UPDATE - Hezbollah backs Lebanon speaker’s efforts to reach cease-fire with Israel

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By Wassim Seif El Din

BEIRUT (AA) - The Lebanese group Hezbollah said Tuesday it backs political efforts by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to reach a cease-fire with Israel.

“We have full confidence in the big brother Berri,” Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised speech.

"We support political efforts led by Berri with its primary goal of a cease-fire,” he added.

Qassem said any other discussions “have no place for Hezbollah before the cease-fire.”

Berri and caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati held talks with a host of Western officials, including French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, to help ease tension between Lebanon and Israel and implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon.

The talks focus on an initiative for a 4-week truce that includes a cessation of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel until reaching a complete cease-fire. It also includes reconstruction and the return of displaced people to their areas and the demarcation of the border.

Qassem said Hezbollah’s military capabilities are still “intact.”

"The group is strictly organized. We have overcome the painful blows and alternatives have been secured in all locations without exception,” he added.

Hezbollah has been the target of massive Israeli airstrikes since last month, which killed the group’s top leadership, including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.

Qassem said Lebanon was targeted by Israel even before Hezbollah joined the fight against Tel Aviv.

“(Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu wants a new Middle East," he said. “Israel wants to subject countries of the region and their peoples to its policy."

The Hezbollah leader said that Israeli losses in Lebanon “are big, but not announced” by Tel Aviv.

“Without US and Western support, the Israeli war on Gaza would have stopped within a month,” Qassem asserted.

Israel has mounted massive airstrikes across Lebanon against what it claims Hezbollah targets since Sept. 23, killing more than 1,250 people, injuring 3,618 others, and displacing more than 1.2 million people.

The aerial campaign was an escalation in yearlong cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of Tel Aviv’s brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 42,000 people, mostly women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.

At least 2,083 people have since been killed and 9,869 others injured in Israeli attacks in Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.

Despite international warnings that the Middle East region was on the brink of a regional war amid Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, Tel Aviv expanded the conflict by launching on Oct. 1 a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

*Writing by Ahmed Asmar in Ankara