Hezbollah's relocation of rocket sites to Lebanon's interior poses wider threat

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By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 23, 2010; A06

BEIRUT -- Hezbollah has dispersed its long-range-rocket sites deep into northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, a move that analysts say threatens to broaden any future conflict between the Islamist movement and Israel into a war between the two countries.

More than 10,000 U.N. troops now patrol traditional Hezbollah territory in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border, and several thousand Lebanese armed forces personnel also have moved into the area. A cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerrillas in summer 2006 triggered a month-long war that prompted the United Nations to deploy its force as part of a cease-fire.

The United Nations is confident that the dense presence of its troops in the comparatively small area is helping lower the risk of conflict and minimizing Hezbollah's ability to move weapons across southern Lebanon, but analysts in Lebanon and Israel say the U.N. mission is almost beside the point.

Hezbollah's redeployment and rearmament indicate that its next clash with Israel is unlikely to focus on the border, instead moving farther into Lebanon and challenging both the military and the government. The situation is important for U.S. efforts in the region, whether aimed at curbing the influence of Hezbollah's patrons in Iran or at persuading Syria to moderate its stance toward Israel and its neighbors.

Hezbollah "learned their lesson" in 2006, when vital intelligence enabled the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the group's long-range launch sites in the first days of the conflict, said reserve Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former head of IDF intelligence. In effect, he said, "the 'border' is now the Litani River," with Hezbollah's rocket sites possibly extending north of Beirut.

In a December briefing, Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the IDF head of operations, said some Hezbollah rockets now have a range of more than 150 miles -- making Tel Aviv reachable from as far away as Beirut. The Islamist group has talked openly of its efforts to rebuild, and Israel estimates that Hezbollah has about 40,000 projectiles, most of them shorter-range rockets and mortar shells.

The group "has been fortifying lots of different areas," said Judith Palmer Harik, a Hezbollah scholar in Beirut. With U.N. and Lebanese forces "packed along the border," she said, "we are looking at a much more expanded battle in all senses of the word."

Just a matter of time?

The border has been relatively quiet since the 2006 war, a fact that officials with the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon attribute at least partly to the 400 or so patrols they send out each day to search for weapons stores and prevent border violations.

Armored U.N. vehicles sit at the entrance to southern Lebanon, alongside Lebanese army and intelligence checkpoints; blue-flagged U.N. troops occupy mountaintop posts that Hezbollah used as firing sites in 2006.

"We are covering every square inch," said Maj. S.K. Misra, a spokesman for the battalion of India's 3/11 Gurkha Rifles corps that patrols southeastern Lebanon. "It's impossible for anything to move."

At the same time, debate is raging in political and military circles between those who argue that the damage to each side in 2006 has created a sort of respectful deterrence between Israel and Hezbollah and those who say it is only a matter of time before violence erupts again.

Hezbollah lost hundreds of fighters in the conflict and was put on the defensive in Lebanon, where some questioned whether the group's vow to continue "resistance" against Israel was worth letting an unregulated paramilitary organization effectively make decisions about war and peace.

With Iran backing and supplying Hezbollah and the United States backing and supplying Israel, "the battlefield is Lebanon," said Marwan Hamadeh, a Lebanese member of parliament and supporter of a government coalition that is trying to curb Hezbollah's arms and limit Syrian and Iranian influence in the country. "This is where the Iranian missiles sit, and this is where the Israeli air force can reach."

Israel, meanwhile, lost more than 100 troops and uncharacteristically large numbers of tanks, helicopters and other equipment -- prompting it to rewrite its war doctrine and adjust its perception of Hezbollah's militia. Military analysts now see Hezbollah not as primarily a guerrilla force but as an organization that practices "hybrid war," mixing classic guerrilla tactics with the strategy, equipment and capability of a standing army.

In a 2008 report for the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, analysts Stephen D. Biddle and Jeffrey A. Friedman concluded that Hezbollah had performed more effectively in 2006 than any of the Arab armies from Egypt, Syria or Jordan that had fought conventional wars with Israel over the years, and better in some ways than the Iraqi army in its two wars with the United States.

