Last update - 01:31 24/07/2007
Palestinians: Hezbollah influence in West Bank on the wane
By Avi Issacharoff and Yoav Stern
Hezbollah's influence on Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades has been checked in recent months, Palestinian security sources said yesterday. On the other hand, the extremist Lebanese Shi'ite organization has restored its military capabilities, particularly its long-range missile arsenal, nearly a year following the Second Lebanon War, senior Israeli security sources confirmed yesterday.
According to Palestinian security sources, Hezbollah has not ceased its efforts to penetrate Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades cells, but its ability to do so has been seriously curtailed.
The sources pointed to a number of reasons Hezbollah is finding it difficult to penetrate the organization and gain control of its members in order to carry out terrorist activities on its behalf against Israel.
Israel's security forces have primarily succeeded in killing or arresting many of the cells that had been under Hezbollah control, mostly in the area of Nablus and northern West Bank.
Also, the flow of cash from Hezbollah to West Bank militants who carry out attacks, has been contained. The Palestinian Authority has also made an effort to convince many of the militants not to accept funding from foreign sources.
Palestinian security sources also insist that contact between Hezbollah and the West Bank has been weakened. They say this is due to a breakdown in cooperation with Palestinians in Lebanon who collaborate with the Shi'ite group and international jihadist elements based there.
There has also been a successful takeover, Palestinian sources say, of the Brigades by centrist elements, who managed to marginalize cells that nominally identified themselves with Fatah but in practice worked for Hezbollah.
However, Israeli security sources are skeptical about the drop in Hezbollah's overall activity in the West Bank, which they said continues unabated through other Palestinian militant groups.
"It is not possible to note a change in Hezbollah activity in the territories since the war. There is neither an increase nor a drop. The Lebanese group continues to view the territories as its main area of operation against Israel, so long as the calm in Lebanon is maintained," Israeli security sources said.
Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah yesterday emphasized the group's preoccupation with Israel in an interview on the Al-Jazeera satellite network; in the program, he boasted that Hezbollah was capable of targetting any point in Israel.
"Just like July 2006, so in July 2007, we have the capability of striking any target, on any point in occupied Palestine," Nasrallah said during yesterday's interview.
While confirming that Hezbollah had restored its abilities to fire long-range missiles against Israel, a senior Israeli security source challenged Nasrallah's assertions yesterday, saying that they could reach points in central Israel, north of the Tel Aviv region.
The same source also said that Nasrallah's visit to Damascus late last week, where he met with Syria's President Bashar Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not his first since the end of the war last year.
Syrian officials are directly involved in the transfer of missiles from Iran to Hezbollah, the senior Israeli security source said.
"This is not smuggling, but the open transfer of weapons, a veritable industry," the source said.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which put in place a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah, also forbids the unauthorized transfer of arms to Hezbollah.