February 24, 2003	Monday	Zul Hijjah 22, 1423

ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER: The infiltrators’ bodies lie somewhere in Israel, still unclaimed and unnamed after their shooting spree in what Israeli officials describe as a new proxy war by the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah.

Israel believes the two gunmen, who clambered across the electrified border fence last March and killed six Israelis before being shot dead, were Palestinians. As liege of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah had to have backed their operation.

But regional developments mean the Shia Muslim group is lying low along the rugged and fortified frontier, loath to draw the ire of Israel and its ally, the United States.

“Hezbollah knows it could be a target in the ‘war on terror’,” a senior Israeli intelligence source said, referring to the US campaign launched following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

“Palestinians are a means for it to keep up the jihad against Israel while maintaining deniability. Hezbollah is shrewd about its survival,” the source said.

“It is a proxy in need of a proxy of its own.”

Having hastened the end of Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah supports the ongoing kindred Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But Hezbollah has gone quiet as the United States prepares to attack Iraq over its alleged weapons of mass destruction and alleged links with international militants, fearing its patrons Iran and Syria could be next, according to experts.

“Hezbollah has not admitted responsibility for the deadly infiltration (last March) but was certainly behind the operation using two specially-trained Palestinians to carry it out,” said Nicholas Blanford, correspondent for the Lebanese newspaper Daily Star and the British-based Jane’s Intelligence Review.

He said a December bomb ambush on an Israeli border patrol which wounded two soldiers probably had the same provenance.

“(Now) Hezbollah will lie low during the Iraq war.”

Hezbollah is no stranger to the wrath of Washington, which blamed it for the devastating 1983 bombings of the US embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, as well as abducting Americans.

Since then, Hezbollah has consolidated its standing on the home front. With its allies it holds 12 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament and enjoys broader support for its anti-corruption stance and network of charitable services.

HEZBOLLAH OF TWO MINDS:Hezbollah could be hit hard by open conflict with Israel. But, born as a resistance movement, it has kept hostility to the Jewish state central to its ideology.

“There is a tension in Hezbollah between consolidating its domestic standing as a viable political force, and fighting on alongside the Palestinians,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East scholar at Boston University.

“The Lebanese rancour against Israel cannot be overstated.”

Hezbollah gunners have regularly targeted Israeli troops in the Shebaa Farms, a disputed area near Syria, and answer Israeli warplanes roaring over Lebanon with anti-aircraft fire.

Casualties have been few but tensions have remained high. Israel’s invasion-strength border garrison is always on stand-by.

“Once we are given the order to retaliate, they won’t know what hit them,” said a regimental commander at Narkiss (narcissus), one of the border outposts that Israel has named after flowers and strung along the hilly frontier.

Israeli officials say Hezbollah is building an arsenal of as many as 10,000 long-range rockets and missiles in hidden silos.

Independent confirmation is unavailable, and Hezbollah has kept mum except for an apparent hint last October by Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek, a senior figure in the movement and representative of the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“All sensitive areas of the Zionist entity are within the range of our fire,” Yazbek told followers. “If the enemy hits at our infrastructure installations, we will strike at its infrastructure installations wherever they exist.”

As far as Israeli intelligence officials are concerned, Yazbek’s threat might also refer to attacks emanating from the Palestinian territories. There, Israel says, Hezbollah has been supplying arms and military know-how to local militant cells.

Palestinian security officials deny links with Hezbollah in the occupied territories. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, insists guerrilla actions are kept within Lebanon.—Reuters