'Google Earth images show Hezbollah building new bases' Recently uploaded Google Earth satellite photos show Hezbollah has been building new facilities in southern Lebanon and eastern Bekaa Valley along Syrian border, the Lebanese Daily Star reports • Facilities include what appear to be a driving course, firing range and an urban terrain assault course.

Hezbollah has been building new bases and facilities in southern Lebanon and in the eastern Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border, the Lebanese Daily Star reported Tuesday, basing the report on recently uploaded Google Earth satellite images.

According to imagery analysts and European intelligence officials quoted by the Daily Star, the images show what appears to be a Hezbollah training base in an area of secluded hills near the border with Syria. The base includes what is suspected to be a driving course, a 100-meter firing range and a possible urban terrain assault course. The experts also indicated that the training base began construction in 2006, the year Hezbollah engaged in a war with Israel.

The images also showed a great deal of overt construction activity in Hezbollah-dominated areas in southern Lebanon, particularly in hills south of the town of Jezzine, which served as the terrorist organization's main line of defense after the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the report said.

Hezbollah's construction activity suggests the organization has made efforts to prepare for another possible confrontation with Israel. However, the construction's unobstructed visibility to Israeli aerial reconnaissance and Western satellite surveillance calls into question the purpose of the facilities, The Daily Star said.

The images of Hezbollah's activity in the Bekaa Valley date May 21, 2011, and show considerable progress in construction, including new tracks and buildings, compared to a previous image from November 2005.

The new construction may be for civilian use, but four features of the new construction raise suspicion, the paper reported. The driving course, consisting of a track with a series of hairpin turns, and unidentified object consisting of three graded strips in the shape of an arrow, two parallel rows of three small roofless buildings with a large structure at the southern end, and the firing range some 400 meters southwest of the other three facilities.

The Google Earth images show what looks like a white SUV parked at the entrance of the site.

If the site is being used for military purposes, it suggests Hezbollah is not making an effort to conceal its facilities, which may indicate that the site is being used only for specialized, not regular, training, the Daily Star said.

In the Jezzine area in southern Lebanon, several new buildings and roads have been spotted in areas that were sealed off by Hezbollah after the last war with Israel. According to The Daily Star, these security pockets are not secret.

"It is possible that the construction is genuinely of a civilian nature and is providing the foundation for future agricultural or industrial projects. But there is another alternative. Hezbollah’s military leaders are masters of deception, which raises the possibility that the construction activity is nothing more than a decoy to keep everyone guessing while the militarily significant work is conducted under camouflage and in secrecy elsewhere," the report said.

Hizbullah Discusses Its Operational Plan for War with Israel: Missile Fire on Tel Aviv and Conquest of the Galilee

• In recent weeks Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah held a series of meetings with his top-level military command as well as field commanders responsible for preparing for war with Israel. According to a source close to Hizbullah, Nasrallah's operational directive was that in the next military conflict with Israel, Hizbullah will hit Tel Aviv with missiles at the outset of the war, while also dispatching forces to conquer the Galilee.

• Hizbullah forces are being trained to fire at least ten thousand missiles, right at the war's outset, at military and strategic targets such as airfields, military camps, and vital facilities including maritime ones, followed by the firing of rockets from launch sites whose location will come as a surprise to Israel.

• The operational plan was formulated in tandem with senior Iranian strategic experts and will include a force of five thousand fighters who have recently trained in Iran, tasked with taking over designated zones in northern Israel including Nahariya, Shlomi, and Carmiel.

• It was said that engineering units of the Iranian army had mined areas in the eastern Bekaa Valley that were seen as possible landing sites for Israeli special forces, and that Hizbullah had equipped itself with "smart" Iranian anti-tank missiles that can disrupt the defensive systems of Israel's Merkava tanks.

• Nasrallah's recent escalation of public statements stems from heightened fear in Hizbullah that an Israeli and/or American attack on Iran is drawing nearer. As a strategic arm of Iran, Hizbullah sees itself as Iran's first line of defense against Israel.

Hezbullah has enough votes to take over Lebanon

Hezbollah Theme Park Opens

NYT: Iran Renews Nasser's Three "No's" - In the Mideast, No Politics but God’s

BEIRUT — A line was uttered this month by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that drew little notice in between his stentorian asides but said a great deal about politics today for Israelis, Palestinians and the larger Arab world.

