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Hezbollah threatens Israel following spy infiltration

[ssba]

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has threatened an incursion into Israel and the use of new potent weapons, having admitted that Israel successfully infiltrated his organisation at a high level.

Israel’s border with Lebanon has been largely quiet since the month-long 2006 Second Lebanon War, during which Israeli forces attempted to quell substantial Hezbollah rocket fire on northern Israeli communities.

However, in a rare public appearance on Lebanese television, Nasrallah warned that his organisation possesses weapons which Israel “could not even imagine.” He claimed that Hezbollah is ready to “conquer the [northern Israeli region] Galilee. We are ready to intervene there and take over. We have everything we need to fight Israel in the future.” Israeli officials have previously warned that in a future conflict, Hezbollah could momentarily capture Israeli territory.

Nasrallah’s threats come at the same time as a candid admission that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency successfully recruited a high-ranking Hezbollah official. Speaking to Al Mayadeen television, Nasrallah said that the spy was arrested and confessed five months ago and that such a “breach” is “part of the battle, it is part of the war between us and Israel.”

During the past two years, Hezbollah fighters have been heavily occupied with fighting on behalf of Syria’s President Assad in that country’s civil war. However, within the last year, Hezbollah has been increasingly visible along the Israeli border. In March, they detonated two explosives against an IDF convoy in the Mount Dov region and have also targeted Israeli forces along the Syrian border.

Israeli officials have estimated that Hezbollah has approximately 100,000 rockets at its disposal, ten times the arsenal which Hamas controlled before Operation Protective Edge, posing a significant challenge to the Iron Dome anti-missile system. Former National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror earlier this week estimated Hezbollah’s rocket power to be even larger, commenting that several thousand rockets can reach anywhere in Israel and that it “exceeds the firepower possessed by most of the European states combined.”