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00:00Today Israel is bombing Hezbollah sites in Lebanon in the south of the country
00:05piling pressure on the militant group already reeling after explosions
00:09targeted its communication systems this week. In a statement this afternoon the
00:14Israeli army said its chief of staff had approved plans for the northern arena
00:19that refers to the front with Lebanon. Now those comments come as this
00:24afternoon Hassan Nasrallah is speaking in Lebanon. The Hezbollah leader
00:29describing the attacks that killed 37 people and left over 3,000 injured as a
00:35massacre he said Israel had crossed quote all red lines. Well with me now is
00:42Douglas Herbert who's listened to a little of Nasrallah who is still
00:45speaking this afternoon. Just give us a sense of his tone and his message so far.
00:50Yeah well first of all I mean he's clearly trying to look like he's calm
00:54and composed but you can imagine internally he's anything but calm and
00:58composed and his words suggest that he is very much aware of just how
01:02devastating a blow humiliating a blow this was to Hezbollah. As we were saying
01:07earlier right this is by far the biggest security breach to Hezbollah in its
01:12four-decade history. Nasrallah you know was upfront about it he like he said you
01:17know suffering that that it suffered a major blow an unprecedented blow are the
01:22words that he used. At the same time he's saying that while it was a major blow it
01:27is not going to cause Hezbollah to fall. So we were talking earlier about
01:32Hezbollah really staking its entire persona on its defiance on its image of
01:41defiance that is what defines Hezbollah. So even in the wake of what is by his
01:46own recognition his own acknowledgement a devastating blow to Hezbollah in them
01:51in the whole scope of its history if the organization is still committed to
01:56remaining defiant to showing its defiance and that's obviously going to
02:00be a lot more difficult in the wake of these back-to-back apparently
02:04coordinated attacks attributed to Israel by most in the region attacks which have
02:09essentially knocked out not just severely degraded but all but knocked
02:12out Hezbollah's mode of communication internally communication for militants
02:17to communicate among each other for operations and there's been a lot of
02:20speculation so how do you communicate if you don't have presumably the use of
02:24cell phones they may have to fall back on cell phones even though the reason
02:27they stopped communicating that way is because Nasrallah told them that it is
02:31too vulnerable and susceptible to Israeli surveillance they may have to in
02:34the short immediate term just to communicate fall back on that if not
02:37what are they going to use homing pigeons no but more seriously they'll
02:41have to use perhaps human couriers which is not an exactly effective viable way
02:45to communicate across broad distances with their fighters spread out across a
02:49vast swathe of Lebanon they might have to fall back on landlines you know
02:53telephone landlines remember those and basically those are obviously also
02:58susceptible to surveillance so this is Nasrallah speaking in very much in
03:03chastened mode but still defiant mode he also mentioned that you know the
03:07pagers had been distributed to 4,000 Hezbollah militants of his fighters so
03:13what he's really saying is that the intention of Israel even if ultimately
03:16it wasn't 4,000 that died he said the intentions were effectively to kill
03:204,000 people so he is trying to basically accentuate just how
03:26devastating this could have been beyond the death toll that we've already seen
03:30of several dozens in these back-to-back attacks he's basically saying it could
03:34have been much worse but I what I what I suspect right now is he is trying to
03:40this is a holding pattern this speech it's hard to rally your followers when
03:45they're literally down and out many of them in hospital right now many of them
03:48with grievous injuries many of them literally blinded because they brought
03:51these pagers to their face to read to see the message but what he's trying to
03:56do is signal that even in the face of this enormous setback for the
04:00organization Hezbollah is not is down but it's not out it's going to continue
04:05fighting obviously becoming much more complicated today in light of what you
04:08just reported Nadia with the reports of fighters jet fighters flying low over
04:14the Lebanese capital Beirut and also those earlier reports of strikes by
04:18presumably Israeli jets against six Hezbollah infrastructure sites as well
04:24as a weapons depot in southern Lebanon