Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah suggested to the Israeli leadership on Friday not to boast about returning Lebanon to the Stone Age in a Friday interview with Al-Manar.
“In the next war with Israel we will have surprises in land, air and sea,” he said, claiming that ‘the resistance’ can attack “the whole of Israel until [the southern city of] Eilat.” Nasrallah presented a map of the country in which, he claimed, 1,000 targets are marked, Mako reported.
He said that he is “confident of victory” and that “Israel is weaker than a spider web.”
“Life and death are in the hands of God,” Nasrallah said, “yet logic points to me praying in al-Aqsa mosque.”
Speaking about America's so-called "Deal of the Century" to reach a new understanding between Israel and the Palestinians, he said that he and his “brothers” believe it would fail due to what he called “the victory in Syria, the strong Palestinian stand, [and] the powerful stand of Iran” among other things.
Various Israeli officials had taken to using the threat to "returning Lebanon to the Stone Age" in recent years, including Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz in 2014, and last year, Construction Minister Yoav Galant and IDF Spokesperson Ronen Manelis.
The expression became so common it was lampooned in the Channel 10 satirical show Gav HaUmma (Back of the Nation) which asked if it would not be a better idea to return Lebanon to the 1930’s rather than the Stone Age.
The metaphor used by the terrorist leader isn’t new; he himself coined the expression ‘Israel is weaker than a spider web’ in 2000.The image caught hold in Arab resistance to the Jewish state and reappeared during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict when Hamas attempted to release a song in Hebrew to demoralize Israelis called "Attack and carry out terror attacks" with the line "they [Israelis] turn out to be like the web of the spider."
Due to the poor quality of the song, it became a viral hit in Israel when Israelis began releasing parodies of it. Nasrallah himself was used in jest by an ad campaign calling on Israelis to recycle in February. "Nasrallah cannot recycle plastic bottles because he is stuck in a bunker," the ad claimed, "what's your excuse?"