HEZBOLLAH MISSILES DEPLOYED IN SOUTH LEBANON

IDF: Hizbullah Missiles Deployed in South Lebanon - Amos Harel (Ha'aretz)
Hizbullah has deployed large numbers of Katyusha rockets and antitank missiles in Shi'ite villages in southern Lebanon south of the Litani River, undetected by UN observers, senior Israel Defense Forces officials say.  New missiles sent by Iran are capable of striking targets south of the Tel Aviv area, army officials say.  In addition, Hizbullah has sent groups of agents disguised as media teams to film IDF activity along the Israeli border.

GERMAN JEWS WARNED OF TERROR THREAT

Germany warns Jewish community of terror threat from Lebanon (Haaretz)
German security authorities have issued a warning to the Jewish community of an increased threat of terrorist attack emanating from Lebanon, a senior Jewish official said Sunday.

Stefan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of German Jews, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) the warning had been received more than a week ago, on January 11.

He confirmed weekend news reports that increased precautions were being taken. The increased threat was to synagogues and Jewish schools across the country, and not just in Berlin, as was reported earlier, Kramer said.

Kramer referred to information from Lebanon and a possible link to the current trial in Dusseldorf of a Lebanese man, Youssef al-Hajj Dib, 23, on charges of attempting to blow up German trains with suitcase bombs in July 2006.

LIBYA BLOCKS U.N. CENSURE OF MISSILE STRIKE ON ISRAEL

Libya Thwarts Security Council Censure of Missile Strike from Lebanon - Shlomo Shamir and Barak Ravid

Libya, which last week took over the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, is hindering diplomatic efforts spearheaded by Israel to issue a resolution condemning Tuesday's Katyusha strike on the Galilee, Ha'aretz has learned. Libya also seeks to include language condemning the Israel Air Force flights over southern Lebanon in any resolution. (Ha'aretz)

Palestinian Rocket Hits Sderot Home, Wounds Four - Shmulik Hadad

Palestinians in Gaza fired five Kassam rockets at Israel Wednesday afternoon, including one that hit a house in Sderot. Four people sustained injuries, including a 17-year-old girl who suffered shrapnel wounds and a boy who was hurt while attempting to take cover. (Ynet News)

HEZBOLLAH FIRES IMPROVED ROCKETS INTO NORTHERN ISRAEL

Two Katyusha Rockets Fired from Lebanon Hit Northern Israeli Town - Jack Khoury and Eli Ashkenazi (Ha'aretz)
Two Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon struck the northern Israeli town of Shlomi on Tuesday.

Barak: Hizbullah Has New, Improved Rockets - Hanan Greenberg
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday that Hizbullah has acquired higher-quality rockets with longer ranges than those fired in the Second Lebanon War. He said there is currently free passage of arms between Syria and Lebanon. (Ynet News)

DEMARCATING SHABA FARMS

Demarcating Shaba Farms (BackSpin)

A report by Ban Ki-moon finally defined the precise area of Shaba Farms (a.k.a. Har Dov) on the basis of expert cartographers. According to Haaretz, the Israeli government is pleased with the results:

Although the report issued Wednesday criticizes Israel for continued violations of Lebanon's airspace, and failure to provide all the data on the locations of cluster bomb attacks, it does not require Israel to enter separate negotiations on the fate of the Shaba Farms, or to surrender the area to the UN. . . .

Israel is particularly pleased that the secretary general included in the report that the issue of the Shaba Farms "cannot be separated from the principles and elements required for the permanent cease-fire and long-term solution identified in resolution 1701 (2006)."

PA TV SINGS TO ISRAEL'S DESTRUCTION

PA TV Sings to Israel's Destruction - Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook (Palestinian Media Watch)
While the PA announces in English its demand for a two-state solution, in Arabic it continues to define all of Israel as "Palestine," and to promise Israel's destruction. A new video clip, broadcast numerous times daily since it first appeared on Fatah-controlled TV last week, passionately promises that every Israeli city will be "liberated," including Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Beersheba and Tiberias.

SEE ALSO: TV Channel Affiliated with Lebanese Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Beri in Show on Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Jews Use Drug Trafficking to Control World, Subjugate Other Nations (MEMRI)

HEZBOLLAH RETURNING TO U.N. ZONE IN LEBANON

Hizbullah Returning to South Lebanon - Georges Malbrunot (Le Figaro-France)
Hizbullah is getting ready in southern Lebanon, not only north of the Litani River, where a rearmament has been observed since the beginning of the year, but also in the UNIFIL zone.

Lately, truck convoys have been sighted at night, as well as trenches dug amid the palm groves and immediately re-covered; suspicious explosions have been heard. "The Lebanese Army has been informed, but for the moment, it does nothing," said a French military expert.

HEZBOLLAH'S DRUG TRAFFICKING

Hezbollah: New Meaning to Grass Roots Support (BackSpin)
As Lebanon deteriorates, profit-seeking farmers are growing more and more marijuana. The Christian Science Monitor finds that Hezbollah doesn’t object:

The northern part of the Bekaa Valley – where the bulk of the marijuana is grown – is dominated by Lebanon's militant Shiite Hizbullah party. Hizbullah officially disapproves of drug production, but it has chosen to turn a blind eye to the practice rather than risk a confrontation over the issue with its grass-roots supporters.

