Excerpts from a New York Times article on Hezbollah by Neil MacFarquhar and Hassan Fattah:

  • Hezbollah needs to reassert its right to maintain its own heavily armed militia against ever louder domestic calls for its disarmament.

  • There are believed to be up to 3,500 active Hezbollah supporters, including some 300 hard-core guerrillas trained under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards who have maintained a presence in Lebanon almost since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

  • In town after town in southern Lebanon, the streets are hung with banners showing the pantheon of Iran’s ruling ayatollahs.

  • Intelligence estimates drawn from recent Congressional testimony suggest that Iran subsidizes Hezbollah with $100 million to $200 million annually. But Hezbollah has also come to rely on financial support from Shiite expatriates in the West. Those funds far outweigh what comes from Iran, said Timur Goksel, a lecturer at the American University in Beirut who spent 20 years working in southern Lebanon as a United Nations official.

  • Hezbollah’s use of the longer-range rockets has led many regional experts to conclude that Iran gave at least tacit approval for the current clash — and it was not just a few rogue Revolutionary Guard advisers in southern Lebanon who decided to let rip with more powerful weapons.

Excerpts from a New York Times article by Katherine Zoepf on the mood in Syria:

  • The mood here in Syria’s capital was defiant, even gleeful. Pop radio stations played jingoistic military marches, and the state-run daily newspaper, Tishreen, reported on a meeting of the ruling Syrian Baath Party by saying, “participants expressed Syria’s firm stance in support of the Lebanese national resistance.”

  • “Yesterday the Syrian Baath party expressed its full support and sympathy for Hezbollah,” said Marwan Kabalan, a political science professor at Damascus University. “It is overt now, because this is no longer something the government wants to hide. People here are very emotional about the whole situation, and many of them wish that Syria would get up and join Hamas and Hezbollah in their battle against Israel . . . [Hezbollah’s] Nasrallah has caused a great deal of embarrassment among the Arab leaders. He is seen as the only Arab leader who can stand by his words and resist Israel . . . Syria has demonstrated once again that it can’t be marginalized. It has succeeded in turning the tables on the Americans. Syria has demonstrated successfully that it is still here and still in control.”

  • Imad Fauzi Shueibi, a political analyst who often works as a consultant to the Syrian government, said “No one can believe that this will stop without a huge victory for Hezbollah and for Syria. I haven’t felt so optimistic since 1973. I think we are closing the noose on Israel. This may be the last battle, and we may be able to redraw the map of the Middle East, but not on the schedule of America’s plan for the greater Middle East.”

The Times on Hezbollah’s missile capabilities:

  • Sources in Beirut said that Hezbollah had been holding back in its initial response to the Israeli action, merely firing salvos of Katyusha rockets. They claimed Nasrallah could now deploy longer-range missiles. According to Jane’s Defence Weekly he has about 100 missiles, some with a range of up to 90 miles, enabling him to hit Tel Aviv.

The Times on a British aircraft carrier being sent to Beirut:

  • The aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious was being prepared last night to sail to the coast of Lebanon to rescue British people stranded by Israeli airstrikes. It will be joined by HMS Bulwark, an amphibious assault warship.

Excerpts from Con Coughlin’s op-ed in The Telegraph:

  • . . . while – for the moment, at least – the Israelis seem content to rely on their overwhelming air supremacy to exact revenge for Hezbollah’s audacious attack, there remains every possibility that the current crisis could result in Israeli troops launching yet another invasion of its Arab neighbours. The only obstacle to such an alarming development is the American President, and he is resolutely against any suggestion that Washington should rein in its key Middle Eastern ally.

  • There is also a genuine fear that Mr Olmert’s inexperience as a military strategist could lead to Israel escalating its current onslaught to truly apocalyptic proportions. The Israeli government has already blamed Syria and Iran for the unrest on its northern border. If the Israelis attempted to punish Damascus for its tacit support of Hezbollah, this would open up a new front not just in the Near East but in the Gulf, where the hardline regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already declared its readiness to come to Syria’s defence.

  • Mr Olmert needs to think long and hard whether the abduction of two Israeli soldiers merits a military escalation that could have truly catastrophic consequences not just for Israel, but the entire world.

Excerpts from Jason Burke’s op-ed in The Guardian:

  • The militia’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has repeatedly said that it would seek to capture Israeli soldiers on or near the border, and has been trying to do so since moving back into the frontier zone following the Israeli withdrawal six years ago.

  • The Jewish state’s strategic doctrine has always relied, along with massive foreign aid, on a powerful, ruthless and immediate response to any threat. As a final bonus, the Hizbollah attack offered an opportunity to restore the ‘deterrence factor’ – a key aim of the hawkish chief of staff who has a significant influence on a government that contains fewer former soldiers than almost any other previous Israeli administration. ‘There has been a progressive decline in deterrence over the past six years and the defence establishment want to re-establish it,’ said Jonathan Spyer, a former adviser on international relations to the Israeli government and a research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Hertzeliya. ‘They see it as a very serious big boy’s game.’

  • Few Lebanese accept Hizbollah’s claim that its aim was to barter the release of the handful of Lebanese still held in Israeli jails: they blame Hizbollah for plunging Lebanon back into war. Everywhere there is widespread recognition that, even if the Lebanese government, with its pro-Syrian President and predominantly anti-Syrian administration and parliament, wanted to rein in Hizbollah, it could not.