Hezbollah leader claims conflict with Israel has entered new phase

An Israeli strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburb of Beirut earlier this week killed Fuad Shukr

Iranian protesters wave Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group flags in a demonstration to condemn killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (AP)

Hezbollah’s leader has warned that its conflict with Israel has entered a “new phase,” as he addressed mourners at the funeral of a commander from the group who was killed by an Israeli airstrike this week in Beirut.

The group’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said he was exploring a “real response” to the death of Hezbollah chief Fuad Shukr. It came just hours after Iran also said it would take revenge for the suspected Israeli killing of Hamas’s chief Ismail Haniyeh on Thursday, in a move that has heightened fears over possible all-out war across the Middle East.

Gaza’s Hamas and Hezbollah (which controls southern Lebanon) form part of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance”.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for 62-year-old Haniyeh’s death, but officials have previously warned they would target all Hamas leaders responsible for the 7 October attack on southern Israel that triggered Israel’s war in Gaza. The Hamas attack killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, while another 250 hostages were taken back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

The Gaza health ministry in the Hamas-run strip says more than 39,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the subsequent Israeli offensive.

On Thursday, Israel’s military confirmed that the head of Hamas’s military wing, Mohammed Deif, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza last month.

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed in what Hamas claimed was an Israeli airstrike on his Iranian residence on Wednesday (AP)

In a speech via video link to mourners gathered with Shukur’s coffin at an auditorium in a Beirut suburb, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said, “We have entered a new phase that is different from the previous period.”

“Do they expect that Hajj Ismail Haniyeh will be killed in Iran and Iran will remain silent?” he said of the Israelis. Addressing Israelis who celebrated the two killings, he said, “Laugh a bit and you will cry a lot.”

But as he often does, Nasrallah kept his comments vague, vowing a “very well studied retaliation” without saying what form it would take. He said only that Israel “will have to wait for the anger of the region’s honorable people.

“The enemy and the one who is behind the enemy [an apparent reference to Israel’s chief ally, the United States] will have to wait for our coming response.”

Mourners draped in black chanted “death to Israel” and “death to America” at Haniyeh’s funeral on Thursday, which was led by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

International officials have been scrambling to avert a cycle of retaliation before it spirals into a greater war. Since the Gaza war began in October, Hezbollah and Israel have traded fire almost daily across the border in exchanges that have caused deaths and the evacuation of tens of thousands from their homes. But they have also stayed within limits.

Several times, strikes that appeared to cross red lines raised fears of an acceleration into full-fledged war, but outside diplomacy reined in the two sides. Hezbollah faces strong pressure not to draw Lebanon into a repeat of the militant group’s 2006 war with Israel, which wreaked heavy death and destruction in the country.

Israel and Iran risked plunging into war earlier this year when Israel hit Iran’s embassy in Damascus in April. Iran retaliated, and Israel countered in an unprecedented exchange of strikes on each other’s soil, but international efforts succeeded in containing that cycle before it spun out of control.

“We want revenge because Israel killed Haniyeh, who was our guest,” an Iranian woman, who attended a rally after the ceremony at Tehran University, told state TV.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said “all parties” in the Middle East must avoid escalatory actions that could plunge the region into further conflict.

Speaking in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Mr Blinken appealed for countries to “make the right choices in the days ahead” and said a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was the only way to begin to break the current cycle of violence and suffering. Mr Blinken did not mention Israel, Iran or Hamas by name in his comments.

Associated Press contributed to this report