Hizbullah’s secretary-general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah admitted Friday that the two Lebanese suspects detained and later released by Jordanian authorities were trying to smuggle Katyusha rockets to Palestinian groups in the occupied territories.
Ali Fayyad and Issam Hodroj were arrested in Jordan last November on suspicion of having links with Hizbullah and having plotted to carry out terrorist activities in Jordan. The two men were released Wednesday after the intervention of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, according to what their lawyer, Samih Khreiss, told AFP.
Nasrallah did not indicate whether Fayyad and Hodroje were Hizbullah members, but said that everyone should try to supply the Palestinians with weapons. “I will not say whether we (Hizbullah) are doing it or not,” he said during a celebration of Teacher’s Day at Al-Hasanayn Mosque in Haret Hreik.
In his address, Nasrallah played down the importance of the possible resolutions of the Arab League to be held in Beirut on March 27-28. He said that everyone fears the results of the Arab summit, “because all are expecting weak resolutions.”
“If we add the issue of the return of the (Palestinian) refugees and other details, the so-called Saudi initiative would become a traditional Arab rhetoric about the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said, playing down international and regional attention to the proposal.
Nasrallah repeated the resistance’s call for continued militancy in the occupied territories, saying that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would “be defeated soon.”
“All of Sharon’s policies are wrong and failing,” he said, adding that Israel will ultimately evacuate the Arab territories it occupied in 1967. He suggested that the current violence was a test of wills to see “who can hold on until the end.”
When asked whether he thinks Sharon would allow Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to attend the Arab summit, he replied: “We have to wait and see whether Sharon holds power until then.”
According to the Lebanese Daily Star, Nasrallah also praised the Lebanese Army for uncovering an alleged spy network that was providing Israel with intelligence on Lebanon. “The presence of such networks is expected and we predict that Israel might try to revive its connections with former South Lebanon Army personnel soon,” he said, calling on the government to reconsider its release of former SLA men.
On continued tension in the Shebaa Farms, Nasrallah said that the resistance’s role was “to keep the Israelis on their toes.”
About the ongoing German mediation for a potential exchange of detainees between Israel and Hizbullah, Nasrallah said that the negotiations “are going at a slow pace because of the developments inside Palestine.” German mediators are trying to reach an agreement for the swap of three Israeli soldiers who were seized in the Shebaa Farms last year for Lebanese and other Arabs detained in Israeli prisons. (Albawaba.com)
