Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he will not allow "dangerous weapons" to reach Lebanon's Hezbollah.
He made the comment following reports that Israel carried out an airstrike in northern Syria last week. The airstrike reportedly targeted a shipment of Russian anti-ship missiles.
Asked about the reports on the CBS-TV show "Face the Nation," Netanyahu refused to confirm or deny Israeli involvement. He said Israel's policy "is to prevent the transfer of dangerous weapons to Hezbollah and other terror groups," according to a transcript of the interview provided by CBS.
According to a Reuters report this week, Israel has reinforced its forces on the once-quiet frontier with Syria where it believes Lebanese Hezbollah militias are preparing for the day when they could fight Israel. The report quoted an Israeli source.
Syria's civil war has brought an end to decades of calm on the Golan Heights. But since rebels are fighting against President Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syrian villages nearby the border, Israel’s military is intensely watching the situation.
Iran,-backed Hezbollah has sent thousands of its militias to combat Syrian rebels, according to Israeli and Western estimates.
Israel is worried Hezbollah is making initial preparations for future confrontation with it on a new front with Syria and is accquiring valuable combat experience on the Syrian battlefield.
An Israeli source said the group is gathering intelligence on Israel's deployment on the strategic Golan Heights.
"It is not at an alarming level now but we understand their intentions," said the Israeli source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the security and political situation in the area.
Last May, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to turn the Golan into a new front against Israel.
"Since Nasrallah's threat, more (Israeli) army companies have been sent up, more tanks," an Israeli military source said at the Booster military outpost on the Golan.
Booster is about 2 km (1 mile) from a disengagement line set after Israel and Syria fought on the Golan in 1973 and Israeli tanks have just moved back into the position for the first time since then.
Daytime is peaceful on the rocky outcrop that gives a turret-top view of Syrian villages below, with birdsong echoing across sun-scorched fields. That changes at nightfall.
"Every night there is fighting (in the villages across the frontier), explosions and shooting all through the night. This is the hottest spot on the Golan Heights," the source said. "As far as we're concerned, any bullet that crosses over is intentional."
The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) monitors the area between Syria and Israel, a narrow strip of land running 70 km (45 miles) from Mount Hermon on the Lebanese border to the Yarmouk River frontier with Jordan.
The observers have been caught in the middle of fighting between Syrian troops and rebels. Stray shells and bullets have landed on the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan, and Israeli troops have fired into Syria in response.
The rebels have detained UN peacekeepers on several different occasions before releasing them. Japan and Croatia have withdrawn troops due to the violence as has Austria with the gap being filled by soldiers from Fiji.
Among the rebels fighting the Syrian army are jihadi and Qaeda-linked groups, which are also a future threat to Israel.
Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson in charge of international media, told recently a group of European journalists visiting the country as part of a press trip organized by the Europe Israel Press Association (EIPA) that Hezbollah in Lebanon is Israel’s most serious concern, speaking of the depth of their involvement in the population in southern Lebanon.
He said Hezbollah militias are between 30,000 and 40,000. ‘’ Around 60,000 rockets are pointed at Israel mostly targeting the civilian population, even of a city like Tel Aviv,’’ he added.
Around 100 Shiite villages in southern Lebanon have a terrorist infrastructure, the army spokesperson said, explaining that in these villages houses have one floor only for Hezbollah members and their arsenal while the other floors are for families. ‘’They are all in the same building. It is extremely challenging’’
Each Hezbollah village has reportedly a target zone in Israel.
Israel last fought Hezbollah in a 2006 Lebanon war but it said it learned a lot from this conflict. « We have since developed our defense capabilities, for example with the Iron Dome.’’
As a proxy of Iran, Hezbollah is funded, trained and get its directives in Tehran. Iranian advisors are present with Nasrallah and the recent battle in Quseir in Syria’s war saw for th first time Hezbollah terrorists driving tanks. ‘’Whre did they learn this ?,’’ Lt.Col. Peter Lerner asked.
Around 3,000 members of Hezbollah are reported to be fighting in Syria alongside Assad’s forces.
Israel has reinforced the border by building a security fence which is to be completed by the end of this summer, and has deployed a high-tech surveillance system. ‘’We are concerned that the Golan Heights become a no man’s land with terrorists, like the situation that developed in the Sinai peninsula, and that advanced weaponry will be falling into the hands of other terrorists,’’ Lerner said.
Israel has struck inside Syria at least three times in the past few months against what it believed to be anti-aircraft and advanced ground missiles destined for the Lebanese group.
According to him, Hezbollah could launch an attack in several days and ‘’keep Israel under fire for one month.’’
Last month, Israel held a military drill that simulated taking over a northern Israeli town of Safed in preparation for possible conflict.
In the meantime, Britain has renewed its formal request to its European Union partners to put Hezbollah's military wing on the EU terror list amid signs that opposition to the move is weakening.
The British drive to blacklist Hezbollah within the EU was discussed twice by a special group but British diplomats failed to win over a number of skeptical governments which fear the step would fuel instability in the Middle East .
Britain, backed by France, Germany and Holland, a country which has already designated Hezbollah as a whole as a terror organization since 2004, has now asked for the issue to be put on the agenda of the next meeting of the 28 EU Foreign Ministers on July 22.
The agenda for the meeting has not yet been finalized, a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said.
Britain has argued that the Lebanese Shiite group should be outlawed in Europe because of evidence that it was behind the bus bombing in Bulgaria in July 2012 that killed five Israelis and their Bulgarian driver. Bulgaria is a member of the EU.
In support of its bid, Britain has also cited a four-year jail sentence handed down by a Cypriot court in March to a Hezbollah member accused of plotting to attack Israeli interests on the island.
Unanimity is needed to back Britain’s. Austria, the Czech Republic and Italy have reportedly voiced reservations, while some countries fear that blacklisting Hezbollah could further destabilize the already fragile situation in Lebanon where the group is a member of the government.
But the British proposal appears to have gained more support in recent weeks because of Iranian-backed Hezbollah's deeper involvement in the Syrian civil war.
A diplomat from one EU country that had doubts about blacklisting Hezbollah's armed wing said Britain had provided more information in support of its request.
"I haven't heard lately that any state - probably a question mark is Prague - is so dead against this that they will prevent a consensus. At the end of the day nobody wants to be the defender of the military wing of Hezbollah," the diplomat said.
A Czech diplomat said his government remained opposed to blacklisting Hezbollah's armed wing because of the difficulty of distinguishing between its political and military wings.
According to Dr Eitan Azani, Deputy Executive Director of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, the main question is not that Hezbollah is a ‘’hybrid organization’’ but that it is a terrorist organization ‘’not from the Israel point of view, but from an international point of view.’’
Speaking at a conference earlier this week in Brussels, Azani said most definitions of terror around the world highlight three different components: act of violence and violence against civilians to achieve political goals.
‘’These are the three components of most of the terrorist groups around the world.’’
‘’From the beginning of its creation, Hezbollah used violence to achieve its goals. Not only violence against Israeli citizens, but violence to achieve the goals of the organisation in different parts of the world. Hezbollah established from the early days an international infrastructure that it used during the years to operate and to carry out Hezbollah operations around the world – some of them logistical operations, some of them criminal operations like drug trafficking, some of them military and terrorist operations,’’ Azani said.