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Hezbollah leader claims Israel preparing for war

Israel’s new military exercises are preparations for a new war on Lebanon, the deputy leader of the militant Hezbollah group said on Sunday.

Sheik Naim Kassem also warned that Hezbollah was fully ready to defend Lebanon if Israel attacks again.

Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas fought a 34-day war in the summer of 2006.

More than 1,200 people, including many civilians, were killed on both sides, mostly in Lebanon, according to UN, Israeli and Lebanese officials.

WAR GAMES

Kassem’s remarks came as Israel began a five-day home front security drill on Sunday.

The Israeli military started simulating responses to war and other emergency situations, including a large-scale terror attack or natural catastrophe.

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said that the drill was meant to help Israel apply lessons from its inconclusive 2006 war against Hezbollah guerrillas, during which the group fired hundreds of conventional rockets into Israel.

But he and other Israeli officials denied the exercise was related to current friction along Israel’s northern border with Syria and Lebanon.

“These drills are part of preparations for war because Israel is always in a warlike situation,” Kassem said at a rally south of Beirut.

“These maneuvers are part of preparations for something in the future — probably it could be far off — but it is a preparation for war,” he said.

Kassem said the Israeli drills were also intended “to raise the collapsing morale of the people inside Israel following the defeat in the 2006 war.”

Israel attacked Lebanon that summer after Hezbollah militants killed three Israeli soldiers and seized two others in a cross-border raid.

But the Jewish state has acknowledged that it failed to achieve two of its declared objectives: freeing the two captured soldiers and destroying Hezbollah’s military structure.

After the war, a 13,500-strong UN force, along with 15,000 Lebanese troops, were deployed along the Lebanese-Israeli border to monitor a UN ceasefire.

Kassem said Hezbollah was ready to defend Lebanon if it was attacked again by Israel.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, whose Western-backed government is locked in a fierce power struggle with the Syrian-backed opposition led by Hezbollah, told reporters on Sunday that he was opposed to the Israeli exercises.

Saniora said he had instructed the Lebanese army and the UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon to be vigilant “so that Israel will not use [the drills] as a pretext to violate our airspace or launch an attack on Lebanon.”

He spoke in Cairo after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

RETALIATION

In a speech delivered last month, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah threatened to retaliate with an “open war” against Israel for the assassination of one of his top military commanders, Imad Mughniyeh.

Mughniyeh was killed on Feb. 12 in a car bomb in Syria. Hezbollah and Iran, its main backer, blamed Mughniyeh’s assassination on Israel, which denied any role in the killing.

Israel at the time declared a heightened security alert after Mughniyeh’s death, fearing a retaliation by Hezbollah.


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