be realised in the liberation of Quds (Jerusalem), God willing,” spokesman Nasser Kanani posted on X.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced five days of public mourning.
President Joe Biden said Nasrallah’s death was “a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis and Lebanese civilians”.
Washington supports Israel’s right to defend itself against “Iranian-supported terrorist groups” and the “defence posture” of US forces in the region would be “further enhanced”, Biden added in a statement.
Leading Republicans in the House of Representatives also welcomed the end of a “reign of bloodshed, oppression, and terror” by “one of the most brutal terrorists on the planet”.
Russia’s foreign ministry said “we decisively condemn the latest political murder carried out by Israel” and urged it to “immediately cease military action” in Lebanon.
Israel would “bear full responsibility” for the “tragic” consequences the killing could bring to the region, the ministry added in a statement.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told ARD television that the killing “threatens destabilisation for the whole of Lebanon”, which “is in no way in Israel’s security interest”.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was “gravely concerned by the dramatic escalation of events in Beirut in the last 24 hours”.
Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel sparked the devastating war in Gaza that drew in fellow Iran-backed groups including Hezbollah, called Nasrallah’s killing “a cowardly terrorist act”.
“We condemn in the strongest terms this barbaric Zionist aggression and targeting of residential buildings,” Hamas said in a statement.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas offered his “deep condolences” to Lebanon for the deaths of Nasrallah and civilians, who “fell as a result of the brutal Israeli aggression”, according to a statement from his office.
The Iran-backed Yemeni rebels, who have been firing on ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Hamas, said in a statement that “the martyrdom of Hassan Nasrallah will increase the flame of sacrifice, the heat of enthusiasm, the strength of resolve” against Israel.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose country maintains diplomatic relations with Israel but who has been a sharp critic of its offensive in Gaza, said on X that Lebanon was being subjected to a “genocide”, without referring directly to Nasrallah.
