Hezbollah will respond with a "surprise" strike against Israel after a mysterious drone attack in Lebanon, but a new war remains unlikely, the Iran-backed movement said, amid heightened fears of a full-scale confrontation between the longtime adversaries.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the two drones that crashed over the weekend in the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut. One of them exploded, causing some damage to Hezbollah's media center in the district, but nobody was hurt.
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"I rule out that the atmosphere is one of war, it is one of a response to an attack," Hezbollah deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem said in a TV interview on Tuesday night. "Everything will be decided at its time."
Lebanon's Hezbollah was planning a "calculated strike" but seeks to avoid a new war with Israel, two sources allied to the Shiite Muslim group, which fought a deadly month-long war with Israel in 2006 said.
A regional security official said that the drone incident was "a strike that dealt a blow to Hezbollah's capabilities in the realm of precision-missile manufacturing".
Asked what would happen if Hezbollah escalates after responding, the official said: "I imagine that Israel would then step up its strikes and wipe out this capability altogether. The details of these sites are known. The ball would now appear to be in Hezbollah's court."
Despite signs that Israel and Hezbollah do not want a new full-scale conflict, tensions over the drones and an air raid in Syria that Israel says thwarted an Iranian attack have emerged at a sensitive time in the Middle East.
Iran and the United States are at odds over a 2015 nuclear deal. Shiite militias in Iraq, many of whom are backed by Iran, blame recent blasts at their weapons depots on the United States and Israel.
In a speech on Sunday, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah described the drone crashes as the first Israeli attack in Lebanon since the 2006 war.
Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Nasrallah should "calm down," also issuing warnings to Lebanon and Qassem Soleimani, commander of the overseas arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Precise details about where the drones were fired from have yet to emerge. In response to questions about the origin or target of the drones, Qassem did not give details in the interview with Russia's RT Arabic channel.
He added that Hezbollah, which says the drones were rigged with explosives, saw it as an attack that it must respond to so that Israel does not set its own terms.
"We want the strike to be a surprise ... and so there is no interest in diving into the details," he said. "The coming days will reveal this."
In his speeches over the past year, Nasrallah has often said that an all-out war with Israel was unlikely.
