Until last week, Nasrallah remained silent since the October 7 massacre in Gaza, and even when he spoke for the first time tonight on Friday, he bitterly disappointed the murderers in Gaza. They had hoped that he would announce Hezbollah's immediate and complete joining of the campaign, but he did not deliver. The most he said in his speech was to promise that "all options are on the table," and did not add anything else.
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Unless this is part of some ploy – and Hezbollah, we must remember, is now on high alert in Lebanon – the main part of Nasrallah's speech was likely an attempt to discourage Israel from coming down with a pre-emptive strike on his organization. He claimed that this step would be "the stupidest thing that Israel could do in its entire history".
Even his boasting about his "accomplishments" in the limited conflict with Israel along the northern border, such as forcing the IDF to cut down the attacking forces in Gaza, in order to redeploy part of them to the north, show that Nasrallah would have preferred to continue on this path and escalate the situation, as long as the flames remained lower than the ones that lead to an all-out war.
In practice, he also struggled to define two scenarios in which he would escalate the current situation: One, the rate at which the situation in Gaza was developing (for example, if he felt that Hamas was on the verge of defeat) and the second, the way that Israel conducted itself on the northern border, for example, if it inflicted serious harm on Lebanese citizens.
Toward the end of his speech, he said that in the war in Gaza Hamas will come out victorious, despite the destruction and devastation, "just as Lebanon had won in 2006", but forgot that he explicitly said that if he had known how Israel would react then, he would not have been in such a rush to provoke the Second Lebanon War.
Since the Second Lebanon War, Nasrallah has mostly been a hero from the bunker. He also made his speech on Friday evening from the bunker. He is well aware of the risks he will take on if he still decides to join the war and it is not totally clear that he believes his own rhetoric when he warns the US of the "response" he is preparing to its rapid deployment of force to the region, including the aircraft carriers.
