08/10/2010 Day after another, the West seems to admit that Hezbollah is becoming stronger and stronger, ready to face the Israeli enemy and defeat it once again…
“Hezbollah appears to be, if not bristling for a fight with Israel, then coolly prepared for one,” American daily New York Times said, in an article written in the town of Aita Al-Shaab in South Lebanon, the region of the Resistance and victories.
The NY Times conclusion was made following investigations and interviews made with South Lebanon residents and Hezbollah officials. In this context, the daily quoted Hezbollah officials and supporters as saying that they were now sending a pointed message to Israel through their efforts to rebuild, repopulate and rearm the south. “We are not sleeping,” the daily quoted the member of the Loyalty to the Resistance parliamentary bloc MP Ali Fayyad as saying. “We are working.”
“Four years on the war, Hezbollah seems to be calculating either that an aggressive military posture might deter another war, as its own officials and Lebanese analysts say, or that a conflict, should it come, would on balance fortify its domestic political standing,” the US daily said.
While quoting Hezbollah officials as saying they are ready to fight even if a war would do widespread damage, the daily said that Hezbollah has actually proved to its constituents that it could quickly rebuild from the last war, completing a lavish reconstruction project with hundreds of millions of dollars in financing from Iran and donors in the Persian Gulf. “Polished 10-story apartment blocks, completed this year, line the center of Haret Hreik, the Beirut suburb almost uniformly reduced to rubble because it housed many of Hezbollah’s top institutions and leaders.”
The daily quoted, meanwhile, Lebanese analysts as saying that, perhaps most importantly, Hezbollah’s role in the government has paved the way for tighter cooperation with Lebanese intelligence units, emphasizing that Lebanese officials have reportedly arrested more than 100 people suspected of being Israeli spies in the past two years.
According to New York Times, the renaissance in southern Lebanon is on full display in Aita al Shaab. “Almost destroyed in 2006, it has been ostentatiously rebuilt, and its population has increased by about 30 percent from its prewar level, to 12,000 inhabitants. Party supporters have constructed dozens of enormous houses along the strategic hills that face the Israeli border, in areas that used to be mostly farmland.”
“We’re not wasting time,” Mahmoud Komati, one of Hezbollah’s founders, said according to the US daily. Komati said that the Resistance wanted to maintain a deterrent balance with Israel. Hezbollah, he added, does not want to start the next war, only to burnish its capacity to retaliate. “Today we are living the balance of fear,”Komati said. “This balance blocks war.”
For his part, Walid Sukaria, a retired general and member of the Loyalty to the Resistance parliamentary bloc, said that Israel would have to think twice before attacking any member of the “axis of resistance,” which includes Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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