Hezbollah Is A Terrorist Group

[Rasputin]

Hezbollah killer freed as hostage is released

GERMANY has quietly released a Hezbollah member jailed for life for the murder of a US Navy diver, disregarding Washington's desire that he be extradited or remain behind bars, officials said yesterday.

The government said there was no link between Mohammad Ali Hammadi's release and that of a German hostage in Iraq just days later.

"He served his term," Eva Schmierer, a spokeswoman for Germany's justice ministry, told a news conference.

Sources in Berlin and Beirut said that Mohammad Ali Hammadi, who was convicted of killing Robert Dean Stethem in Beirut during the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight and sentenced to life in prison, was flown to Lebanon last week.

Ms Schmierer said her ministry had never received a formal extradition request from Washington, but diplomats in Berlin said the German government was well aware the Americans would have liked Hammadi extradited upon release to the US, where he is under indictment for Mr Stethem's murder.

Under German law, Hammadi could not have been extradited for crimes for which he has already been convicted and punished - namely murder, air piracy and the possession of explosives.

The US did submit an extradition request to the West German government in 1987, but it was turned down since Hammadi could have faced the death penalty in America.

Still, several diplomats said that if he could not be extradited, the Americans had wanted Hammadi to remain behind bars for the murder of Mr Stethem, whose battered corpse was thrown out of the TWA plane by the hijackers after they had shot him.

The diplomats said that the release could complicate relations between Germany and the US, which have pledged to co-operate against terrorism.

The US embassy in Berlin made no comment on Hammadi's release, which came shortly before Susanne Osthoff was freed in Iraq.

The 43-year-old archaeologist had disappeared last month. Germany said on Sunday she was in safe custody.

The foreign ministry denied any Hammadi-Osthoff link, saying: "There is no connection between these two cases."

Doris Moeller-Scheu, the spokeswoman for the Frankfurt prosecutor's office, also denied any link to Osthoff. Hammadi was freed after a review of his case that began before Ms Osthoff was seized, she said.

Under German law, he became eligible for release after serving 15 years. He spent over 18 years in jail in Germany.

A Lebanese source said a senior German intelligence officer visited Damascus early this month but did not disclose the purpose of the trip. Syria is a key backer of Hezbollah.

Hammadi, now in his late 30s, was captured in 1987 and sentenced to life in 1989.

[Rasputin]

Hizballah Wants Israel to Free Child-Killer

The Arab prisoner that Hizballah wants Israel to release in exchange for two abducted Israeli soldiers, is serving multiple life sentences for killing a four-year-old girl with a rifle butt.

Samir Kuntar is one of only two or three Lebanese prisoners still held by Israel, and Hizballah said its July 12 assault is aimed at winning his freedom.

The terrorists killed eight Israeli soldiers and seized Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, taking them back over the border. Their whereabouts and condition remain unknown.

The Shi'ite group dubbed the raid Operation True Promise (Al-Wa'ad Al-Sadeq), saying it was making good on an earlier pledge to continue to capture Israeli soldiers and use them to obtain the release of the remaining Lebanese in Israeli jails.

Since the raid, the conflict has escalated, with Israel launching an air assault on Lebanese infrastructure and Hizballah targets and Hizballah firing hundreds of missiles into Israel.

The fighting and loss of life have swung some attention away from the hostage issue, and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in an address late last week that "the battle today is no longer a battle over prisoners or the exchange of prisoners."

Nonetheless, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said during a televised address to the nation Monday night that he kept photographs of Goldwasser and Regev - along with one of another soldier, Gilad Shalit, kidnapped by Hamas in a June raid across the Gaza-Israel frontier - on his desk as a daily reminder of his mission.

"We will do everything in our power to ensure their safe release and bring them back home," he said.

In past years, Israel has succeeded in winning freedom for captured soldiers, or the return of missing soldiers' remains, but only by negotiating exchanges involving large numbers of Arab prisoners.

In the most recent of these highly controversial swaps, in January 2004, Israel handed over more than 400 Lebanese and Palestinian detainees in return for one Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers abducted along the Lebanon border in 2000.

That exchange left just two Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails - Kuntar and a man named Nasim Nesser. (Lebanon claims a third man, named as Yehya Sekaf, is also being held, although Israel denies this.)

Lebanese media refer to Kuntar as the "dean" of Lebanese prisoners in Israel. He has been in prison for 28 years, and Hizballah wants him out.

Although Kuntar was jailed for an attack launched by a Lebanon-based Palestinian terrorist group before Hizballah was even established, Hizballah depicts itself as the vanguard of the Islamic campaign against Israel and regards winning freedom for the prisoners a "sacred duty."

A website set up by family members says Kuntar was jailed "for killing several Israelis in a raid on northern Israel."

Israeli media and eyewitness accounts of the incident provide much more detail. Kuntar was one of a four-man group that crossed into Israel by sea, sent on the mission by the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), an affiliate of Yasser Arafat's PLO.

In the coastal town of Nahariya, the terrorists shot dead a policeman and forced their way into an apartment building, where they captured Danny Haran and his daughter, Einat, 4.

While the terrorists rampaged through the apartment, firing weapons and detonating grenades, Haran's wife Smadar hid in a crawlspace above the couple's bedroom together with their other daughter, two-year-old Yael, and a neighbor.

In an effort to prevent Yael from crying out and alerting the terrorists to their whereabouts, Smadar kept her hand over the child's mouth, and accidentally smothered her to death.

Meanwhile Kuntar and his group took Danny and Einat Haran to the beach.

"There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see," Smadar wrote later.

"Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar."

Strategic mistake

Israeli police shot dead two of the terrorists. Kuntar and the remaining man were tried and imprisoned. The other man was released as part of a May 1985 prisoner exchange - 1,150 Arab terrorists for three Israeli prisoners-of-war held in Lebanon - but Kuntar was not included in the deal.

Several months later, the PLF seized the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, demanding that Israel release Kuntar, along with other Palestinian prisoners. The hijackers killed a wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

Kuntar remains in jail and has been hailed as a hero among Israel's enemies. The Palestinian Authority last March announced it was giving the Lebanese-born prisoner honorary Palestinian citizenship.

Hizballah repeatedly has agitated for the release of Kuntar, and after the January 2004 prisoner exchange, vowed not to rest until it had done so.

