Hezbollah's Nasrallah Issues Ominous Warning to US: 'Remember Your Defeats'

In his first speech broadcast since the beginning of the war between Israel and Palestinian factions led by Hamas, the leader of the powerful Lebanese Hezbollah movement warned that any intervention by the U.S. against a growing coalition of militias targeting Israel would deal a decisive defeat to Washington's interests and troops in the region.

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah praised Hamas' unprecedented October 7 surprise attack against Israel and expressed his solidarity with the group now engaged in fierce battles with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Gaza Strip during his remarks Friday. Already engaged in deepening clashes with Israel along the border with Lebanon, he said Hezbollah was prepared to expand this front.

Nasrallah also took direct aim at the U.S., which has increased its force posture in the region, including through the deployment of a Navy carrier strike group in the Eastern Mediterranean, in a bid to deter a wider war from erupting.

But Nasrallah said "your Navy ships in the Mediterranean don't scare us and they never did."

He went on to reference past U.S. setbacks in the broader region.

"To the Americans, I say to you, remember your defeats in Lebanon, Iraq, in Afghanistan and remember how you humiliatingly withdrew from Afghanistan," he said. "Today, Americans, I say to you, that those who defeated you in Lebanon at the beginning of the 80s, they are still alive and together with them we have today their children and their grandchildren."

In the midst of Lebanon's devastating 15-year civil war and an Israeli invasion, U.S. and French members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon were targeted in a twin suicide bombing attack in October 1983, killing 241 U.S. military personnel in the deadliest day for the U.S. military since the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War, as well as 58 French personnel. The attack was claimed by a Shiite Muslim group calling itself Islamic Jihad, not to be confused with the Sunni Muslim Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but U.S. officials have directly blamed the then newly formed Hezbollah, along with its ally, Iran.

The U.S. withdrew from Lebanon the following year, but would become more heavily active in the region after the 9/11 attacks nearly two decades later.

The U.S. led an intervention against Taliban-led Afghanistan in 2001 over its ties to the Al-Qaeda militant group, and established a new government. This government fell 20 years later, however, when the U.S. withdrew in 2021 and the Taliban regained control of the country.

The U.S. also led an invasion of Iraq in 2003 and toppled the government of President Saddam Hussein, who was accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda. U.S. troops would go on to contend with rival Sunni and Shiite Muslim insurgencies, withdrawing in 2011 until conducting a new intervention against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) in 2014.

Shiite Muslim militias mobilized by Iran also played a frontline role in fighting ISIS in both Iraq and Syria, but, as tensions worsened between Washington and Tehran in recent years, these forces have targeted U.S. soldiers in both countries. One entity in particular calling itself the "Islamic Resistance in Iraq" has claimed daily attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since October 17, the day the IDF and Palestinian factions blamed one another for the bombing of a hospital in the Gaza Strip.

Nasrallah thanked the Islamic Resistance in Iraq in particular during his speech Friday, saying its fighters "took the initiative and targeted the American military bases, the bases of the American occupation in Iraq and Syria, because the Americans, they are the ones managing the war in Gaza, they are the ones who should pay the price for the aggression and their support and their occupation and crimes in Iraq and in Syria and in Palestine."

While President Joe Biden has already ordered one round of airstrikes last week against what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called "two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups," both men and other U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that they did not seek to engage in a wider war with Iran or its allies.

Earlier this week, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command told Newsweek that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq was "a broader term used to describe the operations of all Iran-backed militias in Iraq to include the recent spate of strikes into Iraq and Syria during the current conflict between Israel and Hamas."

"Regarding Iran," the CENTCOM spokesperson said at the time, "the U.S. posture increases were intended to serve as an unequivocal demonstration in deed and not only in words, of U.S. support for Israel's defense and serve as a deterrent signal to Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, and any other proxy across the region who might be considering exploiting the current situation to escalate conflict."

The spokesperson warned that "those adversaries should think twice."

But as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq continued rocket and drone strikes against U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria, claimed new operations directly targeting Israel and warned of a "new phase" of hostilities in the coming week, Nasrallah asserted Friday that it was up to the U.S. to prevent such a broader regional conflict, one in which he warned it would only stand to lose.

"Those who want to prevent a regional war, they must quickly proceed to put an end to the aggression on Gaza," Nasrallah said in his remarks. "And you, the Americans, you know very well that if war were to erupt in the region that your Navy ships, your Air Force, will be to no avail and your interests, your troops, your Navy ships, they will pay the price first and foremost, they will be the biggest loser."

In response to Nasrallah's speech, the head of Iraq's Hezbollah Al-Nujaba Movement asserted that the "Iraqi resistance" was "capable of defeating the Zionists side by side with you until achieving victory" and that "the battle with the American occupation that began in Iraq should not end except with comprehensive liberation."

"The battle has become a battle of existence before the deceitful and treacherous enemy," Hezbollah Al-Nujaba Movement Secretary-General Akram al-Kaabi said in a statement.

Newsweek has reached out to Hezbollah's media office for comment.

As to the ongoing conflict across the border, Nasrallah fell short of declaring a full-scale war with Israel as Hezbollah had waged in the 1980s and in 2006, but he lauded an "unprecedented" campaign his forces were currently involved in.

A day before the speech, Hezbollah claimed that the "mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance" targeted an Israeli drone, an espionage site and barracks, along with 19 military sites, while the IDF said it had conducted strikes against Lebanese territory via air, tank and artillery assets.

With Hamas calling for Arabs and Muslim across the globe to step up actions against Israel and its allies, Nasrallah addressed expectations that he may have used the opportunity Friday to launch even further-scale attacks.

"Some people who expect or are calling on Hezbollah to quickly intervene in a full-scale war with the Israeli enemy, for them, maybe what's happening on the border area is something limited," Nasrallah said.

"But if we were to take a really objective look at what is going on, it's very important," he added. "It has a very big impact, and it won't be limited to this scale anyway.

He alleged that already the IDF had been forced to devote significant resources to the northern front that otherwise would have been deployed to the campaign in Gaza. Should Israel seek to escalate in Lebanon, however, he warned his forces were ready.

"The operations of the resistance in the south and the blood of our martyrs and your martyrs in the south," Nasrallah said, "it sends a message to the enemy, which might think to launch an aggression into Lebanon, or to launch a preemptive attack against Lebanon, that you will commit the biggest act of stupidity and the biggest mistake in your life if you do this."

With Israeli forces on "very high alert" on the Lebanese front, according to IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, Israel has also issued warnings to Hezbollah. Following Nasrallah's comments, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his own video address in which he delivered a message to "our enemies" on the northern front.

"Do not test us," Netanyahu said. "A mistake on your part will come at a high cost, a cost you could not even imagine."