The head of powerful armed group Hezbollah warned on Wednesday that "no one" would be allowed to operate in maritime oil and gas fields if Lebanon was barred from its "rights" in extracting from areas off of its own coast.
"If you don't give us the rights that our state is asking for ... then we could flip the table on everyone," Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address.
"If you want to get to a formula where this country is barred from taking advantage (of these fields), then no one will be allowed to extract gas or oil and no one will be able to sell gas or oil," Nasrallah said.
Lebanon is locked in U.S.-mediated negotiations with Israel to delineate a shared maritime border that would help determine which oil and gas resources belong to which country.
Israel has already begun work at the Karish oil field through a vessel operated by London-based Energean.