Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah is at it again with his threats. In a speech he gave on the “Day of the Shahid [Martyr],” and which was shown on huge screens set up in the Shuhada compound in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Nasrallah boasted: “There’s a power station in Israel, which, if we strike it, will leave the whole country in the dark. Can Israel survive six months of darkness?”

Look who’s asking! The ever-present, ever-AWOL leader of Hezbollah, who has spent the past six years holed up in his bunker, hardly even daring to come out to address the masses.

It’s practically a ritual by now. Whenever he does come out of his bunker he’s been hiding in since the Second Lebanon War [2006], he takes the opportunity to issue vapid threats. On one occasion he actually threatened that Hezbollah would conquer the Galilee. Another time he warned Israel that he would destroy Tel Aviv to avenge the assassination of senior Hezbollah official Imad Mughniyah, etc. This time he threatened to leave the entire Galilee in the dark. 

There’s no need for any in-depth analysis to realize that Hassan Nasrallah’s bluster and threats are inversely proportional to his dwindling strength and the troubling situation in which he finds himself. It is a classic example of lashing out defensively out of fear for his future and the future of the organization he has headed since that day in February 1992, when Israel assassinated his predecessor Abbas Musawi.