As reported by Reuters and The Guardian, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that the October 7 attacks by Hamas militants in southern Israel “dealt a serious blow to the normalization efforts” that have taken place between various Arab governments and Israel in recent years.

The last country to come close to normalizing relations with Israel before the Hamas attacks was the great traditional enemy of the Jewish state, Saudi Arabia, under the auspices of the United States, now led by Joe Biden in a Democratic administration, but accelerated by his Republican predecessor (and again a presidential rival election in 2024 Donald Trump).

As of 2020, in agreements brokered by the Trump administration, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan have agreed to normalize relations despite the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories.

In his ongoing speech in Beirut, Nasrallah said the attacks by Hamas, which he described as the Islamist militant group’s preferred name, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, were not just a blow to that normalization but a collapse of Israel’s deterrence capacity.

“The purpose is quite clear”

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accuses Israel that its “real goal” is to expel all Palestinians from Gaza.

Nasrallah pointed to “people forced to leave their homes in Gaza and the West Bank and even in southern Lebanon to some extent,” the Hezbollah leader continued.

“I saw great dangers … but at the same time I saw resistance and defiance … a refusal to surrender” and leave Gaza, he said.

• the news is updated

Hamas’s second leader, Saleh al-Aruri, who lived in exile in Lebanon, was killed on Tuesday in a drone attack in a suburb of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, in an attack attributed to Israel.

Aruri, the exiled commander of Hamas forces in the occupied West Bank and a veteran Hamas leader who spent 17 years in Israeli prisons, was deputy to the Islamist group’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh. So far, Israel has not released any official information regarding the killing of Saleh al-Aruri, six people were killed in the attack.

This is the first time since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip – the war continues for the 88th day – the Israeli army attacks the capital of Lebanon, Reuters and AFP note. Clashes between the Israeli army and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, a group allied to Palestinian Hamas, have so far been confined to the border areas in southern Lebanon.