HEZBOLLAH ARSENAL HAS TRIPLED UNDER U.N. "SUPERVISION"

U.N. told Hezbollah arsenal has tripled (UPI)
JERUSALEM, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Israel has informed the United Nations the arsenal of Hezbollah guerrillas' land-to-sea missiles in Lebanon has tripled, Haaretz reported Wednesday.

The intelligence came to light Tuesday in a report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon following up on the second Israel-Hezbollah war in July 2006.

Ban's report for the Security Council said Israel had provided "a great deal" of information claiming Hezbollah militants had rehabilitated its military strength north of the Litani River, where "most of the new missiles include (Iranian-made) Zelzal and Fajr missiles that have a range of more than 150 miles and are capable of hitting areas south of Tel Aviv."

However, Ban was critical of Israel for failing to provide complete information on the location of cluster bombs fired during the war and Israel's continued use of military flights into Lebanese airspace, Haaretz said.

The newspaper report didn't provide specific numbers of missiles and arms Israel alleges Hezbollah has.

The Do-Nothing UN (Contentions)
In a development certain to shock nobody, the UN has released a report on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701, the cease-fire agreement that paused the Israel-Hizballah war last summer. The new report confirms what most sentient people predicted: that Resolution 1701 would accomplish nothing. Ban Ki-moon’s report assents to what Israeli intelligence and military officials have been saying since the end of the war, namely that Iran and Syria have encountered few obstacles to rearming Hizballah with better weapons.

Detailed in Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, the report says that, in addition to the establishment of surface-to-air missile capacity and the tripling of Hizballah’s arsenal of land-to-sea missiles,

Hizballah’s long-range missile teams are deployed north of the [Litani] river,
and . . . most of the new missiles include [the Iranian-made] Zelzal and Fajr
missiles that have a range of over 250 kilometers and are capable of hitting
areas south of Tel Aviv.

Resolution 1701 and the “robust” UNIFIL that has been “patrolling” southern Lebanon for the past year have not been total non-entities in affecting the situation on the ground. Since the arrival of UNIFIL, Hizballah has focused its reconstruction and re-armament on the area of Lebanon north of the Litani, where UNIFIL does not enforce its paltry and symbolic suppression of Hizballah. Hizballah’s activity in this region, which also involves buying up land for Shia settlement, is actually quite strategically valuable—it allows the creation of physical contiguity between Hizballah’s two strongholds in Lebanon, the Bekaa valley/Syrian border area in the east and the Shia south. Creating this contiguity, and planting Shia civilians throughout this territory, are vital to Hizballah’s ability to deter encirclement by Israel in another round of war, and to wage war from among, and with the help of, Shia civilians. Read on