Addressing a large Shi'ite gathering last February, Nasrallah declared: "We are working on making this year the year to free our brothers in Israeli detention - Samir Kantar and his friends."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made it clear that Israel will not back down this time - but so has Nasrallah.

At a press conference in Beirut's southern suburbs last week, reported on Hizballah's website, he said of the Israelis: "What do they want us to do? Hand over the soldiers and apologize? What kind of world are they living in?"

Israelis remember the huge controversy sparked by the 2004 prisoner exchange, brokered by Germany.

An opinion poll by the Ma'ariv daily found the country split down the center - 44 percent of respondents favored the exchange while 43 percent were opposed.

As the debate raged, Ely Karmon of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism wrote that it would be a strategic mistake.

"Hizballah will be strengthened politically, psychologically and, in the final analysis, strategically, too. It will strengthen Hizballah inside Lebanon, in the Palestinian arena, and in the Muslim world, and thereby turn it into a model for admiration and imitation."

Rabbi David Golinkin, president of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, associated with the Jewish Conservative movement, commented on the "lopsided" prisoner exchange from a religious perspective.

After exploring the Jewish concept of "pidyon shvuyim" (the redemption of captives) and arguments by scholars about the value of life and the importance of ransoming those held captive, he concluded that "the public takes precedence over the individual, even if this endangers the individual."

"Exchanging hundreds or thousands of terrorists for one Israeli encourages kidnapping of Israelis, and frees hundreds or thousands of terrorists who will pick up their weapons and attack Israel," Golinkin said.

"In other words, it endangers the public and should not be done."

[Rasputin]

Hezbollah's Plans

I just published an article with National Review Online about my theory that Hezbollah was behind the October 15 attack on U.S. personnel in Gaza.

I have got another thought on Hezbollah - which is a very formidable organization. There are two key elements that make it particularly effective. First, their very close relationship with Iran guarantees funding, territory and most importantly close collaboration with Iranian intelligence. Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence have worked hand in hand - most notably in the bombings in Argentina in the early 1990s. The other key element in Hezbollah's effectiveness is their success. Their bombings drove the U.S. and the rest of the multi-national peacekeeping force out of Lebanon. Their kidnapping campaign led to the hugely embarrassing Iran Contra scandal, and finally their war with Israel led the Israelis to withdraw from southern Lebanon. This was, arguably, the biggest Arab victory in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict.

Hezbollah tutored al-Qaeda in blowing up building, simultaneous attacks, and agent handling. But I think Hezbollah is going to take a lesson from al-Qaeda. One of Bin Laden's talents has been taking control of local Islamist terrorist groups and making them part of al-Qaeda. The best example was in Algeria where in the late 1990s the Armed Islamic Group (GIA, remember educated Algerians are French-speakers, the group' actual name is Groupe Islamique Arme), was so brutal that some of its commanders wanted to break away. Bin Laden took advantage of this rift and helped the dissident commanders form the Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC - Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat). The GIA declined and the GSPC grew rapidly with Bin Laden's support. But most importantly, the extensive terror networks among the Algerians in Europe fell under control of al-Qaeda.

Hezbollah may be attempting a similar stratagem with the Palestinian groups. First it established warm relationships with any willing Palestinian organization, readily stepping across religious-secular and Sunni-Shiite barriers. Hezbollah has provided training and support since the late 1980s. In the al-Aqsa Intifada Hezbollah has been particularly generous - teaching the Palestinians how to destroy Israeli tanks and build lethal explosives (the bomb used in the March 2002 Passover Massacre may have used Hezbollah techniques.) Hezbollah has also been building its own cells in the West Bank, Gaza, and among the Israeli Arabs.

Now, with the local leaderships decimated and in hiding, Hezbollah has both the reputation and infrastructure to begin directing Palestinian activities on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank.

The real prize is Hamas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has no social/charitable component, is dependent on Iranian funds and is already closely linked to Hezbollah. Fatah played a key role in founding Hezbollah, along with Iran and Syria. In fact, Hezbollah's top killer, Imad Mughniyah, is an alumnus of Arafat's Force 17. But Fatah is tightly under Arafat's thumb and has maintained its independence for over three decades. But Hamas, has its own extensive infrastructure, including international fundraising networks which could prove very valuable. Besides increasing Hezbollah's options against Israel, Hamas' international fundraising networks could provide components for terrorist cells around the world. This, combined with Hezbollah's already formidable reach and honed by Iranian intelligence would present a very serious, world-wide terrorist threat.

[Rasputin]

Hassan Nasrallah is Hezbollah’s resident lunatic. Since we’re still plagued by a dial-up hypospeed and can’t find the courage to upload pictures, let’s try to describe him for you: Think Osama bin Laden without the Casio watch, the GI vest and the AK-47; think of Ayatollah Khomeini impregnating a goat, then the offspring being wrongly exchanged in the manger for a hairy pig; and finally, if Hollywood made a movie about Hezbollah, Vince Vaughn would play Nasrallah. Picture him now? Good.
In terms of rhetoric, Nasrallah shares the same speechwriter as BFF and Iran Supremo Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Most common words found in his vocabulary include: Revolution, Resistance, Destruction of Israel, Zionist, Allah, Shish Kebab.
Nasrallah is married to Fatima Yassin and has 4 sons and one daughter (because God, in his infinite wisdom, obviously decided that this was a guy who needed to have 4 potential fighters in his family).

[Rasputin]

Much has been said and written in recent days about the issue of proportionality in armed conflict in the context of Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s unprovoked across-the-border attack. No cogent argument can be made for or against Israel unless we first consider the three fundamental principles of a just war and then how the doctrine of proportionality applies in such a situation. These principles are: 1) adherence to norms and rules that guide international conduct in armed conflict, 2) discrimination in the execution of the war to prevent collateral damage, and 3) creation of better conditions than those existing before the eruption of hostilities and prevention of renewed violence.

