In a televised address on Wednesday, the chief of the armed Islamist group, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said that because Cyprus had become a part of Lebanon’s conflict with Israel, what awaited it would be “very big”.

Nasrallah said: “The Cypriot government must be warned that opening Cypriot airports and bases for the Israeli enemy to target Lebanon means that the Cypriot government has become part of the war and the resistance (Hezbollah) will deal with it as part of the war.”

“[Israel] knows that what also awaits it in the Mediterranean is very big... In the face of a battle of this magnitude, it knows that it must now wait for us on land, in the air, and at sea.”

The Hezbollah leader added that his group would fight with “no rules” and warned that there would be “no place safe from our missiles and our drones” in Israel if a full-scale war broke out between the two countries.

Cypriot authorities have not yet responded to Nasrallah’s threats.

The warnings come as the Iran-backed militant group fired more than a dozen missiles into northern Israel on Wednesday, a day after Israel said it had approved operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon.