The Shiite group has vastly increased its size and training of members since the conflict with Israel in 2006. It is confident that its next military conflict will be of much shorter duration. Worryingly, both sides now seem to be in favour of another conflict this summer. BEIRUT // With large-scale military exercises being conducted by both Hizbollah and the Israeli Defence Forces on the 10th anniversary of Israel's hasty withdrawal from South Lebanon, the border between the two sides is the tensest it has been since the end of the 2006 summer war despite a huge United Nations peacekeeping presence. But even as both sides issue half-hearted claims that neither is interested in a new round of hostilities, it remains clear from the rhetoric that not only do they consider another war inevitable, but they see it as a favourable outcome.
Wars generally do not produce an unequivocal victor, and one has to wonder if anyone would benefit from another round of bloodletting. But after a year of increasingly hostile rhetoric from the Israelis, who have repeatedly accused the Lebanese government of politically acquiescing to Hizbollah, the recent accusation that Syria has armed the group with long-range Scud missiles has added even more kindling to the fire.
Despite denials from top Hizbollah leadership that a war is neither desirable nor imminent, its rank and file sound convinced that not only will there soon be a war, but they will handily win it, based on the Israeli Defense Forces' poor performance in the summer of 2006. One Hizbollah military commander went as far as to declare the next war as "the last one we will have to fight with the enemy".
"The war is coming soon and we will win it easily," the commander said. "There's a saying in Arabic about the two men who clamp the other's fingers in their teeth until one can't take the pain and lets go. The next war will bring the people of Israel so much pain that not only will they let go, but they'll never bother us again." Hizbollah fighters are normally a confident bunch, in the manner of well-disciplined young men with extensive military training, but the casual attitude towards any impending hostilities has recently begun to border on arrogance.
"They will be hit with so many rockets in such a short period of time that it will be like the 'shock and awe' of the Americans," the commander said. "It will take days this time to break their spirit when they realise their planes cannot stop us from shelling their settlements. We can hit anywhere in Israel now and even if their tanks flatten every single village in the south with bulldozers, they will start to cry when they realise that rockets will continue to fly up out of the piles of bricks. They can't stop us and they won't be able to take it."
It is an incontrovertible fact that Hizbollah has rearmed itself and even exceeded its weapons stockpiles since the end of 2006. And there is an increasingly dominant conventional wisdom that the group has expanded its arsenal to include even more effective weapons, including longer-range missiles and rockets that can probably hit Tel Aviv. The Israeli military claims to have badly hurt Hizbollah's manpower in 2006, but there's little evidence to support this - and most neutral observers in Beirut, including some with access to Hizbollah's military wing, contend that the group's casualties were less than a third of the more than 700 fighters the Israelis say were killed.
Besides the safe assumption of new weaponry, there appears to be a factor overlooked in the statements of the Israeli leadership: the number of Hizbollah fighters in the field. In 2006, according to commanders within the group who have repeatedly provided accurate information in the past, the war was fought by fewer than 1,000 fighters in southern Lebanon out of maybe 5,000 trained members of the military wing countrywide.
"The Israelis had air cover that made it hard for us to reinforce, they won't have the same advantage next time," another fighter recently said. "We could have men and equipment to help the fighters in the villages and bunkers [in the south] but the boys never really needed the help, so it was decided to hold everyone in reserve rather than risk moving them. We never even deployed our reservists."
But today, in a phenomenon so far unmentioned by the Israeli leadership, there is a massive increase in size and training of the group since the 2006 war, which appears to have sparked the interest in thousands of young men in joining the group. "They must have doubled their size, maybe tripled it," according to a resident of the southern suburbs with close ties to the group. "It used to be that everyone knew who the Hizbollah guys were, now everyone is a Hizbollah guy.
"And training? Dozens of guys leave every neighbuorhood and village for months at a time for the mountains or Iran to train. It's all they do, train and prepare for the next war." The man said this became clear when Hizbollah announced it would mobilise on Friday last week, ahead of the Israeli military exercises being held this week. "Within an hour, every boy in South Lebanon just evaporated," he said. "Phones were off and the streets were empty. There's twice as many of them as in 2006, easily."
mprothero@thenational.ae