Everyone who is not an extremist agrees that, according to Article 51 of the UN Charter, Israel has the right to defend itself. The question is whether Israel, as many, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, charge is using excessive or disproportionate force relative to Hezbollah’s provocations, which inflicted and continue to inflict undue harm on Israel’s civilian population. Here, Israel’s critics seem to miss a crucial point: although the rules and norms of international conduct in armed conflict apply to a sovereign state, they do not bind a non-state player, in this instance, a terrorist organization, such as Hezbollah. Moreover, sharing the same fervent religious faith, Hezbollah operates mostly at the behest of the Iranian government, whose president has repeatedly called for Israel’s elimination. Hezbollah is thus complicit to Iran’s designs and a willing participant in their implementation. This asymmetry challenges the premise of proportionality as articulated by Israel’s critics, because it must respond not only to the current provocation but to the much larger looming threat that Hezbollah and Iran pose to Israel’s very existence.

This argument of course does not exempt Israel, or any other aggrieved party, from indiscriminately conducting a military campaign that causes the death of innocent civilians. Yet, here too, Israel’s accusers are pointing to the truly horrific pictures of and reports about Lebanese men, women, and children caught, through no fault of their own, in a deadly conflict, without paying much attention to the causes of their tragic plight. Israel sees this conflict as existential and is determined to destroy Hezbollah as an armed militia. But it has been Hezbollah’s strategy to hide behind women’s s***ts and use children as human shields. Most of its arsenals are hidden in civilian-populated areas in southern Lebanon and southern Beirut, where its fighting men are also totally imbedded. While Israel drops hundreds of thousands of leaflets and makes radio announcements and telephone recordings warning civilians to leave before any air strike, Hezbollah’s leaders encourage their people to stay put to deliberately increase civilian fatalities and so create international condemnation of Israel. War, under the best of circumstances, is ugly, and with the best of intentions innocent people die. But no Lebanese would have died if Hezbollah’s blind leaders had not been operating under a deadly illusion that has led to the sacrifice of their young followers and disaster to their nation.






The questions now are how this unfortunate war should end and what measures are necessary not simply to prevent a repetition but to produce conditions in which Lebanon, Israel, and the whole region can benefit. First, it is necessary to dismantle Hezbollah as an armed militia, disarming it totally, in accordance with UN resolution 1559. Although the international community should never allow Hezbollah to reconstitute its military arm, Hezbollah could continue to exist as a political party. This outcome will dramatically diminish Iran’s influence in Lebanon and impede its ability to undermine future Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Such an outcome will enhance Lebanon’s democracy, restore its territorial integrity and potentially usher in a permanent calm on its border with Israel, if not peace. In addition, this outcome will also be most welcome, not only in Lebanon but in the predominantly Sunni Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, which feel threatened by the rise of the Shiites in Iraq and by Iran’s growing regional assertiveness and potential nuclear threat. The creation of a crescent of more than a 100 million Shiites, extending from the Persian Gulf to Lebanon, stirs tremendous anxiety in these and other Arab Sunni states, many of them viewing the battle in Lebanon as part of their own battle against the Shiites which transcend Iraq and which explains their relative silence regarding the current swirling events.

Should this development come to pass it will not, in itself, bring stability to the Middle East. While destroying Hezbollah as a military entity can diminish Iran’s influence in Lebanon, the organization’s other main supporter, Syria, will not be similarly affected. Damascus’ interest has been, and will always be, the recovery of the Golan Heights. Whereas Syria can adjust to losing much of its influence in Lebanon, no Syrian government, led by a democratically elected leader or a despot, will rest until the Golan is back on the international agenda and the prospect of recovering it from Israel becomes real. Therefore, regardless of Hezbollah’s fate, Syria remains perfectly capable of being the regional spoiler. In exchange for breaking its axis with Iran, severing ties to various Palestinian militant groups, notably Hamas, and rejoining the Arab Sunni fold, Damascus wants the United States to pay serious attention to Syria’s national economic and security interests. This is why the Bush administration must break loose from its taboos about dealing with Syria and begin a dialogue with the potential of changing dramatically the political landscape of the entire region. This is particularly important in view of the chaotic situation in Iraq and the failure of the American drive to introduce democracy in the Arab and Muslim states.

The senselessness of this war deeply saddens me. But it will be utterly in vain if the main players do not attempt to take from its ashes something that benefits the region and its people. Israeli “proportionate” response or a premature ceasefire which allow Hezbollah to survive with much of its arsenal intact will invite a replay of recent events only with greater tragedies and human suffering.

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Throughout the 1980s, the nation of Lebanon had a number of deeply complex and storied problems worthy of a 400,000-word explanatory thesis, condensable to four words: There was no government.
Lebanon had hosted thousands of Palestinian refugees in the 1970s. At the end of the decade, Israel invaded Lebanon to get at Palestinian terrorists. They decimated the country before withdrawing under heavy U.N. pressure. In the ensuing power vacuum, virtually every religious and ethnic group in the country formed its own gang, clique or terrorist cabal.

Hezbollah was one of those cabals. Backed by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's original goals were to end the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and to institute a Shi'ite Islamic theocracy. The group later expanded these goals to include liberating the Palestinian territories and dropped its theocratic aspirations in favor of participating in a parliamentary government.

Hezbollah used terrorist tactics to push its political agenda, which slowly but surely drove Israel out of Lebanon, inch by bloody inch. It became famous as an innovator in suicide bombing, as well as kidnapping Westerners, hijacking aircraft, and other terrorist activity.

A 1983 terrorist bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Marines has been tied to Hezbollah and Iran (although it's also been tied to half a dozen other groups as well). This attack is widely considered to mark the dawn of the modern age of terrorism. After a similar attack in 1984, the tough-talking Reagan Administration got the hell out of Lebanon, an embarrassing retreat that most Americans don't like to talk about or even remember.

As terrorist organizations are wont, Hezbollah slowly but surely spread its reach into other countries, sending operatives to the United States and elsewhere. One such Hezbollah spy was named Ali Boumelhem. After moving to Michigan, Boumelhem went to U.S. gun shows and illegally bought weapons for shipment overseas (he was a naturalized U.S. citizen, but had a felony conviction which made it illegal for him to buy weapons). Several other Lebanese immigrants in Michigan were charged with sending money and supplies to Hezbollah, which the U.S. government officially designated a terrorist organization in 1996.

The problem with that declaration was that the horse had already long fled the barn. In fact, the horse had fled the barn, run around for a while and come back of its own free will. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hezbollah's "terrorist" phase was at its height, with suicide bombings and hostage-taking galore. After Lebanon's civil war officially ended, however, the organization began repackaging itself as a legitimate political party that had sprung from what it argued was a legitimate revolutionary movement.

