BEIRUT: Hezbollah stands ready for a showdown with Israel and knows what to target in the event of another conflict, the party’s second-in-command Naim Qassem claimed in an interview published Wednesday.
"We now hold a large and precise bank of Israeli targets, and Israel will have to pay the price for any step it takes," Qassem told the mass-circulation daily An-Nahar.
"Hezbollah has worked to develop its readiness to rise to the challenge should it arise, and we can safely say that in the past four years we have prepared ourselves far more than Israel has," he told the Arabic-language daily which is close to a parliamentary alliance that rivals Hezbollah.
"But that does not mean that war is near," Qassem added.
The last deadly war between Hezbollah and Israel was triggered by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Shia group in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006.
The month-long fighting that ensued destroyed much of Lebanon’s major infrastructure and killed about 1,200 Lebanese, mainly civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the conflict and beefed up a United Nations peacekeeping force deployed in southern Lebanon since 1978.
But tension between the two foes has risen again after Israel in April accused Syria of smuggling Scud missiles to its ally Hezbollah, a charge Damascus denies.
Israel’s military says the Shia group has a stock of some 40,000 rockets and this month published aerial photographs showing what it says is evidence of Hezbollah stockpiling weapons in towns and villages near the border.