A wider struggle

In Beirut, politicians and analysts agree that the group has only grown stronger since 2006. As they hear Hezbollah's secretary general, Hasan Nasrallah, speak of a conflict that will "change the face of the region," many assume that the IDF will not allow the organization to rearm, recruit and train much longer before striking.

In Israel, Hezbollah is seen as part of a wider struggle for regional influence between Iran and U.S.-allied moderate Arab states, given the group's ties to Iran and Syria and arms supplies assumed to run through both countries.

There is no reason the current calm cannot continue, said retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser who is now a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies.

But if a conflict does break out, "Israel will not contain that war against Hezbollah," Eiland said. "We cannot."

Given Hezbollah's capabilities, he said, "the only way to deter the other side and prevent the next round -- or if it happens, to win -- is to have a military confrontation with the state of Lebanon."

Israeli navy says it seized ship carrying arms bound for Hezbollah - washingtonpost.com

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By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 5, 2009

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli navy said Wednesday that commandos had seized a container ship carrying a huge cache of weapons that originated in Iran and was ultimately destined for the militia of the Islamist Hezbollah movement.

As part of its routine inspection of ships in the Mediterranean Sea, the Israeli navy intercepted the vessel Tuesday night near Cyprus, roughly 100 miles off the Israeli coast. There was no resistance from the ship's crew, and once Israeli special forces boarded, they found an estimated 600 tons of rockets, guns and other munitions, said Rear Adm. Rani Ben-Yehuda, deputy head of the Israeli navy.

Flying under an Antiguan flag, the ship, called the Francop, was carrying cargo loaded in Damietta, Egypt, and bound for Latakia in Syria, Israeli defense officials said. Some of the ship's 500 containers were stamped with the insignia of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, and 36 of them were found to contain arms. Other documents found on board identified the cargo as originating in Iran, Ben-Yehuda said.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, speaking from Tehran, denied that Iranian arms were bound for Syria and said "pirates" had disrupted legitimate trade between Syria and Iran, news services reported.

The incident comes as Israeli political officials defend their country in the U.N. General Assembly against allegations that Israeli forces committed war crimes during last winter's three-week war with the Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.

Israel contends that it took military action only after years in which the Iranian-backed group fired rockets at civilian targets in Israel. The country regards Hamas and Hezbollah as imminent threats -- a point highlighted when Israeli intelligence officials told the country's parliament this week that Hamas had recently test-fired an Iranian-supplied rocket able to reach Tel Aviv. Hamas denied the allegation.

"This is the state of Israel's answer to all those who call on Israel to examine itself, about how it defended its citizens," former defense minister Shaul Mofaz said on Israel Radio after the seizure of the ship was announced. "We have to act constantly, daily, to defend our citizens. This is further and emphatic proof that attempts by the other side do not stop."

Israeli officials offered no direct evidence that the supplies were bound for Hezbollah. They noted, however, that Iran is forbidden under a U.N. embargo to export arms. Iran is widely considered a major weapons supplier for Hezbollah and Hamas.

Ben-Yehuda said the nature of the supplies, including thousands of shorter-range Katyusha rockets, supported the idea that the arms were not intended for the Syrian military or some other standing force.

"We know what Hezbollah uses and what ranges they need," he said.

Israel fought an intense war with the Lebanese Islamist militia in 2006, and since then, Lebanon has been under a U.N. resolution meant to discourage the presence of armaments not under the control of the nation's military.

After the naval boarding, the ship was redirected to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where officials began to offload it and display what they say is Israel's largest haul of smuggled arms to date.

Ben-Yehuda said neither the ship's 11-person crew nor the Egyptians at the port knew about the contents of the containers, which held civilian goods layered over weapons crates.

Lebanon’s Shadow Government | Foreign Affairs

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How Hezbollah Wins by Losing

Mohamad Bazzi
MOHAMAD BAZZI is an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalism professor at New York University.

On July 14, a mysterious explosion rocked the southern Lebanese town of Khirbet Silim, destroying a building. United Nations peacekeepers later claimed that the building was a Hezbollah weapons depot that had accidentally blown up. Hezbollah, a Shiite militia with close ties to Iran, has remained silent about the blast's cause, but the group made clear that it does not appreciate the renewed international attention focused on its arsenal.

