Interesting interview today with Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Lebanese TV. Here's the quote everyone will be talking about:
In an interview granted to Lebanese news network New TV, Nasrallah said in an almost apologetic tone that "we did not believe, even by one percent, that the captive operation would result in such a wide-scale war, as such a war did not take place in the history of wars. Had we known that the captive operation would result in such a war we would not have carried it out at all."
And his comments seem to be part of a concerted effort by Hizbullah to walk back a bit from past comments on the war. Here's Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Kassem speaking n the same subject yesterday:
"We expected Israel's response to the taking hostage of the two soldiers to be at most a day or two of shelling or a few limited attacks of specific places, and that the response wouldn't last more than three days and would cause only limited damage," said Kassem."I don't hide it that we estimated that Israel would one day want to attack Lebanon and that it would be in the framework of an American-Israeli plan, but we didn't expect such a thing to happen at this time. From information we received two days after the start of the Israeli offensive, it became clear that Israel planned with the US to open an offensive this upcoming September of October, and this information was leaked to a number of American media outlets," said Kassem[...]
Kassem added that after the war started, it became clear to the enemy that it was not ready for a war of such scope despite American pressure to continue the offensive: "We didn't estimate that this is how it would be at this time, and in this scope, and when the aggression started, we didn't expect it to be carried out in such an abominable manner of hysterical destruction. In the last days, the enemy went into a military hysteria that we didn't expect."
