Hezbollah: besluit EU vrijbrief voor Israël om Libanon aan te vallen (en)

BRUSSELS - Lebanese group Hezbollah has said the EU's listing of its military wing makes it a party to any future Israeli assault.

Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, made the statement on TV after a sunset meal on Wednesday (24 July) with women who work for the Islamic Resistance Support Association, a Hezbollah fund-raising group.

He said: "These [EU] states have made themselves fully responsible for any Israeli attack on Lebanon … They are giving legal cover to Israel for any attack on Lebanon, because Israel can now claim to be fighting terrorism and to be bombing terrorist targets."

He noted that the blacklisting, enacted by EU foreign ministers on Monday, undermines European countries' sovereignty because it was made under Israeli and US pressure.

"Some EU member states considered the step to be illegal but they yielded to intimidation," he said.

He called the move an "insult" to its "resistance fighters."

But he said the related asset freeze and visa bans on its military staff will not make any practical difference because "we don't have money in European banks."

He added that the EU should blacklist the Israeli army, the IDF, because it is an illegal occupying force which frequently kills Arab civilians.

"Those who kill, commit massacres, occupy land, and prevent an entire nation [Palestine] from returning to its territory, aren’t they terrorists?" he said.

Amid fears by some EU states the move could destabilise Lebanon, Nasrallah warned the country's caretaker government not to "exploit" the European decision by trying to form a new cabinet without its people.

He joked that Hezbollah's ministers in the future Lebanese government will come from its military staff after the EU said its wants to keep talking to Hezbollah politicians.

But in a sign the group itself is keen to maintain contacts, Hezbollah's website noted that one of its top foreign policy officials, Ammar Moussawi, will meet with the EU's ambassador in Beirut, Angelina Eichhorst, on Thursday.

Hezbollah is a Shia Muslim group formed during the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s.

It claims victory in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict - which saw the death of some 1,000 Lebanese and 40 Israeli civilians - because it resisted against the IDF for 33 days before Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanese territory.

One motive for the EU listing is Hezbollah's recent defeat of Western-backed Sunni Mulsim rebels in fighting near the Syrian town of Qusair.

Bur for his part, Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence officer who now runs an NGO in Beirut, told EUobserver i the Qusair story is more complicated than it looks.

He said when Lebanon gained independence in the 1940s, several Shia Muslim villages ended up in Sunni-Muslim-majority Syria in the Qusair region. When the villages came under attack by Sunni rebels, they first formed town militias and then called for Hezbollah support.

"It is grave mistake for the EU to take sides in the [Syrian] civil war," he said.