While it seems patently obvious to Western observers that Hezbollah is a terrorist operations, what with the bombings and kidnappings, that presumption is far less obvious to governments in the Middle East and Asia, not to mention the people of Lebanon. As a 2003 report by the Brookings Institution notes:


Syria and Iran openly support (Hezbollah), and much of the Arab world regards it as heroic, for its successful resistance against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (the only time that Arab arms have forced Israel to surrender territory), and legitimate, because of its participation in Lebanese parliamentary politics. Even officials in France, Canada, and other Western nations have acknowledged the value of its social and political projects.
That same report, however, clearly defined the group as perhaps the pre-eminent terror organization in the world, with operational cells all over Europe, Latin America and North America.
But when the group won eight seats in the Lebanese parliament in 1992, it gained that crucial legitimacy which made it much more entrenched. The decision to abandon its call for a strict Islamic fundamentalist government made Hezbollah palatable to Lebanon's Christians and Sunni Muslims. Its focus on social services in a country with virtually no government infrastructure made it flat-out popular. Not many terrorist organizations have their own television network. Hezbollah does. They run Al-Minar ("the lighthouse"), a worldwide satellite TV station from Lebanon. And its successes against Israel made the organization into an icon across the Middle East. In 2000, Israel withdrew the last of its troops from Lebanon, a development almost entirely credited to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah today is led by Hassan Nasrallah, who styles himself as "secretary-general of the party," a clear sign that the group isn't planning to yield its veneer of respectability any time soon. As a young man, Nasrallah studied in Iraq with a radical Shi'ite cleric named Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (whose nephew Muqtada al-Sadr is currently making life difficult for the United States in Iraq).

Nasrallah was involved in the first efforts to beat the Israelis back from their occupation of Lebanon, but the original Hezbollah revolutionary cadre soon split over whether or not to accept a non-Islamic government in the country (he voted for "not"). With support from the governments of Syria and Iran, Nasrallah soon regained control over the organization. He used terroristic tactics, with often brutal efficiency, to ensure that the cost of occupying Lebanon was a steadily increasing body count.

By 1992, Nasrallah was ready to drop his insistence on theocracy, which helped move Hezbollah into the mainstream of Lebanese politics. Once in the parliament, Hezbollah began funding social services and charitable work in the country out of its own pockets (or rather, out of the pockets of Iran and Syria). The charitable work was assisted by a network of expatriates and non-governmental organizations similar to the one employed by al Qaeda.

The legitimate face of Hezbollah makes it difficult for the West to directly confront the ongoing problem of its sponsorship of global terrorism and its extensive organization of training camps for terrorist operatives. You'd think the same factor would inhibit Hezbollah from directly confronting the U.S., but you'd be wrong. Both before and after September 11 threw a sharp focus on the issue of global terrorism, Nasrallah maintained a steady stream of virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric (to him, there is no difference between the two). Nasrallah has said Hezbollah is proud to be called a terrorist organization by the "Great Satan." He has repeatedly argued that the United States is the cause of all Lebanon's woes. In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he explained that "death to America is not a slogan. Death to America is a policy, a strategy and a vision."

Despite all this, Washington has wisely decided not to press its "zero tolerance" terrorism policy in Lebanon... yet. The problem with the policy is, of course, the implication that zero terrorism will be tolerated. While an admirable notion, the practical application of zero tolerance is a decidedly tricky thing, especially in the ever-ready-to-explode environment of the Middle East.

Hezbollah and al Qaeda are known to have cooperated in the past, but it doesn't appear they have worked together closely. The main reason for this is sectarian. al Qaeda is mostly made up of Sunni Muslims and Hezbollah is mostly Shi'ite Muslims. However, there is a recent trend for Sunnis and Shi'ites to cooperate against a common enemy, i.e., the United States, so don't be surprised if something more turns up.

President Bush's April 2004 decision to endorse an extremely unpopular Israeli plan to withdraw from Palestinian territories can only inflame Hezbollah further. But in the final analysis, the outcome of the Iraq war will likely determine the organization's future. If the U.S. pulls off an increasingly unlikely "happy ending" in Iraq by installing a democratic West-friendly regime that makes oil plentiful and allows America to base forces on its soil, the "War On Terrorism World Tour" will likely set its gunsights next on Syria and Iran -- Hezbollah's primary state sponsors.

If that happens, the global network of Hezbollah will almost certainly get its second test in an all-out war on America.

Hezbollah's infrastructure within the U.S. has mostly given logistic support a very focused and successful guerilla war against Israel employing terror tactics. As a fighting force, the sleepers haven't been tested. The post-9/11 dragnet certainly swept up some of those sleeper agents, but how many? And Hezbollah's high-impact, high-body count strategy has already caused the U.S. to turn tail and run once before.

Let's hope we don't find out whether it could happen again.

[Rasputin]

Iran's mullahs hiding Hezbollah terrorist boss

Iran on Wednesday denied reports that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was holed up in its Beirut embassy after at least two Israeli attempts to kill him in air raids.

"The foreign ministry spokesperson (Hamid Reza Asefi) denies the reports put about by the Zionist regime according to which Hezbollah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah is in the Iranian embassy," said a ministry statement carried by the official IRNA news agency.

"The Zionist regime, which is incapable of dealing with the determination of the Lebanese resistance, is putting about lies," the statement quoted Asefi as saying.

The Hezbollah leader resurfaced in a television broadcast earlier on Wednesday in which he threatened attacks into the heart of Israel.

Israeli army and public radio reported that some politicians and military commanders they did not identify believed Nasrallah might be in hiding in the Iranian embassy.

[Rasputin]

New York - While many US government officials are deeply concerned over Iran's nuclear program, according to recent reports, investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department revealed last May that the Lebanon-based terrorist group, Hezbollah, may be plotting attacks. These attacks may be launched by their sleeper cells in New York and several other US cities.

According to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith, Hezbollah's largest headquarters outside of the Middle East is located in Toronto.

In a story on Fox News, law-enforcement and intelligence officials were quoted as saying that though there is no imminent threat of any attacks, security has been stepped up after the reports of a meeting between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and leaders of Hezbollah and other terror groups during his recent visit to Syria.

The Iranian Mission to the United Nations in New York City is being kept under surveillance by federal and local intelligence officers, according to Fox. The New York City Police Department possesses one of the largest intelligence divisions in the world.

