BEIRUT: Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah warned Friday that his group would respond to any Israeli attack at any time and in any place.

The resistance party chief said that the Israeli airstrike that killed six Hezbollah fighters and a top Iranian general in Syria’s Golan Heights this month has shattered the rules of engagement with the Jewish state.

In a defiant speech, two days after Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israeli military convoy in the occupied Shebaa Farms, killing two soldiers in retaliation for the Israeli raid in the Syrian town of Qunaitra, Nasrallah said the Lebanese and Iranian martyrs who died in Syria reflected the unity of the battle among the three countries against Israel.

“After what happened in Qunaitra [on Jan. 18] and in the Shebaa Farms Wednesday, you have tried us. Don’t try us again,” Nasrallah warned the Israelis in a televised speech during a Hezbollah ceremony in Beirut’s southern suburbs commemorating the six slain party fighters and the Iranian commander.

“We do not want war … but the resistance is militarily ready and we are not afraid of war,” he said, drawing cheers from hundreds of supporters assembled at a complex in the southern suburbs, waving the party’s yellow flags.

“If the Israeli enemy thinks that the resistance fears war, I tell them today in the commemoration of the Qunaitra martyrs and after the Shebaa qualitative operation that we don’t fear war and we are not reluctant to face it, and we will face it if it is imposed on us, and we will win it, God willing,” Nasrallah said.

He added that the Qunaitra attack has destroyed the rules of engagement that had governed the military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel in south Lebanon in the past.

“Following the Qunaitra operation and the response in the Shebaa Farms, I want to be clear: We in the Islamic Resistance [Hezbollah] in Lebanon are no longer concerned with any such thing as the rules of engagement. We don’t recognize the rules of engagement that have ended,” a seemingly defiant and relaxed Nasrallah said.

“It is our religious, moral, humanitarian and legal right to face aggression, wherever and whenever it may occur. The story that you hit me here and you retaliate here is finished,” he added, speaking through a huge screen via a video link. “We have the right to respond in any place and at any time and in the way we deem as appropriate.”

The Hezbollah chief said the Israeli attack in Qunaitra revealed the unity between Beirut, Damascus and Tehran.

“The martyrs who fell in Qunaitra reflected a fusion of Lebanese-Iranian blood on Syrian territory, and also reflected the unity of the cause and the unity of the fate and the battle of these countries [against Israel],” he said. “When blood unites Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, then we will enter an era of victory.”

The death of Revolutionary Guard Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi and Hezbollah field commander Mohammad Issa shows how commanders are present on the ground along with the fighters, Nasrallah said. He added that the death of Jihad Mughniyeh, son of the slain Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, shows how entire families have given themselves to the resistance.

Among those present at the ceremony was visiting Iranian official Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee. The wall behind the podium was decorated with pictures of the six party fighters and Iranian general killed in the Israeli raid.

The din of automatic weapons reverberated in parts of Beirut and the southern suburbs before and after the roughly 90-minute speech, during which Nasrallah revealed that the Hezbollah ambush in the Shebaa Farms was planned to resemble the Israeli attack in Qunaitra.“They killed us in broad daylight, we killed them in broad daylight … They hit two of our vehicles, we hit two of their vehicles,” he noted. “As for the casualties, we’ll have to wait and see.”

The main difference between the two attacks was that Israel did not immediately acknowledge that its soldiers were targeted, while Hezbollah announced Israel’s attack in Qunaitra moments after the strike, he said.

Nasrallah said Hezbollah decided to avenge the Qunaitra attack when Israel was at the highest level of security alert along its border with Lebanon.

He added that threats by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the individuals who carried out the attack in the Shebaa Farms indicated that he was evading military confrontation and was seeking to track them down to assassinate them. He warned that Hezbollah would retaliate if any of its members was killed by the Israelis.

“From now on, if any Hezbollah resistance cadre or youth is killed in a treacherous manner, we will hold Israel responsible and it will then be our right to respond at any place and at any time and in the manner we deem appropriate,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lebanon Friday lodged a complaint with the U.N. Security Council against Israel over its artillery shelling of areas in south Lebanon in which a Spanish peacekeeper was killed, the National News Agency reported.

It said Lebanon’s Ambassador to the U.N. Nawaf Salam filed the complaint, requesting the international community condemn Israel with “the strongest words” for its shelling of south Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah ambush in the Shebaa Farms.

The complaint said the Israeli shelling “constituted a blatant violation of [Lebanon’s] sovereignty, the United Nations’ Charter and Security Council decision, notably Resolution 1701,” the NNA said.

For his part, Speaker Nabih Berri said that Israel had informed the U.N. peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, shortly after the Hezbollah attack in the Shebaa Farms that it did not want to escalate the situation with Lebanon if Hezbollah showed restraint. Berri, according to visitors, was informed of Israel’s willingness to maintain calm by the Lebanese Army Command, which informed the speaker and Prime Minister Tammam Salam that Israel said that it could implement a cease-fire within 20 minutes.

“Israel knocked on the door and got their answer. It was not the first time that Israel violated the rules of engagement,” Berri was quoted as saying.

He said the Hezbollah attack in the Shebaa Farms did not violate Resolution1701 that ended the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. “It was a calculated and clean operation that took place on occupied Lebanese territory,” he said.

Berri added that the situation was de-escalated following intense high-level contacts between him, Salam, the Army, UNIFIL, the United States and the United Nations.