“If there is a cease-fire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said in an interview with The Associated Press at the group’s political office in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Hezbollah's participation in the conflict has been as a “support front” for Palestinian resistance groups, Kassem said, and “if the war stops, this military support will no longer exist.”

But, he said, if Israel scales back its military operations without a formal cease-fire agreement and full withdrawal from Gaza, the implications for the Lebanon-Israel border conflict are less clear.

“If what happens in Gaza is a mix between cease-fire and no cease-fire, war and no war, we can’t answer (how we would react) now, because we don’t know its shape, its results, its impacts,” Kassem said during a 40-minute interview.

Talks of a cease-fire in Gaza have faltered in recent weeks, raising fears of an escalation on the Lebanon-Israel front. Hezbollah has traded near-daily strikes with Israeli forces along their border over the past nine months.

Last month, the Israeli army said it had “approved and validated” plans for an attack on Lebanon if no diplomatic solution was reached to the ongoing clashes.

Kassem said he doesn't believe that Israel currently has the ability — or has made a decision — to launch a full-blown war with Hezbollah.

He warned that even if Israel intends to launch a limited operation in Lebanon that stops short of a full-scale war, it should not expect the fighting to remain limited.

“Israel can decide what it wants: limited war, total war, partial war,” he said. “But it should expect that our response and our resistance will not be within a ceiling and rules of engagement set by Israel… If Israel wages the war, it means it doesn’t control its extent or who enters into it.”

The latter was an apparent reference to Hezbollah’s allies in the so-called “axis of resistance” in the region.

Armed groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere could enter the fray in the event of a full-scale war in Lebanon, which might also pull in Israel’s strongest ally, the United States.

European diplomats have made a circuit between Lebanon and Israel for months in an attempt to ward off a wider conflict.

Kassem said he met on Saturday with Germany's deputy chief of intelligence, Ole Dieh, in Beirut. U.S. officials do not meet directly with Hezbollah because Washington claims it's a terrorist group, but they regularly send messages via intermediaries.

Kassem said White House envoy Amos Hochstein had recently requested via intermediaries that Hezbollah apply pressure on Hamas to accept a cease-fire and captives exchange proposal put forward by U.S. President Joe Biden. He said Hezbollah had rejected the request.

“Hamas is the one that makes its decisions and whoever wants to ask for something should talk to it directly,” he said.

A constructive deal, he said, would aim to end the war, get Israel to withdraw from Gaza, and ensure the release of captives.

Once a cease-fire is reached, then a political track can determine the arrangements inside Gaza and on the front with Lebanon, he added.