Hezbollah, or God's Party, grew out of the Lebanese civil war in the early 1980s and quickly became the region's leading radical Islamic movement. Their primary goal was to drive Israeli and American troops out of Lebanon.

For many years, Hezbollah was synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings. In 1983, militants who went on to join Hezbollah's ranks carried out a suicide bombing attack that killed 241 US marines in Beirut, which lead to President Ronald Reagan's withdrawal order for all US military peacekeepers.

In May 2000 -- due to the success of the party's military arm -- one of its main aims was achieved. Israel's military was forced to end almost 20 years of occupation in southern Labanon. Hezbollah now serves as an inspiration to Palestinian factions fighting to liberate more territory. The party has embraced the Palestinian cause and has said publicly that it is ready to open a second front against Israel in support of the intifada.

Hezbollah's political rhetoric's central theme is the total annihilation of the state of Israel. Its definition of Israeli occupation has also encompassed the idea that the whole of Palestine is occupied Muslim land and it has argued that Israel has no right to exist. Hezbollah's spiritual head Sheikh Fadlallah is close to Iranian government and is believed responsible for the vitriolic speeches of the Iranian president.

Hezbollah is funded, armed and trained by the Iranians and given free reign by Syria's ruling Ba'athist Party. Its international network, according to terrorism analysts, is believed to include at least 15,000 operatives in cells in the US, Canada, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, most of Western Europe, Indonesia, Malaysia, and throughout Africa. Western intelligence sources estimate Hezbollah's annual budget to be approximately $400 million, including almost $100 million annually from Iran.

Other sources of funding include Syria, charitable organizations, individual donations, legitimate business, and illegitimate businesses such as illegal arms trading, cigarette smuggling, currency counterfeiting, credit card fraud, theft, operating illegal telephone exchanges, and drug trafficking. Recently two men were convicted of running a criminal operation that helped to fund Hezbollah.

Hezbollah's growing international terrorist activity has raised concerns that the terrorist group may be emerging as a more serious threat than previously considered. Its global terrorist reach has serious policy implications for Democratic countries. However, there are international organizations that continue to insist that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon and that it does not warrant the designation of "terrorist group."

[Rasputin]

ارزیابی دکتر ابراهیم یزدی

حساب حزب الله لبنان را
با حزب الهی های ج.ا مخلوط نکنید




دکتر ابراهیم یزدی دبیرکل نهضت آزادی ایران که روابط بسیار نزدیکی با جنبش "امل" در لبنان، پیش از انقلاب 57 داشته و روابطی نیز با امام موسی صدر داشته، در ارزیابی کوتاهی پیرامون جنگ جدید در لبنان و موقعیت شیعیان از یکسو و کباده کشی های سپاه پاسداران در ایران با ادعای زیر پوشش داشتن حزب الله لبنان گفت:

زماني شيعيان در لبنان شهروند حساب نميشدند، تا چه رسد به شهروند درجه 2 بودن. درايت و وسعت نظر امام موسي صدر آنچنان بود كه حتي مسيحيان عضو حركت محرومين لبنان شدند و طبيعي است كه انقلاب اسلامي ايران نيز به تحولات آنجا شتاب داد. اما تحولات لبنان نتيجه انقلاب ايران نبود كه بعضيها ميخواهند آن را به نفع خود مصادره كنند.

بايد ديد جنگهاي اتفاق افتاده تا چه اندازه از نظر فرزانگي سياسي قابل توجيه است. آتشبس دير يا زود اعلام خواهد شد و اين جنگ نميتواند ادامه پيدا كند. در اين بازي جديد كه در لبنان شروع شده، اسراييل بازنده است و نميتواند از اين بازي پيروز خارج شود. اسراييل در دو هدف اعلام شده كه آزادي دو سرباز و خلع سلاح حزبالله است، موفق نخواهد بود.

دير يا زود اسراييل مجبور خواهد شد عليرغم فشار آمريكا بدون هيچ قيد و شرطي آتشبس را بپذيرد. در اين صورت به هيچ كدام از اهدافش نخواهد رسيد جز اينكه افكار عمومي مردم جهان را عليه خود بسيج كرده است.

برخي كشورهاي اسلامي هنوز درباره اين جنگ اعلام موضع نكردهاند و كشورهاي عربي هم مايل نيستند تصميماتي بگيرند كه به نفع اين جريان باشد. جامعه اعراب در كشورهاي مختلف به دليل شكستهاي مستمري كه از اسراييل خوردهاند دچار آسيب رواني شده است. اگر حزبالله، خود، به اسراييل ضربه بزند راضياند اما اگر با هويت اسلاميشان اين كار را بكنند تاثيرات بلندمدتتري خواهد داشت كه برخي سنيها و وهابيون از آن استقبال نميكنند. اگر اسراييل نتواند با ادامه عمليات كنوني، حزبالله را به زانو درآورد ممكن است مجبور باشد ادامه جنگ را به بيرون از لبنان تسري دهد.

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

On July 23rd, the day before Rice’s visit, I’d made my way toward the cities and towns of the Shia south––Hezbollistan, as some call it. I drove from Beirut with a few photographers, taking back roads to bypass the mangled highway interchanges and bridges. The only cars we saw were racing in the opposite direction, to the relative safety of the north, usually in caravans of seven or eight. Most were packed with families, who had attached makeshift white flags to the sideview mirrors. The previous week, an Israeli missile had hit a van full of refugees, killing sixteen of them. Some drivers flashed their lights, warning us not to proceed; most passed by at high speed, the expressions on their faces grim, intent, and scared.

Approaching Tyre, we saw that a bomb had gouged out a crater, twenty feet across and twenty feet deep, in the middle of the road. Nearby, a black S.U.V. sat accordioned and empty; it had crashed into a telephone pole. From the sky came the whoosh of a fighter jet and, much closer, the whine of a drone.

We pulled over to make way for a convoy of refugees. One driver, a man wearing a white T-shirt and steering a large black Mercedes-Benz, had several frightened-looking women and children in the back seat. As he slowed down to edge past the crater, he yelled out to us, in English, “We will never go back! We must leave this country.” In another car, a woman pointed to a child and said, frantically, “Down syndrome.” A teen-ager poked his head out of yet another car and exclaimed wildly, “U.S. Embassy!” A muffled explosion sounded, coming from beyond the city.

