Damascus, February 26: The head of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement travelled to Damascus for talks with allies Syria and Iran, the SANA news agency said Friday.
Hassan Nasrallah attended a dinner banquet in Damascus Thursday hosted by President Bashar al-Assad in honour of his visiting Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the official agency said.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television in Lebanon reported that Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad met to discuss “the latest developments in the region, and Zionist threats against Lebanon and Syria.”
Assad and Ahmadinejad signed a visa-scrapping accord in Damascus on Thursday, signalling even closer ties and brushing aside US efforts to drive a wedge between the two allies.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
Israel also currently occupies the Syrian Golan Heights, in addition to the whole of the Palestinian territories.
—Agencie