Beiru, May 02: The chief of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement said on Saturday it had a “legal” right to own any weapon it wishes to protect his country from Israeli threats.
“The Scud (issue) emerged a while ago… and it created a lot of fuss,” Hassan Nasrallah said in his first public reaction to the controversy, according to a statement from Hezbollah’s press office.
“We do not confirm or deny if we have received weapons or not, so we do not comment and we will not comment,” he told a committee in charge of security, financial and logistical backing for Hezbollah, adding: “This is our position.”
Hezbollah has a “legal and humanitarian right to own any weapon it wants to protect people oppressed and threatened by Israel’s cancerous presence.”
The controversy erupted in April when Israeli President Shimon Peres accused Syria of supplying its Lebanese ally Hezbollah with the missiles, a charge Damascus denied.
Washington, which has sought a rapprochement with Damascus, further fed the controversy as Defence Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran and Syria of arming Hezbollah with sophisticated weaponry, without specifying they were Scuds.
Gates warned at a joint news conference Tuesday with Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak that Hezbollah has “far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world.”
On Saturday Nasrallah dismissed talk that the controversy about Hezbollah weaponry was a prelude to a new armed conflict.
“When the US defence minister Gates says that Hezbollah has more weapons than most governments in the world… whether this is right or wrong, I will not comment,” he said.
“I don’t believe that all this fuss about the missiles is a prelude to a war, and God willing I am right. It is not a climate of war.”
Hezbollah on Friday slammed “interference” in Lebanese affairs by UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen.
“Hezbollah condemns this attempt to create dissent and sedition among the Lebanese under the guise of advice and guidance,” the party said in a statement.
“Roed-Larsen’s continuous attempts to interfere in Lebanese affairs and incite the Lebanese to fight one another are unacceptable for an international official working for peace in the region,” it said.
On Thursday the UN envoy had warned of the need to address the presence in Lebanon of heavily armed groups, which he said was a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, adopted in 2004.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
—Agencies