By Robert Fisk
".....For months, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has been warning Israel that his organisation has a "surprise" new weapon in its armoury and there are few in Lebanon who do not suspect that this is a new Iranian-developed ground-to-air missile – rockets which may at last challenge Israel's air supremacy over Lebanon......
If its aircraft could no longer bomb at will over Lebanon without fear of being destroyed, would Israel stage another costly land invasion – highly unlikely after the bloodying its troops took in 2006 – or use its own ground-to-ground missiles on Lebanon? For if the latter option were chosen, it would bring a whole new dimension to Lebanon's repeated wars.....
The government of Fouad Siniora may be trapped in its own "Green Zone" in central Beirut – it even refused to attend the Arab League summit in Damascus – and parliament is suspended after 17 vain sessions to elect a president.....
And each month, the Hizballoh improves its new bunkers north of the Litani. Some now sprout aerials but they may be "dummies" for Israel's pilots to attack. Deep underground telephone land-lines have been laid to those which are visible and to those others which are beneath the surface. The Hizbollah learned a lot from the 2006 war. Then its secret bunkers were air-conditioned with beds and kitchens attached. But when Israeli troops discovered a handful of them, they also found copies of their own Israeli air force reconnaissance photographs, complete with Hebrew markings.
The Hizbollah had obviously bribed or blackmailed Israeli border guards for the pictures – from which they could tell at once which bunkers the Israelis had identified and which remained unknown to them.
Which is how, in 2006, its guerrillas sat safely through days of air bombardment in the latter, while allowing the Israelis to blitz the "known" fortresses to their hearts' content. Who knows if the Hizbollah has not since collected a new batch of photographs for the coming months?"
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