CAIRO: The Lebanese Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday bears the hallmarks of coordination with the Palestinian movement Hamas, inspired by their backers in Syria and Iran, analysts said.
“This coordination exists and its inspiration is Damascus and Tehran,” said Antoine Basbous, a Paris-based Middle East specialist.
The director of the Observatory of Arab Countries argued that Syria and Iran had prodded the Shia militia Hezbollah into action, in a bid to tip the balance in Hamas’s favour as its confrontation with Israel escalates.
Both movements “know how keen Israel is to retrieve its soldiers so they are trying to cash in,” Basbous said.
Israel confirmed that two of its soldiers had been captured and seven others killed by Hezbollah following an attack on the Shebaa Farms, a disputed area which lies on its northern border with Lebanon.
The fresh abductions came little more than two weeks after the capture of an Israeli corporal by three militant groups — including the armed wing of the governing Hamas — during an attack on a southern Gaza Strip border post.
The three groups holding Shalit had demanded Israel free 1,000 Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and “other” prisoners, and Hezbollah promptly demanded a prisoner swap after announcing the capture of two more soldiers.
Hezbollah commands great prestige among Palestinians for having accelerated Israel’s May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, had stressed late last month during a rally in Beirut that kidnappings were a vital weapon and urged Hamas not to release Shalit.
Lebanon-based Hamas political official Osama Hamdan said on television on Wednesday that “the nature of the relation (between Hamas and Hezbollah) is such that there is an understanding and a coordination.”
Hezbollah had not captured Israeli soldiers since October 2000, when it seized three servicemen in the Shebaa. Their bodies were eventually returned in a swap that saw 429 Lebanese and Palestinians, languishing in Israeli jails for years, freed from Israel custody.
Wednesday’s abductions prompted an Israeli air and ground offensive into south Lebanon, the first such operation since the pullout six years ago.
Emad Gad, an analyst from the Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, argued that Hezbollah’s intervention in the current crisis was aimed at “deflecting Israel’s attention and scuppering any mediation attempt”.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has spearheaded efforts to secure the peaceful release of the Israeli soldier detained in Gaza, said in a interview published on Wednesday that his mediation had been sabotaged.
“I had reached an honourable solution to the crisis of the captured soldier and had obtained from Israel that it would free a large number of Palestinian detainees,” Mubarak told the state-owned Al-Ahram daily.
“But Hamas was submitted to pressure and other parties, whom I will not identify, intervened in the contacts engaged by Egypt, raising new hurdles for an agreement which was imminent,” he added.
Emad Gad argued there was no doubt that Mubarak, in his comments made before the flareup on the Lebanese-Israeli border, was “referring to Syria and Tehran”.
Damascus “has the habit of using the affairs of other people to serve its own interests”, he said, citing the example of the Shebaa Farms.
“Syria is making a big fuss about the Shebaa Farms these days but not about its Golan Heights,” which have also been occupied by Israel since 1967, Gad said.
“The coordination is very clear from the start between Hamas and Iran, which asked Hezbollah to intervene in the crisis. As for Syria, it harbours the leadership of Hamas and wields much influence within Hezbollah,” he said.
The exiled leadership of Hamas, including politburo chief Khaled Meshaal, is based in Damascus and believed to hold a tougher line than Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and the rest of the Islamist movement’s Gaza-based leaders.
Even as the crisis mounted in the region, Syrian Vice-President Faruq al-Shara was holding talks in Damascus on Wednesday with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani.
Both officials described the abductions as legitimate acts of resistance.
Following the June 25 capture of the Israeli soldier in Gaza, Israel launched a massive assault against the territory, killing more than 60 Palestinians — many of them civilians — over the past week alone.—AFP