Over the next half hour, several more groups of cars made the run. One had its roof caved in and one of its sides smashed; it seemed impossible that anyone could drive it, but, as it came nearer, I saw an older man behind the wheel, his body bent and his head low to one side. As he passed, he called out that he had been with a woman—“a journalist like you”—and added, “She’s dead.” Later that day, news reports confirmed that a twenty-three-year-old Lebanese photographer, Layal Nejib, had been killed when an Israeli missile struck near her car on the road south of Tyre.

We turned north, to a hospital in Sidon. A large group of people—men, women wearing chadors, and children—were talking and crying at once. I recognized the man in the white T-shirt who had passed us by the crater. He appeared to be in shock, walking back and forth, trembling and shouting; several men were trying to calm him down. He was soaked with sweat. Three members of his family had been wounded. I walked up to the man and said that I had seen him less than an hour before. He turned and shouted, accusingly, “You were there and I talked to you—and then they hit us!”



Near the hospital, a mosque lay in ruins. Next door was a technical college and school run by the Hariri Foundation, which was established by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in a car bombing in February, 2005. (A preliminary U.N. report implicated Syrian intelligence; the investigation is incomplete.) One of the mosque’s white domes, still intact, was propped up, bizarrely, on top of the debris. Strips of the mosque’s red carpet, shredded by the explosion, hung from the branches of nearby trees.

A man approached and told me that he was a teacher at the Hariri school. I asked him why he thought the Israelis had hit a mosque, and he said, simply, “It was a Hezbollah mosque.” As he led me onto the grounds, a caretaker began yelling in Arabic about “Israel” and “America,” but the teacher shooed him away. I found a leaflet that had been dropped by the Israelis. It showed caricatures of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad; Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and Khaled Mashal, a Hamas leader based in Damascus, playing flutes around an urn; from it emerged the bearded face of Nasrallah. “At your service,” the caption read.

A younger man came up to me and, when we were out of earshot of others, said that Hezbollah had kept bombs in the basement of the mosque, but that two days earlier a truck had taken the cache away. It was common knowledge in Sidon, he said, and everyone was expecting the mosque to be hit. When, the previous evening, displaced people from the south had gathered on the grounds, they had been warned away.

“Everybody wants to end this Hezbollah regime, but nobody can say anything,” the young man said. He told me that he had been to the United States. “I know how the people are there, what they eat and how they live and think, and we don’t have anything like that here. We would like to live like that, without all this”—he waved toward the ruined mosque—“normally, the way you do.” He hoped that the Israelis would be successful. When another Lebanese man came up and joined us, he stopped talking. Before we parted, I asked him if he was a Christian. He looked surprised. “No,” he said. “I am Muslim. Sunni.”

[Rasputin]

Sunni and Christian politicians often publicly declare their solidarity with the Shiite Hezbollah, which routinely refers to itself as a Lebanese national “resistance movement.” But the sectarian fault lines have been affected by the current crisis. The population is estimated to be thirty-five per cent Christian, thirty-five per cent Shiite, twenty-five per cent Sunni, and five per cent Druze, and government posts are allocated to specific groups—the Prime Minister must be Sunni, for example. “Civil war is on everyone’s mind, but it’s the one thing nobody wants to talk about,” an affluent Maronite Christian businessman told me over dinner at a restaurant in a Maronite enclave in the hills above Beirut. I was there with two couples—the other man, also a Christian, was a well-known former government minister—on the restaurant’s terrace. Like many people with money, they had moved their families to the hills. The restaurant’s sound system was playing a song by Fairouz, Lebanon’s most famous singer and a national idol, whose beautiful laments evoke emotions in the Lebanese the same way that Edith Piaf once did for the French in wartime.

My hosts had been telling me, with a certain pride, how the monasteries and schools in the area had taken in thousands of Shiite refugees from the south. “This kind of thing has never happened before,” the former minister said. “Most of the people from these two communities have never had this sort of contact with each other. But they have been taken in, and they are getting along.” He saw it as a promising sign of “inter-communal solidarity.” After all, he said, the attacks had been directed not only against the Shiites but against Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Down the table, the businessman said that he wondered why, with all the resources Hezbollah had at its disposal—it receives an estimated hundred million dollars a year from Iran—it hadn’t done more to protect its civilian population. “Why didn’t Hezbollah prepare for this?” he said. “Where is the food, the medicines? Where are the shelters for the people? Maybe, out of this, people will begin to question why they had to suffer because of the will of one man.” He meant Nasrallah.

Speaking about the Shiite refugees, who were now dependent on aid handouts, his wife asked, “What will happen when October comes and winter begins? Will they stay? Will they have homes to return to? All through the civil war, I stayed in Lebanon—I never wanted to leave—but in just two weeks they have destroyed everything we have built in the fifteen years since the war ended, and now I don’t want to stay anymore. This time, I want to leave.”

A moment later, a distant rumble could be heard. “Are those bombs?” she said. “Is that what I am hearing? Here?” Neither her husband nor the ex-minister acknowledged her. But then there was another, louder explosion, and she asked again.

“We are hearing Fairouz,” the ex-minister said sternly, cocking a thumb toward the sound system. He said this as if to tell her, “Don’t spoil the evening,” but afterward he brooded, and everyone at the table sat silently, listening to the music and, unavoidably, to the explosions in the distance.



When I arrived at the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret Hreik, in Beirut’s predominantly Shiite southern suburbs, it had just been pummelled, as it had every day since the bombing began. Most of the residents, who lived in concrete apartment blocks, had left. It had been risky for reporters to go to the neighborhood, both because of the Israeli bombardment and because of the remaining Hezbollah sentinels, who were tense and suspicious. But now Hezbollah was conducting a press tour of its ruins.

I found my way to the rendezvous point, at a bombed-out highway interchange, where fifty or sixty journalists had gathered—reporters, photographers, and television cameramen. An energetic young man named Hussein Naboulsi, who runs Hezbollah’s press office, announced that the tour would be fast, and that no one should stray from the group. He then headed off so quickly that people had to sprint to keep up. Hezbollah men kept an eye on the sky, and on us.

