DUBAI • Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah apologised late Thursday to a family of Israeli Arabs who lost two children in a rocket attack by the Shiite Muslim militia in Nazareth. “I ask this family for forgiveness, I know that apologies are insufficient, I take full responsibility,” Nasrallah said in an interview with Arabic television channel Al Jazeera.

“I ask them for forgiveness, it was not intentional,” he said, adding that “the dead in Nazareth are considered martyrs like those in Lebanon, Palestine and the resistance”. Rabia and Mahmud Taluzi, aged three and seven, were killed and 37 people were wounded in the rocket attack on Wednesday when a Hezbollah rocket hit a house in Nazareth, home to Israel’s largest Arab population and the town where Jesus (PBUH) spent his adolescence.

In total, Hezbollah has fired around 900 rockets into northern Israel since the Jewish state launched an offensive against Lebanon last Wednesday, sparked by the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyah yesterday warned that massive Israeli offensives in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon were exposing Arabs and Palestinians to “strategic risk”.

“What is happening is a strategic risk for Palestinian unity and the Arab nation because this war goes beyond its goals,” he said in an address delivered in a mosque in Gaza City’s Shatti refugee camp. “They want to drum it into our children’s heads that the aggression we are subject to is the result of the capture of an Israeli soldier (by Palestinian commandos) and that of two Israeli soldiers in Lebanon,” he said.

“The problem is not Palestinian or Lebanese resistance, the problem is not the capture of soldiers, it is the mentality of the continued occupation,” said the head of the Hamas-led government. Haniyah said the war was seeking to “overthrow the (Hamas) government in arresting ministers and bombing ministries,” to “finish with the Palestinian cause” and “sow division”.