Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Israeli Official: Foreign Sources Arming Hezbollah, Hamas at Alarming Rate

WASHINGTON — Hezbollah is presently receiving a "constant stream of armaments" from Syria, Iran and other foreign sources, senior Israeli officials said Tuesday, and the terror group is "preparing for violence" in an increasingly radicalized Middle East.

"They are getting all kinds of rockets, advanced anti-tank missiles, command-and-control systems, training, finance," an Israeli official said. Asked if the group has fully reconstituted back to where it was before the war in terms of military capability, the official said: "They are certainly on their way."
The official, a top-ranked officer in the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and an accompanying aide briefed a handful of reporters on the condition the officials' names not be used.

While Hezbollah has been unable to return to, or rebuild, bunkers and other fortifications it was using before the start of last summer's Israeli-Hezbollah war, the Israeli official said the group maintains an "operational" presence along the Lebanese-Israeli border, and cited as evidence the IDF's discovery Monday of a "cluster of explosives" near the border on the Lebanese side.

Enabling Hezbollah's rearmament, the official said, is the "open border" Lebanon shares with Syria, and the lack of "real teeth for enforcement" in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1718, which established a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hezbollah war last August.

Entire article here.

No comments:

Post a Comment