Indeed, Hizbullah in the past has co-opted cross-border drug smuggling networks between Lebanon and Israel, allowing narcotics to flow south into the Jewish state in exchange for intelligence gathered by Israeli drug dealers.

Here's how some Israelis fought back last year: with an hashish boycott.

HEZBOLLAH REGAINS STRENGTH IN LEBANON

Hizbullah Regains Strength in Lebanon - Scheherezade Faramarzi
More than a year after the Israel-Hizbullah war, Hizbullah appears to be solidly entrenched across Lebanon's south - looking, in fact, as if its fighters never really left but merely went underground. The Shiite militia's banners hang everywhere, boasting of the "divine victory" over Israel and thanking its chief sponsor, Iran, for helping with post-war reconstruction. Villagers report Hizbullah's recruitment of young men is booming and its popularity is firm. While UN peacekeepers maintain a buffer zone between the Litani River and the Israeli border, Hizbullah appears to be in a strong position both north and south of the Litani, both politically and militarily. Villagers across the south point to various places they say are arms depots for Hizbullah. (AP/Washington Post)

KUCINICH TOURS SOUTH LEBANON

FRESH OFF HIS MEETING WITH SYRIA'S ASSAD, TINFOIL-HATTED DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTAL CANDIDATE DENNIS KUCINICH TOURED SOUTHERN LEBANON AND CALLED FOR A "MORE EVEN-HANDED" U.S. APPROACH TO THE PEACE PROCESS. WINK. WINK.

Kucinich tours south Lebanon (JTA)
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) toured areas of south Lebanon marked by Israeli cluster bombs that fell in last year's war.

Kucinich, a long-shot candidate for his party's presidential nomination, said the situation in the region was "dire." "There has to be a commitment to cleaning up these cluster bombs," he said.

The candidate, who met with Lebanese and Syrian leaders during his trip this week, also called for a more "even-handed" U.S. approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"America must lead the way in this regard, by taking an even-handed approach in the Middle East which includes establishment of two states, together with the protection of the social, economic and political rights of Palestinians simultaneous with mandatory, firm long-term structural security assurances for Israel," he said.

LEBANESE ARREST 2 PALIS IN ATTACK ON U.N. FORCES

Lebanese Arrest Two Palestinians in UNIFIL Attacks
Lebanese authorities have arrested two Palestinians in connection with a roadside bombing that targeted UN peacekeepers in Qassimiyeh in southern Lebanon on July 16, a security official said Thursday. Salem Kayed and Ahmad Mohammad, who are suspected of belonging to Jund ash-Sham, an extremist Sunni group, were arrested on Wednesday near Ain al-Hilweh. "The two men admitted their role in the attack," the official said. (AFP/Daily Star-Lebanon)

U.N. REJECTS ISRAEL REQUEST FOR PROTECTION AGAINST HEZBOLLAH

UN Security Council to Reject Israeli Request to Expand UNIFIL Role
The UN Security Council will reject an Israeli request to expand UNIFIL's mandate in southern Lebanon against Hizbullah, Israel Army Radio reported Thursday. Israel wants UNIFIL troops to be granted new rules of engagement to take a more "proactive" role against Hizbullah and expand its field of operations from open areas to cities and towns. Israel also asked that UNIFIL troops be allowed to open fire against Hizbullah operatives, and not only after they are fired upon. According to the report, the Security Council will reject the request due to safety concerns for its personnel on the ground in southern Lebanon. (Jerusalem Post)

HEZBOLLAH BUYS SO. LEBANESE LAND TO PREP. FOR WAR WITH ISRAEL

Hizbollah buys frontier land to attack Israel (Telegraph UK)
Hizbollah is buying up large tracts of land owned by Christians and other non-Shias in southern Lebanon as the militant group rebuilds its defences in preparation for a new war with Israel, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.

The land grab is thought to be driven by the Iranian-backed guerrillas’ efforts to rearm themselves and fortify the strategically important ravines north of the Litani River, just north of the front line in last year’s 34-day conflict with its Jewish neighbour.

Here, Hizbollah has been free to press forward without harassment from the 13,000 United Nations peacekeepers and 20,000 Lebanese army troops who were deployed south of the Litani as part of the ceasefire agreement that ended the conflict.

Just south of the Litani, the UN is conducting hundreds of patrols each day in a bid to keep Hizbollah weapons out of the area, but the peacekeepers’ mandate ends at the river.

The Lebanese army, meanwhile, is about 50 per cent Shia and seems to be turning a blind eye to Hizbollah activities north of the river.