Under the Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, blue-helmeted UN troops are responsible for intercepting illegal weapons shipments and shutting down storage sites south of the Litani River. But when UN troops tried to raid another suspected weapons cache in Khirbet Silim a few days after the explosion, hundreds of villagers surrounded the soldiers, pelted them with rocks, and forced them to withdraw. Peacekeepers fired warning shots in the air as they cleared a path out of town. Ever since, black-capped Hezbollah men have stood guard outside the house.

Since the June 7 Lebanese parliamentary elections, an alluring but simplistic narrative has emerged in the West: because Hezbollah and its allies were defeated at the polls, the militant group would lose some of its luster and a pro-American political coalition would rule Lebanon. In fact, Hezbollah remains the country's dominant military and political force. Moreover, it holds the key to both domestic and external stability -- its actions will determine whether there is another war with Israel or if Lebanon will once again be wracked by internal conflict. By losing the election, Hezbollah also avoided being held accountable by Lebanon's other sects -- without power, there is little responsibility.

Under the Saudi-brokered Taif Accord that ended Lebanon's 15-year civil war, all of the country's militias were disarmed. But Hezbollah was allowed to keep its weapons as a "national resistance" against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in May 2000. When the Israelis withdrew, many Lebanese asked why Hezbollah did not give up its arms and become a strictly political movement. Hezbollah insisted that because Israel was still occupying a tiny strip of land -- called Shebaa Farms -- at the murky intersection of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, its mission of resistance was not over. The UN later determined the area to be Syrian, not Lebanese, territory.

The last war began after Hezbollah fighters crossed the border and abducted two Israeli soldiers on July 12, 2006. Hezbollah miscalculated, and Israel launched its most intense attack since its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The offensive crippled the country's infrastructure, displaced one million people, cut Lebanon off from the world, and killed more than 1,000 Lebanese -- the majority of them civilians. Hezbollah, in turn, fired nearly 4,000 rockets at Israel, killing 43 civilians. During 34 days of fighting, 120 Israeli soldiers were killed, many of them by Hezbollah's potent arsenal of antitank rockets. Throughout the war, the Lebanese army remained on the sidelines. Today, it is still as ill-equipped and ill-trained as it was in 2006, and it is unlikely to be involved if another war breaks out. The main difference now is that the army is deployed in southern Lebanon, alongside 13,000 UN peacekeepers.

In recent weeks, Hezbollah officials have ratcheted up their rhetoric, pledging that they are ready for war with Israel and warning against UN attempts to seek out Hezbollah's weapons and rockets. Hezbollah leaders boast that the group now has an even larger and more potent stash of missiles than it did three years ago. Israeli officials -- who are also escalating their war rhetoric -- estimate Hezbollah's arsenal at between 40,000 and 80,000 rockets.

On August 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that his administration would hold the Lebanese government responsible for any attacks on Israeli targets by Hezbollah. "It should be clear that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible for every attack -- every attack -- launched from its territory against Israel," Netanyahu told Israel Radio. "It cannot hide and say, 'Well, that's Hezbollah, and we don't control them.'"

Some political leaders and analysts in Lebanon interpreted Netanyahu's comments as a signal that Israel would no longer distinguish between the Lebanese state and Hezbollah, especially while the group has a sizable bloc in parliament and seats in the cabinet. Other Israeli officials have suggested that Israel would retaliate against Lebanon if Hezbollah makes good on its promise to avenge the February 2008 assassination of its military commander, Imad Mughniyah, in Damascus -- an act of revenge that Israel worries could take the form of an attack on Israeli tourists, embassies, or other targets outside Israel.

A few days after Netanyahu's comments, Israeli President Shimon Peres tried to calm tensions by once again drawing a distinction between the Lebanese state and Hezbollah. "There was not in the past nor is there now any reason for Lebanon to be Israel's enemy or for Israel to be Lebanon's enemy," Peres said. But Netanyahu's warning is more representative of the Israeli military and political establishment, which both view Hezbollah as a significant danger.

