Lebanese Hezbollah MP says 'resistance' needs $9 billion to wipe out Israel

A Lebanese member of parliament has claimed that $9 billion would be enough to wipe out Israel.

Mohammad Raad, who heads Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, said that while the cost of war on Yemen reached $900 billion, "the resistance only needed $9 billion so that there would be no such thing as Israel in the region."

He gave no explanation to what he was basing the figures on.

Raad made his comments last week during a ceremony in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh, a stronghold of the Iranian-backed Shia Hezbollah militia.

Israel considers Hezbollah to be a major threat. The two sides fought a devastating month-long war in 2006, and have been engaged in minor border skirmishes since.

Hezbollah, which sometimes refers to itself and its allies as the "Islamic Resistance in Lebanon", currently refuses to give up its stockpile of weapons, saying that Israel still poses a threat.

The group has been militarily involved in Syria in support of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and is also a vocal supporter of the Houthi rebels in Yemen, although it denies a military presence in that country.

The Lebanon-based party has in recent years slammed Saudi Arabia for what it calls "war crimes" in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen against the Houthi rebels in 2015 and the conflict in the country is widely seen as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, although there have recently been moves towards a ceasefire.