by Jamie Dettmer at Politico
BEIRUT — Iran-backed militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah are closely coordinating their next steps in fighting against Israel, a senior Hamas representative in Lebanon told POLITICO on Tuesday, just hours after Tehran warned of “preemptive action” against Israel.
Ahmed Abdul-Hadi, the head of Hamas’ political bureau in Beirut, insisted Gaza-based Hamas had not given its ally Hezbollah any advance notice of its attacks against Israel on October 7, which killed more than 1,400 people. Despite this, however, he described a continual cooperation between the two groups, stressing Hezbollah was now “geared for a major war” against Israel in the north, while Hamas would burst Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “dream” of driving it out of Gaza.
The remarks will heighten fears the conflict in the Middle East could be about to spill onto two fronts and engulf Lebanon, particularly if Israel launches a ground invasion of Gaza, where its bombardments have already killed more than 2,700 people, and Tehran commits its fellow-Shiite Hezbollah proxies into all-out war.
“We have very strong relations with Hezbollah. We were cooperating with Hezbollah before the attack on Israel and after and now we are in full cooperation,” Abdul-Hadi said in an interview in his office in the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, where he was born 55 years ago. The camp is a warren of oppressive, narrow alleys with ramshackle buildings and little sunlight, and is the smallest of a dozen camps in Lebanon for Palestinian refugees who fled the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Abdul-Hadi identified an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza as one of the key triggers…
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