Peter Goodspeed National Post October 31, 2002

For months now Israeli intelligence officials have suspected that Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon have been planning to widen the conflict in the Middle East by financing, arming and training Palestinian militants.

As Palestinian resistance groups have struggled to survive a ferocious Israeli anti-terror campaign that began early this year with Israel’s invasion and reoccupation of the West Bank, Hezbollah militants have been rumoured to infiltrate Israel and the occupied territories in order to pick up the slack.

By early May, there was a sudden shift in the pattern of bombing attacks being launched against Israel.

In addition to sending single suicide bombers against Israeli civilian targets, someone seemed to be planning more severe attacks, against a variety of strategic targets.

First there was a foiled plan to destroy twin 50- and 46-storey office towers in downtown Tel Aviv with a truck bomb, which the Israeli defence force said was uncovered and prevented by Israel’s six-week invasion of the West Bank.

Then there was a bungled terrorist attack in late May with a remote-controlled bomb that exploded under the belly of a tanker truck as it was being filled with diesel fuel at Israel’s largest fuel depot.

Security experts said sheer luck and an efficient sprinkler system prevented a disaster that could have killed thousands and caused billions of dollars in damage if the bomb had detonated a series of huge, above-ground tanks that each contain more than 3,000 tonnes of fuel.

The new attacks were distinctly different from previous Palestinian acts of terror and they had many similarities to successful Hezbollah operations that had been launched against Israeli soldiers through nearly 20 years of hit-and-run warfare in occupied areas of southern Lebanon.

Israeli officials firmly believe the Iranian-backed Islamic fundamentalists of Hezbollah are finally trying to carry their style of warfare into the West Bank and Gaza.

In June, Israeli authorities arrested a Lebanese-born Canadian man, known both as Abu Ahmed and Fauzi Ayub Abu Abbas, in Hebron on suspicion of plotting a large-scale terrorist attack.

The 35-year-old has since been accused of being a member of Hezbollah, who was sent to Israel to train Palestinian militants.

Days later, Israeli police also charged an Israeli citizen with spying for Hezbollah.

The man, identified only as “Nissim,” is the son of a Jewish mother and a Shia Muslim father, who immigrated from Lebanon to Israel 10 years ago.

He was arrested as he prepared to leave the country to meet his Hezbollah handlers and was said to be carrying maps of Tel Aviv and Haifa, marked with fuel and electricity stations to attack.

Hezbollah — or the “Party of God” — first emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s and rapidly became the region’s leading radical Islamic movement.

Determined to drive Israeli troops from Lebanon, the devoutly Islamic guerrilla group waged a long drawn out campaign against Israel’s 20-year occupation of south Lebanon.

And it was quick to claim responsibility for forcing Israel’s hurried military withdrawal from the country in May, 2000.

That perceived victory has since made Hezbollah’s campaign of resistance a model and inspiration for many Palestinian fighters.

Hezbollah has encouraged the flattery and incited imitation by embracing the Palestinian cause and vowing publicly to open a second front against Israel in support of the intifada.

For 20 years, Hezbollah has devoted itself to two main goals: the destruction of Israel and demands for an Islamic revolution in Lebanon.

Inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution and establishment of an Islamic Republic in Iran, the group dreams of transforming Lebanon into an Islamic state.

Hezbollah’s political rhetoric centres on claims Israel has no right to exist because all of “Palestine” is really just occupied Muslim land.

Hezbollah receives substantial amounts of financial, training, weapons, explosives, political, diplomatic, and organizational aid from both Iran and Syria.

It has always had close ties with Islamic radicals in Iran and, in its early days, was very close to a contingent of about 2,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards sent to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to rally resistance against Israel’s occupation.

As Hezbollah escalated its guerrilla attacks on Israeli targets in Lebanon, the group also adopted the tactic of taking Western hostages in Beirut and for many years the group was synonymous with Middle East terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings.

In 1983, Hezbollah militants carried out a suicide truck bombing that killed 241 U.S. Marines in an attack on the U.S. embassy and a barracks in Beirut.

The group also attacked the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and is a suspect in the 1994 bombing of the Israeli cultural centre in Buenos Aires.

Over the years, the group evolved into one of Lebanon’s largest and most successful political movements, with thousands of trained guerrillas, the largest political party in Lebanon’s parliament and a welfare program that assists tens of thousands of Shia Muslims — a group that makes up 40% of Lebanon’s population.

Hezbollah is still a formidable military opponent and is believed to have a large arsenal of missiles in southern Lebanon, capable of paralyzing northern Israel and reaching as far south as Haifa.

Israel and Hezbollah continue to clash since Israel withdrew from Lebanon.

Generally, Hezbollah launches sporadic attacks on Israeli territory in the far north by firing rockets over the border and sniping at Israeli army positions in a disputed patch of land, known as the Shebba Farms, along the Israeli-Lebanon-Syrian border.

Israel generally responds by launching air raids against Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon.

But with each new bit of evidence of possible Hezbollah incursions inside Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, concern has grown over the possibility of opening a new military front that could rapidly become a more dangerous regional war, drawing in both Lebanon and Syria and perhaps other Arab states.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 5th, 2002 and is filed under opinion.