Israel comes face to face with the man who would wipe it off the map Lebanon's southern border, so often a battleground, hosted the latest leg of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative tour yesterday

He looks like a shepherd, but he might have been the Shah. And there he was last night, the President of Iran, one of the triple pillars of the "Axis of evil", scarcely two miles from the border of that holy of holies which every American president must support – the State of Israel, or the "Jewish State of Israel", as its government claims it to be. The Shia Muslim crowds loved Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They adored him. For weeks, they had been told he was coming. Shah-like was his welcome.

Hezbollah's Gift For Ahmadinejad: An Israeli Rifle

The leader of Hezbollah gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a unique gift to cap off his two-day trip to Lebanon — an Israeli assault rifle captured during the militant group's 2006 war with the Jewish state.

Hezbollah chief echoes Iran’s call for Israel to disappear

BEIRUT — Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah echoed Iran’s call on Wednesday for Israel to disappear, speaking during a mass rally in Beirut organised in honour of visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“President Ahmadinejad is right when he says Israel is illegitimate and should cease to exist,” Nasrallah told an ecstatic crowd of tens of thousands via video link.

Ahmadinejad, who has called Israel a “tumour,” has denied the Holocaust and repeatedly said the Jewish state is “doomed to be wiped off the map.”

As recently as last month, he said the people of the Middle East are “capable of removing the Zionist regime” from the world scene.

Chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel,” Hezbollah supporters turned out en masse in the southern suburb of Beirut they control to welcome Ahmadinejad, whose country is a major financial, military and ideological supporter of their militant Shiite group.

A beaming Ahmadinejad, who arrived in Lebanon Wednesday morning on a two-day visit, waved at the crowd before taking a seat next to Hezbollah number two Naim Qassem.

The rally was held at an outdoor stadium where Iranian flags and photos of Ahmadinejad were hoisted alongside two life-sized pictures of overturned Israeli Merkava tanks.

A photo of a crying Israeli soldier bearing the message “Israel has fallen” was also on display as video footage of the 2006 war aired on a giant screen.

“Iran is the heartbeat of the resistance,” said Hussein Khawi, 50, who was at the rally. “Israel won’t dare come near south Lebanon anymore.”

Added Hajj Hussein, a 65-year-old Lebanese who resides in Canada: “I came to thank Ahmadinejad for what he offered us.

“Iran stands by us and that means victory is ours.”

Ahmadinejad’s trip is seen as a major boost for Hezbollah but has drawn criticism from members of Lebanon’s pro-Western parliamentary majority who see it as a bid to portray the country as “an Iranian base on the Mediterranean.”

But Nasrallah shot down fears that Iran, which wields considerable political clout in Lebanon through its Shiite proxy, had plans for an Islamic revolution in the tiny Mediterranean country.

“There are those ... who speak of an Iranian project for Palestine, for Lebanon, for the Arab region ... and work to strike fear into governments and peoples,” Nasrallah said.

“What Iran wants for Lebanon is what the Lebanese want. What Iran wants in Palestine is what the Palestinians want. That is the Iranian project.”

The highlight of Ahmadinejad’s trip comes on Thursday when he will be just a few kilometres (miles) away from the Israeli border as he tours southern villages destroyed during the devastating 2006 war between Hezbollah and the Jewish state.

Iran has been a major donor in the reconstruction of southern Lebanon following the month-long war, and Ahmadinejad is set to receive a hero’s welcome in the area.

But Ahmadinejad’s visit, his first since he was elected in 2005, comes at a sensitive time in politically turbulent Lebanon.

Hezbollah is locked in a standoff with Sunni Prime Minister Saad Hariri over unconfirmed reports that a UN-backed tribunal is set to indict members of the Shiite militant group over the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father, ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.

Tensions over the tribunal have grown steadily in recent weeks, raising fears of renewed sectarian violence and the collapse of Lebanon’s hard-fought national unity government.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/Hezbollah+chief+echoes+Iran+call+Israel+disappear/3665383/story.html#ixzz12LhVBD4R

NYT: Stronger Hezbollah Emboldened for Fights Ahead

AITA AL SHAAB, Lebanon — It was from this shrub-ringed border town that Hezbollah instigated its war with Israel in 2006, and supporters of the militant Shiite movement sound almost disappointed that they have not fought since.