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Hezbollah’s chief said on Wednesday his group had tens of thousands of combatants ready to fight, adding that nowhere in Israel was off-limits to attacks.

‘We have tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants’ ready to fight, Naim Qassem said in a speech marking 40 days since his predecessor was killed.

He also said nowhere in Israel would be ‘off-limits’ to the group’s attacks.

He said the results of the US presidential election will have no impact on any possible ceasefire deal.

‘We don’t base our expectations for a halt of the aggression on political developments whether Kamala Harris wins or Donald Trump wins, it means nothing to us,’ he said in a pre-recorded speech before Trump’s win was announced.

‘What will stop this war is the battlefield’ he said, citing fighting in south Lebanon and Hezbollah attacks on Israel.

The speech was Qassem’s second since he was named Hezbollah secretary-general last week.

He replaced the group’s decades-long chief Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in a massive Israeli strike on the group’s south Beirut bastion.

Meanwhile, Lebanon said that it had filed a complaint with the United Nations’ labour agency over deadly attacks on communication devices across the country in September, which it blames on Israel.

Lebanese labour minister Mustafa Bayram called the attack an ‘egregious war against humanity, against technology, against work’, saying his country had filed the complaint with the International Labour Organisation in Geneva.

‘It’s a very dangerous precedent,’ he told journalists in the Swiss city at an event organised by the UN correspondents’ association ACANU.

The move comes after Israel escalated its air raids on Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon, Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley on September 23, after nearly a year of cross-border fire, and a week later sent ground troops into southern Lebanon.

The escalation kicked off with sabotage attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, which killed dozens of people and injured thousands more across Lebanon.

Israel has not officially taken responsibility for those attacks, but Bayram said it was ‘widely accepted internationally that Israel was behind this heinous act’.

‘In a few minutes, more than 4,000 civilians fell, between martyrs and injured and maimed,’ he said, speaking through a translator.

Among the victims not killed, he said many people had ‘lost their fingers; some have totally lost their eyesight’.

‘We are in a situation where ordinary objects, objects you use in daily life, become dangerous and lethal,’ he said.

‘If left unchecked, this crime could become normalised,’ he said, adding that filing the complaint was meant ‘to prevent such crimes from happening in the future’.

‘I consider it a moral obligation to my country and to the world.’

Asked why Lebanon had chose to file the complaint with the ILO, Bayram pointed to all the workers who were on the job when pagers and walkie-talkies — tools they used to do their work — suddenly exploded.

‘We deemed it necessary to point out that this runs contrary to work environment, security and safety, contrary to decent work principles defended by the ILO,’ he said.

He added that Lebanese authorities could still file complaints over the pager attacks in other international forums, including the World Trade Organisation.

‘In more general terms, the Lebanese government wants to present a myriad of complaints’ against Israel over its operations in the country, he said, since ‘the amount of crimes is huge’.

More than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since clashes between Hezbollah and Israel began in October 2023, according to the health ministry, including at least 1,964 since September 23, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

The war has also pushed more than a million people to flee their homes.