BEIRUT: Hezbollah guerrillas, the bane of successive Israeli governments, have rearmed since last year’s war in Lebanon but have little interest in provoking a new one, analysts say.
Israel has complained about Hezbollah’s resupply effort, but it too seems unlikely to plunge into any fresh conflict until it has digested the lessons of the previous one. Israel is also preoccupied with the political firestorm around Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, rebuked by an inquiry for his handling of the war.
Lebanese security and political sources said Hezbollah had amply replenished its rocket arsenal and had received improved anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles from Iran via Syria since a United Nations-backed truce halted hostilities in August.
The Beirut government says it has no proof of arms transfers from Syria. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon discussed the issue last month with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who opposes any move to put UN troops on the Syria-Lebanon border.
“What the group took six years to achieve (after Israeli troops left Lebanon in 2000), it has achieved in six months,” one political source said of Hezbollah’s military buildup.
A security source, who asked not to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said Hezbollah was in better shape than before the war that erupted after it seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
The Shia guerrillas have had no visible presence in the border region since Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers took over the area south of the Litani river. But Hezbollah can call up hundreds of villagers with military training if need be.
Hezbollah has also established a new defence line, with trenches, bunkers and rocket bases just north of the Litani and in the southern part of the Bekaa Valley to the east, the sources said.
They said the group has sent hundreds of fighters, both new recruits and veterans, for training in Iran – more than making up for its war casualties, including 270 or so dead.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has openly stated that military preparations are under way, couching them as precautions rather than as a prelude to attack.
This week he jubilantly noted the Israeli inquiry’s flaying of Olmert for his conduct of the war, in which Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah or stop it firing rockets across the border.
“Today the climate in the whole of the Zionist entity is that this war was a failure,” Nasrallah said on Wednesday.
Many Israelis agree, with two thirds telling pollsters Olmert should resign. Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz argue that Israel made some gains in the war because UN peacekeepers had replaced Hezbollah fighters on the border.—Reuters