U.N.'S FAILURE TO DISARM HEZBOLLAH

A Failing UNIFIL (Contentions)
Noah Pollak of Azure has an informative summary of the problems with UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, whose ostensible mission is the disarmament of Hizballah and the pacification of southern Lebanon. UNIFIL was expanded to 14,000 troops last summer, but, as Pollak writes:

The new UNIFIL has of course done nothing. Actually, worse than nothing: In the year since the end of the war, Iran and Syria have been rearming Hizballah at a torrid pace, this time with better weaponry than before, and UNIFIL has barely
even pretended to be interested in disrupting the arms flow. UNIFIL’s rules of engagement prevent the border with Syria from being patrolled, and UNIFIL blue-helmets have neither the desire nor the means to confront Hizballah.

UNIFIL is but one of many of the United Nations’ failed efforts around the world—which do not need to be elaborated upon for readers of COMMENTARY. But the gravest failure among the U.N.’s initiatives in the Middle East has to be UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which for over five decades has kept the Palestinians in perpetual refugeehood when the vast majority of those Palestinians deemed “refugees” (the children and grandchildren of those who were displaced by the 1948 war) would not actually classify as such by the United Nations’ very own definition. I explored the problem of UNRWA—and suggested another source for its hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid money—several months ago here.

MEDIA'S DOUBLE STANDARD EXPOSED BY LEBANESE ARMY'S ASSAULT ON FATAH AL-ISLAM

Double Standards (BackSpin)
Calgary Sun columnist Ezra Levant questions the MSM's double standards applied to Israel, compared to the Lebanese army’s assault on Fatah al-Islam:

Why are military strikes by Israel news, but not those by Lebanon?

Why is an Arab killed by a Jew news, but not an Arab killed by an Arab?

Why did the UN intervene to save Hezbollah from Israel, but the world shrug in apathy -- no, actually send arms -- to support Lebanon against another terrorist group?

There can be no other explanation beside an anti-Israel bias in the newsrooms and diplomatic salons of the world.

SILENCE ON LEBANESE ATTACK ON PALI REFUGEE CAMP

Silence on Nahr al-Bared (Contentions)
For the past three months, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East has been under attack, resulting in the death of hundreds of people and the displacement of nearly half of the camp’s 40,000 residents. Yet the United Nations Security Council has not held an emergency session to condemn the attack. Nor have the governments of France and Britain issued statements condemning the “atrocities” against the Palestinian refugees in the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon. For those who may wonder why there is no public outcry, the answer is simple. The army that is attacking the camp with heavy artillery and helicopter warships is not the IDF. It’s an Arab army—the Lebanese Army.

Read the rest of this entry »

HEZBOLLAH TRAINING LOCAL LEBANESE TO FIGHT ISRAEL

Hizbullah Trains Lebanese Shiites to Fight Israel - Ferry Biedermann (Financial Times-UK)
"We have twice as many people signing up for training this summer as before," said a senior Hizbullah official when asked about the movement's strength. After last year's war Hizbullah is putting more emphasis on training the local population in the villages and towns in southern Lebanon. The goal is to have the inhabitants stay and fight rather than flee, as happened en masse during last year's war.

HEZBOLLAH: ISRAEL BEHIND ATTACKS ON U.N. PEACEKEEPERS

Hizbullah leader claims Israel behind attacks on UN peacekeepers (YNet)
Militant Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah claimed Tuesday that Israel may be behind two recent bomb attacks that targeted United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. Six peacekeepers belonging to the Spanish contingent were killed on June 24 when a bomb struck their armored personnel carrier in the country's south, marking the first such attack against the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL. (AP)

SYRIA OCCUPIES LEBANON...AGAIN

Syria Occupies Lebanon. Again. - Bret Stephens (Wall Street Journal)
As of this minute, Syria occupies at least 177 square miles of Lebanese soil. That you are now reading about it for the first time is as much a scandal as the occupation itself.

The news comes by way of a fact-finding survey of the Lebanese-Syrian border just produced by the International Lebanese Committee for UN Security Council Resolution 1559, an American NGO that has consultative status with the UN. In meticulous detail - supplemented by photographs and satellite images - the authors describe precisely where and how Lebanon has been infiltrated.

Though the land grabs are small affairs individually, they collectively add up to an area amounting to about 4% of Lebanese soil - in U.S. terms, the proportional equivalent of Arizona. Of particular note is that the area of Syrian conquest dwarves that of the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms which amount to an area of about 12 square miles.

It would be nice to see the Arab world protest this case of illegal occupation, given its passions about the subject.

U.N. PEACEKEEPERS TURN TO HEZBOLLAH FOR PROTECTION

UN Peacekeepers Turn to Hizbullah for Protection - Nicholas Blanford
The UN peacekeepers in Lebanon are led by elite European troops, but a year on, UNIFIL finds itself under threat not from the Shiite Hizbullah, but from radical Sunni militants possibly inspired by al-Qaeda. Some UNIFIL contingents are now seeking the cooperation of Hizbullah, which also views militant Sunnis as a threat, to help provide tacit security for the peacekeepers, Hizbullah and UNIFIL sources say. Last month, six Spanish and Colombian soldiers serving with UNIFIL were killed when a car bomb exploded beside their armored vehicle. Last week, a UNIFIL jeep was damaged when a bomb exploded nearby, confirming fears that last month's bombing was not a random act. In both attacks, radical Sunnis are the prime suspects. (Christian Science Monitor)