Despite the increasing threats, neither side has an immediate interest in launching a war. Israel is more concerned about Iran than Hezbollah, although if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear facilities, it is likely that the militia would be part of the Iranian retaliation. Aside from an Iranian-Israeli confrontation, Hezbollah is absorbed in internal Lebanese politics and cannot afford to be seen as instigating another war with Israel. The Shiite group's other main backer, Syria, is trying to improve its relations with Saudi Arabia and the United States, and Damascus would likely frown upon renewed conflict in the region. But the danger of heightened rhetoric and a military buildup is that the situation could get out of control.

Not surprisingly, Hezbollah's response to the Israeli threats has been defiant. At a rally in southern Beirut on August 14, marking the third anniversary of the war's end (what Hezbollah calls its "divine victory"), the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, laid out his new military strategy. Speaking from an undisclosed location, he warned Israel, "If you launch another war on south Lebanon, imagining that you can bomb any city or village in Lebanon, I will tell you this: today we are capable of shelling any city or town in your usurping entity." Nasrallah, who appeared on giant television screens before a crowd of tens of thousands, also vowed to order missile strikes on Tel Aviv if Israel bombs Hezbollah's base of support: the southern suburbs of Beirut. This is an important shift, because during the 2006 war, Israel largely avoided bombing central Beirut, and Hezbollah refrained from firing missiles on Tel Aviv.

In his speech, Nasrallah advanced the idea that Hezbollah's weapons buildup and overall military capability is a deterrent to Israel -- trying to convince the Lebanese that a stronger Hezbollah will prevent a war. "You might ask, 'Do we have the power to prevent a war?' I will reply, 'Yes, there is a very real possibility that, if we cooperate with one another as Lebanese, we will be able to prevent Israel from launching a war against Lebanon,'" Nasrallah told the crowd, which included members of most Lebanese political factions. "I stress to you that there will be surprises in any new war with Israel, God willing. By saying this to the Israelis, we can deter and prevent them. Let them think a million times before waging a war on Lebanon. Let them look for other ways to confront us, but not war."

This is a dangerous assumption on Nasrallah's part because the Israelis have shown that they are not willing to live indefinitely with a well-armed Hezbollah. Nasrallah's argument is also intended to justify the arms buildup to the Sunnis and Christians of Lebanon -- who, due to the militia's recent takeover of West Beirut, are far more worried today about Hezbollah's weapons than they were in 2006.

In May 2008, Hezbollah ignited the worst internal fighting since the end of Lebanon's civil war. Huddled at home in front of their televisions during the weeklong battle, the Lebanese relived one of their worst memories: masked gunmen demanding people's identity cards. The image of gunmen stopping civilians at checkpoints to sort -- and often murder -- them on the basis of religion is perhaps the most enduring symbol of the country's civil war. In response to Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's orders outlawing Hezbollah's underground fiber-optic communication network and dismissing a Hezbollah-affiliated security chief at the Beirut airport, the militia dispatched hundreds of heavily armed fighters into the largely Sunni areas of West Beirut. They quickly routed Sunni militiamen, seized their political offices, and shut down media outlets owned by the Sunni leader Saad Hariri (son of the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri). On May 15, Siniora's government rescinded its orders, Hezbollah pulled its fighters off the streets, and leaders of the two factions headed to Qatar to negotiate under the Arab League's auspices. That led to a deal for a national unity government, which remains in place today and forms the basis of the next cabinet.

But three months after the parliamentary elections, the pro-Western coalition that won the vote is floundering in the morass of Lebanon's peculiar sectarian politics. The coalition chose Saad Hariri as its prime minister-designate, but he struggled for months to form a cabinet and finally withdrew in frustration on September 10. Lebanese President Michel Suleiman will now consult with legislators on naming a new prime minister -- although Hariri could be asked once again. This political vacuum gives Hezbollah free rein to continue building up its military and escalating its rhetoric of war. In the absence of a strong central state, Hezbollah will remain the most powerful force in Lebanon -- and its weapons will guarantee its dominance.

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