We walked past entire apartment blocks that had been flattened. The streets were littered with chunks of concrete, insulation material, twisted aluminum shutters, broken glass, and dangling electrical wires, and it became difficult to walk. Naboulsi paused and waved his arms and said loudly, “You see? This is where ordinary people live. This is what the Israelis do.”

In front of a row of wrecked shop- fronts, he declared, “This is revenge against Lebanon, the only country that has shown itself able to defeat Israel.” We reached an open area where the buildings had been completely levelled. Naboulsi pointed to some rubble and said, “This is where the Hezbollah Media Relations office used be. Now there’s no place for me to work.” He claimed that, apart from this and a center for social charity, there hadn’t been any Hezbollah offices around there—only civilian targets. He then led the group away from the area where, I had heard, Hezbollah’s security headquarters had stood. In Beirut, many people believed that Sheikh Nasrallah was still in the neighborhood, in a bunker, although there were also rumors that he was in Damascus or at the Iranian Embassy.

Naboulsi suddenly yelled, “Jet fighters in the sky!” He urged the journalists to hurry to their cars; the tour was over.

[Rasputin]

One evening, on a rooftop balcony in the eastern-Beirut district of Ashrafieh, I met with Jamil Mroue, a secular Shiite and the editor of Beirut’s English-language newspaper, the Daily Star. Mroue, a big, handsome silver-haired man of fifty-six, nursed a glass of whiskey and looked out over the sea, where two gray American destroyers were prowling the Mediterranean. After staring at the ships for a minute, Mroue began to vent his frustration.

“Even after 9/11, there is this expectation in the U.S. and Israel that some unspoken middle class is just sitting there waiting to inherit the ruins of whatever country it is that they are obliterating. But there is no calculation that, if they flatten Lebanon and Nasrallah comes out of hiding and is given a microphone to deliver a speech, he can topple governments. He has been extraordinarily empowered by this. Israel and America are still obsessed with destroying hardware. But if you do this with Hezbollah you just propagate what you want to destroy”—that is, an unmoored fighting force. “Do I want to live under Hezbollah?,” he said. “No, I don’t. But the same errors that the Americans made in Iraq are the ones being made here. You get rid of Nasrallah not by destroying his guns but by helping to create a sustainable society.”

Mroue went on, “In the beginning, in the eighties, Hezbollah controlled the night, but by 2000 it controlled the day, even as the Israeli soldiers were huddled in their bunkers.” He said that it was unfair to ask Lebanon’s fragile government to do what the Israelis couldn’t in their eighteen-year occupation. “Do you want to use a sledgehammer? Well, do you remember the Israeli minister who compared Arabs to lice? Try hitting lice with a sledgehammer!”

Mroue sipped his whiskey and said, “Hezbollah will most likely come out of this with its infrastructure shattered, but then comes the soapbox with the highly cerebral underdog—Nasrallah—and there will be a camera crew there from CNN or Al Arabiya, and he will go on camera and say ‘Do this,’ and people will.”

Mroue’s point of view was common not only among secular Shiites but among Christians and Sunnis who normally had little use for Hezbollah yet despaired of the effect of Israel’s bombing and the Bush Administration’s refusal to rein in the Olmert government.

“Before the war, probably eighty or ninety per cent of Lebanese were against Hezbollah,” Mroue said despondently. “But now I’d say it’s around fifty, teetering on sixty per cent—in favor.” Those numbers were guesses; the breadth and depth of Hezbollah’s support is one of the great uncertainties in the crisis. Mroue cited an old Saudi tribal proverb: “If you know the price of a man’s ransom, kill him.” The ransom was the price that would be exacted by the slain man’s tribe in revenge for his death. “In other words, if you know what the costs will be for your actions, and you can afford them, go ahead,” Mroue said. “But here, who knows what the price of the ransom is?”



Hussein Rahal runs Hezbollah’s information bureau, and, like other Hezbollah officials, he had gone underground. I met him by prearrangement in a borrowed office in a government building. Rahal was a study in gray: he wore a gray suit, had cropped gray hair, and had a gray stubble beard. He was taking the long view. “We have lived in this situation before. All wars end, and when this one does we will be victorious, because we will stand fast, and the situation we have now will be changed. Right now, the neoconservatives, as part of their strategy to reshape the Middle East, are encouraging Israel to escalate its war against Lebanon, which means that the U.S. Administration is taking a leading part in a war, one that the American people have no say in.” Rahal paused, and added carefully, “But Hezbollah does not want to cause any harm to the American people.” He went on, “The U.S. runs the risk of bringing down the Lebanese state it says it wants to support. And if this happens it could take the whole region into a new stage of the conflict—and who benefits from that?

“War is always two-sided, and you must test both sides’ ability to stand fast. We have weapons that we did not have in 1996. The casualties for Israel in a ground war will be very high. And we have only one choice, and that is to survive.”

The broadcast facilities of Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar, were bombed––the Israelis consider it the group’s most powerful propaganda arm—but it somehow managed to stay on the air. When I asked Ibrahim Mussawi, the editor of foreign news at Al Manar, about the damage the country had sustained, he said, “We’ve managed with thirty-five billion dollars of national debt”—Lebanon’s current debt. “What will it cost to rebuild the new damage? Four, five billion? If we could manage thirty-five, then we can manage forty billion. Bad as it is, maybe some good can come out of this; maybe after this it will be the right time to settle all our problems in Lebanon, all of the ‘isms’ we are famous for: nepotism, corruptionism.” Mussawi seemed to be suggesting that the best solution for Lebanon’s ills, when the war was over, was a government led by the Party of God.

For now, it is not clear who is running Lebanon. Rice came to Beirut in part to express support for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who came to power after the “Cedar revolution,” the mass protests against Syrian interference in Lebanon that followed Hariri’s murder. Siniora, a Sunni, had criticized Hezbollah, but was openly in despair about the lack of U.S. support for a ceasefire; in Rome, he called the air war “barbaric.”

One politician Rice pointedly snubbed during her visit was the country’s President, Émile Lahoud, a Maronite who is widely seen as a tool of Syria. I met with him at the Presidential palace a few hours before Rice arrived. He was deeply tanned, and looked like an older, fleshier version of Tony Blair.

Lahoud told me how pleased he was that I had come to Lebanon to see the “truth” of what was happening. “Unfortunately, Americans have a very erroneous picture,” he said. “It’s—you know, they have a very strong media. Israel is all over the world.”

