Hezbullah has been re-arming since the end of last year’s war.
Since a UN-brokered cease-fire came into force last August 14, the group has been steadily gearing itself up for the next round, with the same determination and secrecy that have made its reputation, the experts say.
“Immediately after last summer’s war Hizbullah began refortifying its positions and working on new ones,” said Judith Palmer Harik, author of the book “Hizbullah: The Changing Face of Terrorism.”
“They are rearming … In fact, there has been no interruption in their receiving of more arms,” she told AFP.
Make no mistake about it, Hezbullah has been energized by the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Michael Young points out that even if they didn’t set off the bomb that murdered six UN peacekeepers, they allowed it to happen.
There were probably two principal reasons, aside from the kill factor, for the car-bomb attack against the soldiers. The first was to make UNIFIL more timorous in its patrolling of the border area, in such a way that, with the removal of Lebanese Army units to fight in Nahr al-Bared, more room would be cleared up for Hizbullah to rebuild its military infrastructure south of the Litani River. That’s not to say that Hizbullah detonated the device that killed the UN soldiers, but it’s very difficult to accept that the party was unaware of what was about to take place. Hizbullah, for all its declarations of sympathy for UNIFIL, views the international force and the Lebanese Army as grave obstacles to the pursuit of “resistance” in the South. For an organization that could not survive without armed struggle, that recently saw its Hamas comrades establish an autonomous territory alongside Israel in Gaza, now is the time to act, in collaboration with Iran and Syria, to again make of South Lebanon a front line against Israel.
[…] Perhaps most disquieting is that if the UNIFIL mandate begins breaking apart, it will be Israel that looks for ways around Resolution 1701 to defend its northern border. This would suit Hizbullah and its Iranian and Syrian patrons just fine, since it’s the Israelis who would take the blame for returning South Lebanon to where it was before the summer 2006 war.
The question, I think, is when–not if.
Well, let’s hope the Israelis use restraint and proportionate response because, as we all know, any Israeli action for any reason is merely a part of that impersonal cycle of violence that besets the Middle East.
Oh, come on. Surely it can’t be that hard to just invent a safe death ray that kills a single terrorist hiding in a village full of women and children. Or to vaporize a rocket launcher on top of a hospital without even getting the roof dirty. Israel probably already has something like that, but they just don’t use it because they’re “mean”.
to hizballah on an unhappy anniversary
never meant to kill your people
never meant to wreck your town
but because you meant to kill us
i’m not sad to see you frown
if you’d like to try again
that would really be a shame
every time you do
the ending always is the same
lots of death and lots of rubble
poverty for all your trouble
when your people pray for death
their own is such a waste of breath …