MIDEAST UPDATE: 3.25.17 - Hezbollah Building Up Massive Offensive Capabilities Against Israel

Hezbollah Building Up Massive Offensive Capabilities Against Israel - By Yaakov Lappin - http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=1116

 

If accurate, a recent report stating that Iran had constructed underground missile factories for Hezbollah in Lebanon would indicate a disturbing boost in the Shiite terror organization's ability to self-produce weapons.

 

The Israeli defense establishment already sees Hezbollah as a powerful and radical army, rather than a 'mere' terror organization due to its deep and sophisticated weaponry, and its hierarchical command structure.

 

The ability to manufacture destructive rockets and missiles would now mean that Hezbollah is no longer entirely reliant on arms trafficking from Iran and Syria in order to wage war against Israel.

 

The recent report, made available by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), was published in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Jarida. 

 

It cites an aide to the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as its source. The IRGC's Quds Force is an elite unit that runs Iran's extensive overseas operations to arm, finance, and strengthen Iran's regional proxies.

 

According to the Kuwaiti report, the IRGC built the missile-making facilities more than 50 meters underground, and fortified them against air strikes before handing control over to Hezbollah three months ago.

 

According to Ely Karmon, a Hezbollah expert and a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, the report is well within the realm of possibility. 

 

He pointed to a 2015 statement made by the IRGC's Aerospace Force commander, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, boasting that Tehran has provided "Syria, Iraq, Palestine and the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance group with the needed know-how to produce missiles."

 

Assessing the latest Kuwaiti report, Karmon said that it is "possible that these Hezbollah military factories are in the Quseyr area in Syria, and not in Lebanon." Quseyr is an area of western Syria that has come under Hezbollah control in recent years, after being seized from Sunni rebel organizations.

 

Israel has bombed targets in the area in the past, Karmon noted, likely as part of Israel's covert program to selectively disrupt Hezbollah's force build-up.

 

In November, Hezbollah paraded its heavy weaponry in Quseyr -- including tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery guns and missile launchers.

 

The Kuwaiti report also claimed that "a special department has been established at the IRGC's Imam Hossein University [in Tehran] to train Lebanese and other experts, and hundreds of experts have already been trained."

 

The missile factories reportedly can produce surface-to-surface missiles with a range of more than 500 kilometers - in other words, missiles capable of hitting anywhere in Israel, as well as Israeli ships and Israel's offshore gas rigs in the Mediterranean Sea. 

 

The Hezbollah production sites can also be used to make machine guns, mortars and anti-aircraft guns.

 

Since the end of its 2006 war with Israel, Hezbollah has stockpiled an arsenal totaling 120,000 missiles -- one of the largest in the world. 

 

The vast majority of these arms were manufactured in Iran and Syria, and smuggled into Lebanon. A growing number of these weapons are guided rockets and missiles.

 

And Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah are continuing regardless of whether Hezbollah has access to its own missile factories. 

 

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided details about "the ongoing Iranian attempt to transfer weapons, advanced weapons, to Hezbollah, via Syria," when he visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

 

According to reports, Hezbollah is also training elite terror cells to infiltrate Israel during the next war, and to temporarily 'conquer' northern Israeli communities in a bid to demoralize the Jewish state.

 

These preparations, it is safe to assume, are being closely monitored by Israel.

 

Hezbollah's wartime experience fighting for the Assad regime in Syria has also boosted its power. 

 

The best form of training for combat is combat itself, and for the past four years, Hezbollah and its operatives have been fighting with Iranian commanders and technology on the battlefields of Syria.

 

Meanwhile, back in Lebanon, Hezbollah has embedded the vast majority of its bases, rocket launchers and command posts into civilian areas, including a massive maze of underground tunnels and subterranean compounds.

 

But all is not well for Hezbollah.

 

The terror group is facing a dramatic economic crisis, due to a shortage of cash flow from Iran, which is still awaiting funds from its nuclear deal with the West. 

 

Additionally, the fact that Hezbollah has sustained more than 1,500 casualties in Syria has demoralized sections of its traditional Lebanese Shiite support base.

 

Nevertheless, Hezbollah is pushing to build up its massive offensive capabilities against Israel.

 

In addition to its efforts to obtain more rockets and missiles, Hezbollah's leader -- Hassan Nasrallah -- has repeatedly threatened to strike Israeli strategic targets, such as ships carrying industrial ammonia to the Israeli city of Haifa, and Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona.

 

This does not mean that Hezbollah is seeking a conflict with Israel right now. But it does mean that should a new war erupt in the future, Israel's civilian population will face unprecedented threats.

