Lebanonwire, November 30, 2002

The Daily Star

Cilina Nasser and Samer Wehbe
Daily Star staff

Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel Friday that any damage inflicted on Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque  would lead to a wide-scale retaliation.
“Zionists and those behind them should understand that any harm caused to Al-Aqsa Mosque will ignite the entire region,” said Nasrallah during a rally held in Nabatieh to mark Jerusalem Day.
Al-Aqsa Mosque is sacred for Muslims. But Jewish extremists call for the mosque’s destruction, claiming that it was built on the Temple Mount.
“If they decided to destroy this mosque, then the nation of this mosque will destroy all of the Zionist entity with the blood of the great martyrdom attackers,” the cleric said.
Nasrallah added that those willing to become martyrs “fill the homes, families, villages and cities of Lebanon and Palestine and all Arab and Islamic states.”
Nasrallah was speaking to some 25,000 people who flocked to the southern town of Nabatieh to attend the Jerusalem Day rally, the first time the event has been held outside Beirut.
Jerusalem Day was declared by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 following the success of the Islamic revolution in Iran. It is celebrated on every last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan.
The rally included a military parade in which thousands of unarmed fighters braved the cold and driving rain to march in tight formation.
The parade was led by three brigades, including children as young as 5.
One brigade was named after Hussein Mussawi, who was killed at the age of six when an Israeli helicopter assassinated his father, former Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Abbas Mussawi in February 1992.
The brigade was made up of around 100 children wearing military uniforms and Palestinian black and white keffiyehs.
Another brigade consisted of the children of Hizbullah martyrs. “We are your soldiers, Hizbullah,” they shouted in unison as they jogged down the road.
The rally was held amid unprecedented security measures in Nabatieh. The town was divided into security zones, necessitating the evacuation of many nearby houses and apartments.
Cameras were set up on several buildings for surveillance, and jamming devices were also installed to prevent any remote-control bombs being detonated.
Public institutions closed down, though without direct instructions from Cabinet. Stores and banks were also closed.
Hizbullah’s security men were deployed on the roofs and entrances of the buildings and at road junctions. The police were present only at the entrance of the town. Policemen directed traffic away from Nabatieh’s main road, which was blocked, while Hizbullah was in charge of allowing people to enter the town center where the rally was being held.
While reporters were permitted to enter the blocked roads with their cars and park near the location, most people were forced to walk through the rain to reach the parade area.
Nasrallah watched the parade with other senior Hizbullah officials behind a bullet-proof window. But when the brigade of fathers of Hizbullah martyrs arrived, Nasrallah, all other dignitaries and the audience stood for about two minutes in respect for the sacrifices of these men. Parade music faded into the national anthem.
There were 52 brigades in the parade, all named after Lebanese, Palestinian and Arab martyrs, such as Fathi Shiqaqi, the head of Islamic Jihad, who was assassinated in Malta in 1995 and Mahmoud Abu Hannoud, a Hamas commander who was assassinated in November 2001 in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Aside from the parade, more than a dozen Hizbullah members rappelled from an eight-story building.
At the end of the parade, all 4,500 Hizbullah members who took part in the rally, except for the children, lined the road and shouted: “A pledge for you, Khomeini; we swear by Al-Aqsa and God’s soul; for Abbas, who is God’s martyr; we will remain on this path, Nasrallah.”
Nasrallah told the rally that it was the resistance that forced Israel to pull its troops from Lebanon, and not UN Resolution 425. He therefore urged the Palestinians not to wait for UN resolutions to obtain their rights.
“What will restore Palestine and protect it is the path that has been chosen by the Palestinian people, through its martyrdom seekers who astonish the world by shattering the Zionist entity and the security of its settlers with their bodies,” he said.
“Today the resistance in Palestine is … self-defense. The Palestinians do not attack others. They did not go to Russia to kill Russian Jews, Ukraine to kill the Ukrainian ones, Poland to kill Polish Jews …
“The Zionists are the ones who came from all over the world to usurp the land, holy places, cities and villages of others. What the Palestinians are doing with the martyrdom operations is legitimate, legal, Islamic and moral because they seek to end injustice.”

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