Hezbollah militants stand at attention as hundreds of people gather in a huge hall waiting to watch a televised speech by Hassan Nasrallah.
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Hizballah believes that Mughniyah's assassination is part of an Israeli plan to decapitate the leadership of militant anti-Israel groups as a precursor for launching a new war against the Shi'ite organization. "Mughniyah was killed in the context of an open and comprehensive war through which Israel is preparing for another war," Nasrallah said at a ceremony Friday marking the beginning of the annual "week of the resistance," in which dead Hizballah leaders are honored.
Nasrallah warned that Hizballah was more than ready to fight another war and threatened Israel that its army would be destroyed if it entered Lebanon. "We will kill you in the fields, we will kill you in the cities, we will fight you like you have never seen before," he said speaking via a large television screen before an audience of tens of thousands of supporters. "Your army will be destroyed in the south and so will your prestige and you will remain without an army. Israel cannot last without an army."
Nasrallah is one of the Arab world's great orators, but he was almost matched at the event by Mughniyah's 18-year-old son, Jihad. Dressed in crisp camouflage uniform and forage cap, Jihad Mughniyah marched briskly onto the stage and delivered a confident and impassioned speech, pledging that "the strugglers of my father and myself are ready to continue in his footsteps." The rhetoric even had hard-nosed Hizballah security men and top rank party officials dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs as the audience burst into applause and cheers at the end of the speech.
"These guys are very ready for war," says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Hizballah expert with the Carnegie Endowment's Middle East Center in Beirut. But not everyone in south Lebanon is ready for another round with Israel. Many residents of the battle-scarred south are still repairing the damage of the 2006 war and the notion of another conflict striking the region is not welcomed, even among some Hizballah supporters. "God bless Nasrallah and the resistance. They have fought and sacrificed for Lebanon. But we are tired of wars and just want to raise our children in peace," said Hassan, a shopkeeper in a mainly Shi'ite border village. Indeed, a Western diplomat in Beirut predicted that Israel will turn south Lebanon "into a parking lot" in the next war, hoping to drive a wedge between Lebanese Shi'ites and Hizballah.
Yet every time Israel has used a heavy hand in Lebanon in the past, it resulted in increased support for Hizballah. Even as Hizballah girds for another confrontation with Israel, however, its leaders will have to factor in the limits of endurance among its war-weary Shi'ite supporters.