 

Israel's defense establishment is making its own preparations to meet these threats, and to counter Hezbollah -- which is turning into a dangerous, and even more deadly, adversary.

 

Israel Plans Mass Evacuation if War Erupts Again - http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/03/22/israel-plans-mass-evacuation-war-erupts/

 

If Islamic militants in Gaza or Lebanon go to war with Israel, they could find their usual targets empty.

 

Israel is drawing up contingency plans to evacuate up to a quarter-million civilians from border communities to protect them from attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah or other Islamic militant groups.

 

The mass evacuations would be the biggest in Israel's history, part of a bigger plan where the army works with municipalities to keep civilians safe.

 

All sides have been preparing in case a new round of warfare breaks out, although Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group sworn to Israel's destruction, currently is tied down in Syria's civil war fighting in support of President Bashar Assad. It also comes amid an uptick in tensions between Israel, Syria and Hezbollah.

 

Each side has warned that a new conflict would be worse than previous ones. Hezbollah fired more than 4,000 rockets on Israeli communities in the 2006 war, while Israel bombarded militant targets in southern Lebanon. The month of fighting killed an estimated 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, as well as 44 Israeli civilians and 121 Israeli soldiers.

 

In 2014, 50 days of fighting between Israel and Gaza's Islamic militant Hamas rulers killed an estimated 2,100 Palestinians, six Israeli civilians and 66 Israeli soldiers. There was widespread devastation in Gaza and thousands of rockets and mortars fired by Hamas and other Islamic militants at Israeli towns and cities.

 

Israel says Hezbollah and Hamas have rebuilt larger arsenals capable of hitting the entire country. Elements of the evacuation plan, codenamed "Safe Distance," were disclosed by a senior Israeli officer in an interview to The Associated Press.

 

"In 2017, all of Israel is under threat," said Col. Itzik Bar of the military's Homefront Command. Preparations are underway for Israel to deal with "very high amounts" of incoming fire, he said.

 

Bar pointed out that Hezbollah has gained battle experience from fighting alongside Assad's forces and that Hassan Nasrallah, the Shiite group's chief, has recently increased his rhetoric about attacking Israel.

 

The idea is to "remove the threat by not having civilians there," Bar said. "We want a meeting of army and Hezbollah forces and not civilians with Hezbollah forces."

 

The evacuation plan would apply mainly to communities adjacent to the borders, he said.

 

"In places where we understand there is a great danger to civilians, for example, where we won't be able to supply defenses or supply deterrence ... we will evacuate," Bar said.

 

Evacuees would be housed in existing infrastructure, including hotels, schools and Kibbutz guest houses, he said.

 

The scope of evacuations would depend on the situation, but all told, the plans cover up to 250,000 people who would be moved to safety if there is a conflict on multiple fronts, he said. Israel has a population of about 8.5 million.

 

Small core groups would stay behind in evacuated areas to maintain vital infrastructure and ensure that communities "function the day after the fighting," he said.

 

Another senior security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with protocol, said the idea resulted from lessons learned in the 2014 Gaza war, in which communities were not evacuated but residents eventually left on their own.

 

Tens of thousands of Israelis left their homes near the Gaza border as the fighting dragged on, turning some areas into ghost towns. The exodus was sparked by Palestinian shelling along with the fear of heavily armed Gaza militants infiltrating Israel through tunnels.

 

Border communities vulnerable to mortars are the most in danger, he said.

 

Israel's "Iron Dome" defense system was seen as a game-changer in the 2014 war, ensuring a decisive protective edge from short-range rockets fired from Gaza. But the security official said there were not enough of the defensive systems to cover attacks on multiple fronts.

 

He said Hezbollah has significantly built up its weapons stockpile since the 2006 war and has upgraded its arsenal to about 150,000 missiles.

 

Israel has made it clear it will act to prevent Hezbollah getting advanced munitions and is widely believed to have carried out several airstrikes in recent years on weapons convoys destined for the militant group. On Friday, it made a rare admission of such a strike after Syria fired missiles at its jets.

 

However, the official said Israel fears that some advanced weapons like surface-to-sea weapons or anti-aircraft missiles might already have reached Hezbollah.

 

Israel's military chief, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, told an academic conference Tuesday that Hezbollah's top military commander was killed in Syria in May 2016 by rivals within the group. The announcement was the latest sign of an escalating feud between Israel and Hezbollah.

 

He said the death of Mustafa Badreddine illustrated "the depth of the internal crisis within Hezbollah." He also said it reflected "the extent of the cruelty, complexity and tension between Hezbollah and its patron Iran."

 

An Israeli military official said Israel believes the order to kill Badreddine was given by Hezbollah's leader Nasrallah.