He spoke vehemently about the “infamy” of the Israeli attacks. “The Israelis said it was because of the taking of two hostages. Well, it is not true. They want to break the infrastructure, because Lebanon is a very big competitor of Israel, from the touristic point of view and with anything—regional trade, finance. So the Israelis don’t want Lebanon to prosper.” He added, “But the most important reason is that they want to take revenge, because we liberated our land.”

I asked Lahoud if he believed, as I had heard other Lebanese say, that Israel wanted to spark a civil war in Lebanon. “Yes,” he said. “Israel is happy when Lebanese fight each other.” He added, “Washington wants whatever Israel wants, unfortunately. For many reasons. The main one, you know”—Lahoud gave me a knowing look—“the lobby, and elections.

“Look, you can see the bombs from here,” Lahoud said. He led me to the window, and we looked down at the southern suburbs. A plume of gray smoke was rising rapidly.

[Rasputin]

On July 27th—the morning after Israel lost nine soldiers in clashes with Hezbollah, and two days after its missiles hit a U.N. outpost, killing four observers—I met a Western diplomat in Beirut. He told me that, while both Hezbollah and Israel had miscalculated, Hezbollah, at this point, had the advantage. “The casualties inflicted by Israel’s air campaign play right into Hezbollah’s hands. Hezbollah certainly thinks it’s winning. Even if it loses popularity among Druze, Sunnis, and Christians, its popularity remains high among Shiites, and for Hezbollah that’s all that really counts.”

Pointing to his head, he said, “In the end, the battle is between the ears. If, as a result of this, the Lebanese people get sick of Hezbollah, and if they turn on it and disarm it, that would be great.” A less favorable scenario was for the fighting to end inconclusively, with Hezbollah allowed to return to its former status. Still, he said, that might at least “show the Lebanese that there are serious consequences for supporting Hezbollah.”

The diplomat said that if anyone had benefitted from the confrontation, it was the government in Tehran. “Iran’s role in this has been huge,” he said. “I don’t know what role, if any, it had in the abductions, but I think it does encourage Hezbollah’s fighting on the border, and its arms shipments have been impressive. Without any cost to Iran, Lebanon is getting devastated, Israel is taking hits, and the Iranians are getting distraction from the nuclear issue. They must be very happy right now.”

The degree to which Hezbollah, fortified by its sponsors in Iran and Syria, has constrained Lebanon’s political dialogue was brought home to me by Nayla Mouawad, Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs. Mouawad, a Maronite, is the widow of former President René Mouawad, who was assassinated in 1989, the main suspects being Syria or a domestic political opponent. When I asked about Hezbollah, Mouawad chose her words very carefully. “We thought we needed Hezbollah to be a part of the government, and we gave it ministries to give it confidence to join in the nation-building. We thought that we could not implement a settlement by force, but through national dialogue.” Mouawad said that she wanted a ceasefire, but that afterward the Lebanese Army should assume control of the entire country. She was worried about it, though. “Divisions still exist in this country,” she said. “If a comprehensive settlement is not implemented, we are going to have problems. There will be people counting their losses—and the losses are tremendous—and looking for someone to blame.” She added, “Lebanon is paying the price for Syrian and Iranian interests.”

She noted that the Lebanese government agreed with some of Hezbollah’s demands, including the return of Shebaa farms and prisoners. “We need to convince Hezbollah that only a strong Lebanese nation and state could preserve its future as a party, as a Lebanese party—not as an armed political faction.” Mouawad paused, and said, “I am very much aware that the moment we are living now may be better than the one we are going to live through.”



Despite its losses, Hezbollah remains conspicuously in control in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Outsiders are stopped and interrogated by men who seem to materialize out of nowhere, riding on motor scooters. A few days after the press tour, I returned to visit an underground refuge for displaced Shiite civilians; a Hezbollah official had approved the visit.

My car pulled up outside the Farms Superstore, a modern supermarket in a concrete-and-glass building. After a round of questioning, I was allowed to proceed but only in the company of a Hezbollah man, who carried a black portfolio. Like most Hezbollah men, he wore a light beard, in the Iranian fashion. He led the way down into the three-level parking garage beneath the store, a vast, clean space of rubberized gray floors and support columns. There were no vehicles in sight; instead, at every other column or so, there were Lebanese families sitting and reclining on reed mats and foam-rubber mattresses. Each family had neat bundles of blankets and plastic bags of clothing and food. A few had electric fans, and one group was gathered around a television. They were mostly women and children, with some older men and teen-age boys; I saw few men in their twenties or thirties. The Hezbollah man said that there were three hundred and sixty families in the garage—approximately two thousand people.

In one corner, children played on swings, a slide, and a small carrousel. Our escort said that Hezbollah had provided the equipment. He added that Hezbollah had set up a clinic and a pharmacy.

As we walked down to the next level, two teen-age boys, who had been squabbling, began throwing punches at one another. The escort grabbed them and sent them away with a reprimand. A few minutes later, we were approached by a young man named Ali. He held the hand of a wide-eyed girl of six or seven. He said he was from the southern town of Marjayoun. “I have been here six days,” he said. “I am tired, but I’m not scared.” He said that he had volunteered his services to Hezbollah, patrolling the refuge at night, “to see if anyone needs anything.” Speaking of the Hezbollah leader, who the night before had made a television appearance, he said, “Sheikh Nasrallah said last night that it will last a long time. So here I am.”

A middle-aged woman in a black chador came over. When I asked if she minded living underground, she smiled and said, in a gravelly voice, “It’s all the same to me. If Israel and America want to do this to us, all we can do is to bear the situation, so if we have to stay underground we will. We don’t mind staying here as long as the boys are O.K.”—a reference to Hezbollah’s fighters—“and as long as Sheikh Nasrallah is fine. We can bear anything. Death is normal to us, and, anyway, it means we’ll go to heaven.” She told us that four children had been born in the underground garage. Two were boys, and they had been named Waaed, which means “the promising one,” and Sadeq, which means “the truthful one,” “because Sheikh Nasrallah says, ‘We have the promise of liberating the south.’ ” She added, “We don’t think the Israelis will come to Beirut, but, if they do, we know what to do with them.” A young pregnant woman standing next to her laughed and made lunging, stabbing motions with her hand.