19 April 2010
BEIRUT: Hizbullah and Syria warned over the weekend that US allegations of Syria supplying the group with Scud missiles were baseless and encouraged an Israeli attack on Lebanon, as Israeli jets harassed southern residents on Saturday night.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, during a conference on nuclear non-proliferation in Tehran, on Sunday repeated Damascus’ denial of US-Israeli claims.
He said the idea of Hizbullah receiving weapons from Syria was “the creation of Israeli aggression.”
“There is no smuggling of missiles and basically the whole story is fabricated by Israel,” Moallem added.
A Lebanese Army statement on Sunday said that Israeli warplanes had dropped a number of flare-bombs over the village of Adaisseh Saturday evening, where a meeting for the forthcoming municipal elections was being held in the house of the village’s mayor.
“This is construed as further provocation by the enemy who has been pushing the line of attack further and further on Lebanon,” the statement added.
In addition, Israeli warplanes performed maneuvers in the skies above Beirut, Baabda, Naqoura and large parts of the south, the army said.
United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) spokesperson Andrea Tenenti told The Daily Star that local media reports of Israeli ground troops being placed on “high alert” appeared untrue. “We are checking to see if there is anything else that happened,” he said. “We haven’t seen any movement of [Israeli] troops.”
Marjayoun-Hasbaya MP Ali Fayyad, a Hizbullah official who attended the meeting, said it took place in a house 50 meters away from the Blue Line – the de facto border with Israel.
“Cars belonging to the attendants were parked in the street surrounding the house when a flare shell was fired in the sky just above the place, another one on the [Israeli] side of the border fence, and a third one residents said was fired but didn’t explode,” Fayyad said.
Tenenti insisted there was no evidence of flares landing on Lebanese soil.
Fayyad slammed “the Israeli enemy that is going too far with its aggressive and provocative acts,” and called on “the Lebanese government to act and file a complaint amid the rising intensity of Israeli provocations and violations of [UN Security Council] Resolution 1701.”
Fayyad had earlier, in an interview with AFP, slammed the US stance that Syria had been delivering long-range ballistic missiles to Hizbullah.
“With this position, [the Americans] are encouraging Israel to carry out an aggression against Lebanon that they are trying to endorse at the international level,” Fayyad said.
“The US is thus placing itself in a position of complicity in the event of aggressions and it will have to take responsibility,” Fayyad added.
Hizbullah has repeatedly refused to comment on its arsenal, which Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has said consists of 40,000 rockets.
On Tuesday, Israeli President Shimon Peres accused Damascus of furnishing Hizbullah with Scud missiles.
“We are obviously increasingly concerned about the sophisticated weaponry that is allegedly being transferred,” White House spokesperson Robert Gates said Wednesday.
Fayyad said Hizbullah would not respond to “Israeli inventions on its arsenal, but US and Israeli accusations had made “the situation more tense than before.” He added that the allegations “exacerbate tension and directly threaten the stability in the region.”
Hizbullah MP Hassan Fadlallah Sunday refuted Israeli-US claims over missile transfers.
“The anxiety expressed in the last few days by the US is the anxiety of the Israeli enemy, which is unable to confront facts and [actual incidents],” the National News Agency (NNA) quoted the Bint Jbeil MP as saying.
“We need to see a new policy by the Lebanese government to confront continuing Israeli violations of our sovereignty.”
Damascus rejected US-Israeli accusations on Thursday, with a Foreign Ministry statement accusing Tel Aviv of endangering the region’s fragile stability.
The US has been coy on the specifics of alleged arms transfers and three unidentified US officials said Saturday there was no evidence any missiles had entered Lebanon across the Syrian border.
“We believe a transfer of some kind occurred but it is unclear if the rockets themselves have changed hands,” Reuters quoted an official in Washington as saying. “It is unclear at this point that a transfer has occurred … and the United States has no indications that the rockets have moved across the border,” said another.
The specter of an Israeli attack on either Syrian of Lebanese positions was raised again on Sunday.
The Sunday Times reported that Israel had transmitted a warning to Syria, threatening to take it back “to the Stone Age,” should Hizbullah instigate hostilities on its northern border.
“We will return Syria to the Stone Age by crippling its power stations, ports, fuel storage and every bit of strategic infrastructure if Hizbullah dare to launch ballistic missiles against us,” an Israeli minister, who remained anonymous, was quoted as saying. – Additional reporting by Wassim Mroueh, with agencies
Copyright The Daily Star 2010.
