Sheikh Ali Daamoush, head of Hezbollah’s Executive Council, said on Sunday that amid the occupation and attacks on Lebanon, the policy of destruction, land clearing, and the elimination of civilian life in border villages, and the enemy’s ambitions over Lebanese territory, the Lebanese people have had no choice but to defend their land and remain committed to their “heroic resistance,” given the state’s past and present inability to fulfill its responsibilities.
Speaking at the second scouting gathering organized by the Beirut Scouts Commission of the Imam Al-Mahdi Scouts in Beirut’s Dahiyeh, Sheikh Daamoush said Lebanon’s “fundamental issue today is the south, and it must be the concern of the entire country.” Liberating the south, enabling its residents to return, and rebuilding it, he said, is a shared national responsibility involving the state, the resistance, and all those committed to Lebanon’s interests.
“The resistance is giving the blood of its finest young men for this cause. Our first priority is the people—this sacrificing, patient, and loyal population. We will spare no effort to serve them and will do everything in our power to ease their pain and suffering,” His Eminence asserted.
Addressing residents of the south, Sheikh Daamoush said, “No one will be able to touch your dignity, pride, or presence in this beloved homeland. If we are going through a difficult period and facing major challenges, we have overcome many hardships through cooperation and solidarity and by holding fast to our values and our land.”
“We will emerge from this crisis with a stronger and more prominent presence, holding fast to our rights and our national partnership.”
Sheikh Daamoush also addressed the current and past campaign of misinformation and distortion of facts concerning the resistance and decisions on war and peace.
“To those near and far, we say: our people were and remain in a position of defending their land,” he said. “It was the enemy that launched the wars, committed aggression, and occupied the land.”
He said the resistance “is not a regular army but a popular resistance with its own means and methods of exhausting the enemy in order to force it to withdraw from our land.”
“If it has today managed to reoccupy some villages, towns, and areas, this does not mean in any way that its project has prevailed or that the need for resistance has disappeared,” Daamoush said. “Quite the opposite: the resistance becomes more than ever a national necessity to liberate the land and restore sovereignty.”
Sheikh Daamoush said Lebanon’s authorities had failed to offer a political option that would liberate the land, enable residents to return, and facilitate reconstruction. Instead, he said, what they had offered amounted to “a dangerous concession of a precious part of the homeland,” a relinquishment of sovereignty and the entrenchment of the occupation through an official agreement.
His Eminence described this as “the greatest blow to the concept of a state responsible for protecting its sovereignty,” saying it had stripped the state of one of its most important powers: sovereignty over its territory.
“That is why the agreement is rejected by the majority of Lebanese, and the authorities have found no one to defend it because it serves the enemy’s interests entirely,” he said.
Daamoush said the alternative to this course was “a return to the true concept of the state”—namely, the Constitution and the National Accord document and bringing Lebanese together rather than dividing them.
He called for the authorities to reverse the measures they had taken against the resistance, saying that this would open the door to internal dialogue aimed at reaching a national understanding.
“We are not against dialogue; we are people of dialogue because we have the argument, the evidence, and the logic,” he said. “But we see no point in resuming dialogue with the authorities unless they reverse their decisions criminalizing the resistance.”
“We support meaningful dialogue preceded by a gesture of goodwill and practical steps, not promises,” Daamoush said. “Without correcting the anti-resistance course toward the resistance and its people that this authority has followed from the outset, culminating in the framework agreement, there is no hope of achieving anything.”
He added that any meeting without addressing the causes of the rupture would appear as though the resistance had accepted all the outcomes, decisions, and positions adopted by the authorities.
“We cannot accept that,” he said. “For dialogue to be productive, we have called on the authorities to stop accumulating failures and to reverse the unjust decisions they have taken against our people so that we can meet on clear foundations.”
Source: Al-Manar Website