 

Israeli intelligence believes Badreddine had been feuding with Iranian military commanders in Syria over the heavy losses his group had suffered on the battlefield.

 

Israel, meanwhile, has been building up its missile defenses. A system called "David's Sling" to intercept medium-range missiles from Hezbollah is due to become operational in early April. That would mark the completion of a multilayer missile defense system that includes Iron Dome and Arrow, designed to intercept long-range ballistic missiles - of the type possessed by Iran - high in the stratosphere.

 

The military also has vastly improved its early warning systems, according to Bar, the Israeli colonel.

 

Technology has come a long way since 1991 when air raid sirens sent Israelis nationwide scurrying to bomb shelters when Iraq fired Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. In the 2014 Gaza war, sirens warned of incoming rocket attacks on wide areas.

 

Bar said the system has been narrowed down and improved "dramatically" with more than 3,000 different warning zones. Now only civilians in the line of fire will need to take shelter, while others in the same city won't, he said.

 

An annual intelligence assessment found Hezbollah or Hamas probably are not interested in sparking a war in 2017, but it warned of the danger of a dynamic of escalation leading to conflict. In February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Hezbollah was not seeking a resumption of hostilities. But he vowed that if war did begin, his forces would strike Israel's Dimona nuclear facilities,

 

Israeli officials have in turn escalated the rhetoric with Lebanon, citing concern about recent comments made by Lebanese President Michel Aoun, a strong Hezbollah ally who was elected head of state in October.

 

In an interview last month with an Egyptian TV network, Aoun said Hezbollah "has a complementary role" to the Lebanese army. As long as the Lebanese army is not strong enough to battle Israel ... we feel the need for its existence," he said. The army's newly appointed commander also has vowed to boost its capabilities.

 

Several Hamas officials say the group does not seek a confrontation with Israel now, but that it has developed its arsenal and restored its capabilities to even greater amount than before the 2014 war. They did not specify numbers.

 

Reports in Gaza suggest Hamas completed repairs to dozens of attack tunnels used to infiltrate Israel that were damaged in 2014.

 

The Real Face of Jordan - Caroline B. Glick - http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-real-face-of-Jordan-484720

 

Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel. It's ugly.

 

Jordan is the country to Israel's east with which Israel has had a formal peace for 23 years.

 

And its people hate Israel, and Jews, even more than the Iranians do.

 

Every once in a while, the Jordanian people are given a chance to express how they really feel about Israel. It's ugly.

 

Twenty years ago, on March 13, 1997, 7th and 8th grade girls from the AMIT Fuerst junior high school for girls in Beit Shemesh packed box lunches and boarded a school bus that was to take them to the Jordan Valley for a class trip. The high point of the day was the scheduled visit to the so-called "Island of Peace."

 

The area, adjacent to the Naharayim electricity station, encompasses lands Israel ceded to Jordan in the 1994 peace treaty and Jordan leased back to Israel for continued cultivation by the Jewish farmers from Ashdot Yaakov who had bought the lands and farmed them for decades.

 

Israel's formal transfer of sovereignty - and Jordan's recognition of Jewish land rights to the area - were emblematic of the notion that the peace treaty was more than a piece of paper. Here, officials boasted, at the Island of Peace, we saw on-theground proof that Jordan and Israel were now peaceful neighbors.

 

Just as Americans in California can spend a night at the bars in Tijuana and then sleep it off in their beds in San Diego, so, the thinking went, after three years of formal peace, Israeli schoolgirls could eat their box lunches in Jordan, at the Island of Peace, and be home in time for dinner in Beit Shemesh.

 

Shortly after they alighted their buses, that illusion came to a brutal end.

 

The children were massacred.

 

A Jordanian policeman named of Ahmad Daqamseh, who was supposed to be protecting them, instead opened fire with his automatic rifle.

 

He murdered seven girls and wounded six more.

 

On Jordanian territory, the guests of the kingdom, the girls had no one to protect them. Daqamseh would have kept on killing and wounding, but his weapon jammed.

 

In the days that followed, Israel saw two faces of Jordan and with them, the true nature of the peace it had achieved.

 

On the one hand, in an extraordinary act of kindness and humility, King Hussein came to Israel and paid condolence calls at the homes of all seven girls. He bowed before their parents and asked for forgiveness.

 

On the other hand, Hussein's subjects celebrated Daqamseh as a hero.

 

The Jordanian court system went out of its way not to treat him like a murderer. Instead of receiving the death penalty for his crime - as he would have received if his victims hadn't been Jewish girls - the judges insisted he was crazy and sentenced him instead to life in prison. Under Jordanian law his sentence translated into 20 years in jail. In other words, Daqamseh received less than three years in jail for every little girl he murdered and no time for the six he wounded.

