Nasrallah: UAE-Israeli deal is treason

Hezbollah’s secretary-general says Arab and Western embassies in Lebanon are spending “millions” of dollars on a media war targeting the Lebanese resistance movement.

The foreign embassies pay the hefty sums to “media outlets to target Hezbollah by spreading false news and lies,” Lebanese news website al-Ahed cited Hezbollah’s chief, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, as saying in a speech on Saturday.

 “They are paying money in exchange for spewing venom,” Nasrallah said. “They have gone beyond the realms of lying, [going as far as] provocation, insults, and slurs against Hezbollah.”

He said the smear campaign of such proportions against the group was unprecedented.

A Saudi-linked disinformation campaign has been trying to portray Hezbollah as the perpetrator behind the recent explosion in Beirut, a US news and opinion website says.

The Hezbollah chief said the media war was being directed from a command center that sometimes fed the same misinformation to all of its subsidiary news outlets.

Hezbollah has resisted pressure targeting Lebanon by Israel and its biggest ally, the United States. In the 2000s, it forced the Israeli military to retreat during two wars on Lebanon.

Nasrallah said the propaganda campaign was aimed at demoralizing the group and making it abandon the causes for which it has been making many sacrifices.

He said, however, that “neither intimidation nor murder can scare us.”

Pointing to the Netanyahu's stance on rejecting the sale of F-35s to the UAE, Nasrallah said that Israel does not trust the UAE or any other nation in the region.

Hezbollah’s secretary-general describes UAE-Israeli deal as treason, adding that we condemn all attempts to acknowledge Zionist regime and all forms of normalization with this enemy. We renew our condemnation of the stance of the officials in the UAE.

“The same as we triumphed over the past years, the same as those in Yemen, Syria and Iran have triumphed, we believe that there will be coming victories in the future”.

He also said that the U.S. is interfering in Iraq and imposing a siege on Iran.

The U.S. is imposing an unjust siege on Syria and occupying Syrian territory. The U.S. backs tyrant regimes in our region, such as in Bahrain.

There is a U.S. aggression against our region, manifested in the U.S. policies towards occupied Palestine and the war in Yemen.

The U.S. administration wants to practice hegemony and impose governments on peoples.

We in Hezbollah, in the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, stress our firm commitment to rejecting this usurping entity (Israel), even if the entire world acknowledges its existence. We will continue to stand by anyone who fights it, Nasrallah added.