86033 - Transcription: Hezbollah still searching for its role

N. Lygeros
Translated from the Greek by Athina Kehagias

It’s more and more that Hezbollah, even from the Lebanese side, has not yet positioned itself in a clear way, because it wants firstly to see what the outcome will be. It does not want to get involved entirely, it just wants to appear to be an ally of Hamas, but in fact we see that the confrontation that is taking place on the border between Lebanon and Israel is very local. So certainly everyone is afraid that the situation could expand and that certainly constitutes the secret want of Hamas, but we ought to understand that Hezbollah also has its own criteria, it has instructions from Iran as well, therefore it comprehends that Hamas may even disappear completely, so it makes sense to give a sign of support, but it doesn’t seem ready to sacrifice itself for the survival of Hamas. Actually, if Hamas is destroyed, Hezbollah will rise even higher in regards to the local geopolitical issues, because quite simply it will come across that it is the most powerful player, which at least, uses Iran in the region along with Qatar. Therefore, we can see that this difficulty of taking a stance, comes firstly from the fact that Hezbollah sees that Israel is hitting Hamas quite severely and they didn’t expect that much, they additionally all expected that there would be neighboring alliances in order for them to be activated together and have a common enemy. This is not possible because everyone is trying to keep the scale of this confrontation relatively low and so consequently, Hamas’ positioning is somewhat difficult. If there was something which was more general, the context would be clearer and it could enter the battle and accumulate points as well. Here it’s trying to gain points from maneuvers but no syncretism whatsoever, it doesn’t want to make any sacrifices, it does the least it could in order to come across as an ally, but in actual fact it doesn’t function in that manner, consequently we’re now waiting to see if it is going to result to a differentiation, however at this point of time that’s what I see.