 

Not satisfied with his sentence, the Jordanian public repeatedly demanded his early release. The public's adulation of Daqamseh was so widespread and deep-seated that in 2014, the majority of Jordan's parliament members voted for his immediate release.

 

Three years earlier, in 2011, Jordan's then-justice minister Hussein Majali extolled Daqamseh as a hero and called for his release.

 

Last week, sentence completed, Daqamseh was released. And within moments of his return, in the dead of night to his village, crowds of supporters emerged from their homes and celebrated their hero.

 

Daqamseh, the supposed madman, never expressed regret for his crime.

 

And now a free man, he was only too happy last week to use his release as a means of justifying, yet again, his crime.

 

"Normalization with Zionists is a lie!" he declared in an interview with Al Jazeera. He went on to call for the conquest of Israel and the destruction of the Jewish state.

 

Jordan owes its existence not to its population nor even to its silver- tongued monarch, Hussein's son Abdullah. It owes its existence to its location. For Israel and the West the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a critical piece of real estate.

 

For Israel, the kingdom is a buffer against Iraq and Syria.

 

For the Americans it is a safe port in the storm in the midst of the Arab world now suffering from convulsions of jihadist revolutions, counterrevolutions, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies.

 

Jordan, which since 2003 has absorbed a million refugees from Iraq and another million from Syria, is viewed by Europeans as a great big refugee camp. It must be kept stable lest the Iraqis and Syrians move on to Europe.

 

If it weren't for Israel and the Western powers, the Hashemite Kingdom would have been overthrown long ago.

 

Today, Jordan is an economic and social tinderbox. Its debt to GDP ratio skyrocketed from 57% to 90% between 2011 and 2016. Youth unemployment, while officially reported at 14%, actually stands at 38%.

 

Jordan, which is the second-poorest state in terms of its available water sources, relies on Israeli exports of water to survive. Its government is its largest employer. Its largest export is its people, whose remittances to their relatives back home keep 350,000 families afloat. And those remittances have fallen off dramatically in recent years due to the drop in oil prices on the world market.

 

The Muslim Brotherhood is the second largest political force in the country. Although Jordanians were revolted in 2015 when Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria burned alive a downed Jordanian pilot, ISIS has no shortage of sympathizers in wide swaths of Jordanian society. More than 2,000 Jordanians joined ISIS in Syria and several thousand more ISIS members and sympathizers are at large throughout the kingdom.

 

Whereas Palestinians used to make up an absolute majority of the population, leading many to observe over the years that the real Palestine is Jordan, since the Iraqi and Syria refugees swelled the ranks of the population, the Palestinian majority has been diminished.

 

Jordan is a reminder that nation building in the Arab world is a dangerous proposition. With each passing year, the US provides Jordan with more and more military and civilian aid to keep the regime afloat. And with each passing year, voices praising Daqamseh and his ilk continue to expand in numbers and volume.

 

Jordan shows that the concept of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is of limited value. So long as the hearts and the minds of the people of the Arab world are filled with conspiracy theories about Jews, and inspired by visions of jihad and destruction that render mass murderers of innocent schoolchildren heroes, the notion that genuine peace is possible is both irrational and irresponsible.

 

Recently it was reported that last October, Israel's ambassador to Jordan Einat Schlein gave a pessimistic assessment of Jordan's future prospects to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkott. Eisenkott reportedly reacted to her briefing by suggesting that Israel needs to figure out a way to help the regime to survive.

 

Eisenkott was correct, of course.

 

Israel, which now faces a nightmare situation along its border with post-civil war Syria, does not want to face the prospect of a post-Hashemite Jordan, where the people will rule, on its doorstep.

 

But Israel can ill afford to assume that this will not happen one day, and plan accordingly.

 

Under the circumstances, the only way to safeguard against the day when Daqasmeh and his supporters rule Jordan is to apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and encourage tens of thousands of Israelis to settle down along the sparsely populated eastern border.

 

After the massacre, the parents of the dead children and the public as a whole demanded to know why the school hadn't smuggled armed guards into the Island of Peace to protect them. Their question was a reasonable one.

 

Daqamseh was able to kill those girls because we let down our guard.

 

The only way to prevent that from happening again - writ large - is to reinforce that guard by reinforcing our control over eastern Israel.

 

23 years after the peace was signed, nothing has changed in the Kingdom of Jordan. No hearts and minds have been turned in our favor. The peace treaty has not protected us. The only thing that protects our children is our ability and willingness to use our weapons to protect them from our hate-drenched neighbors with whom we share treaties of peace.