Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah met with the secretary-general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Ziyad al-Nakhalah and the deputy head of the Political Bureau of Hamas, Saleh Al-Arouri, reports in Lebanon said on Saturday.
The meeting brings together key terror leaders who are all backed by Iran.
PIJ is generally seen as a proxy of Iran and it has been involved in an unprecedented wave of terror attacks and violence in the last year in the West Bank.
Hezbollah, Palestinian terror groups want a terror front against Israel
The reports from Lebanon said that the meeting included discussions of “political developments especially in Palestine, with a joint assessment of the situation in the West Bank and the escalation of resistance movement there and the recent Israeli threats.”
This is Orwellian wording that means they want to increase a terror front against Israel. Iran currently is pursuing a policy of “uniting” various fronts against Israel to fight in various arenas, meaning it wants to create provocations in Lebanon and also move weapons through Syria and enflame the West Bank.
Reports at pro-Iran media such as Al-Mayadeen noted that the groups discussed the “firm position” of the “forces of the resistance axis in confronting the Zionist enemy.” These groups are openly announcing their joint security and military coordination. This has been seen in the past such as over Passover earlier this year when Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh went to Lebanon and met Nasrallah and rockets were fired at Israel. Reports at Al-Mayadeen, which is pro-Iran and also NNA media in Lebanon both noted that the terror leaders discussed the “political, military and security developments, and coordination between the resistance movements, especially in occupied Palestine and Lebanon.”
The men portray this as a tripartite meeting, basically the bringing together of a terror mafia leadership, similar to the scene in the Godfather when the “heads of the five families” gather for a meeting.
The terror mafia leadership
Currently, these groups control more than just terrorist mafias, Hamas controls Gaza, Hezbollah controls half of Lebanon and PIJ has sought to carve out an area of influence in the West Bank that would enable it to fill a vacuum in power. That could be seen as an attempt to create a new Gaza, previous reports in the Post have noted. The three men discussed the West Bank and this appears that it will have ramifications in the future.
The meeting comes in the wake of the Iranian foreign minister visiting Lebanon and also US envoy Amos Hochstein. It appears that Hezbollah is putting the wheels in motion for closer cooperation with Iran, Hamas, PIJ and others. Hamas member Arouri complained that he has been threatened by Israel, the report at Al-Mayadeen said.
The report noted that Arouri has recently posed with a rifle and said he is ready to be a martyr. “This comes at a time when the Palestinian territories are witnessing a growing pace of resistance operations against the Israeli occupation and its settlers,” Al-Mayadeen claimed in its propaganda piece about the meeting.