HEZBOLLAH leader Hassan Nasrallah has called for a "victory" rally on Friday in the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut that were battered by air strikes during his militant group's 34-day war with Israel. "The victory rally will be dedicated to the martyrs, the wounded, the prisoners (held by Israel) and all those who supported the resistance," he said in a statement broadcast by his Shiite group's Al-Manar television overnight.Al-Manar did not specify if Nasrallah would appear in public for the first time since the war erupted on July 12 and was ended by a UN-brokered August 14 ceasefire after some 1300 people were killed in Lebanon alone.
Nasrallah said last week in an interview with Al-Jazeera television that Hezbollah had won "a strategic and historic victory" over Israeli forces, whose objective, he said, had been to crush the Syrian-backed Lebanese group. But in late August, he expressed regret for the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a Hezbollah raid on the two countries' border that sparked the devastating war between his guerrillas and Israel.
