Ahmadinejad heads to Lebanon’s southern region

BEIRUT/OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Agencies)
Israelis wary ahead of Ahmadinejad border tour

Hezbollah supporters used mosque loudspeakers Thursday to rally crowds ahead of a trip by
Iran’s president to southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, a visit the U.S. and Israel have called intentionally provocative.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Lebanon on Wednesday to a rapturous welcome organized by Hezbollah. His country is the main patron of the Shiite militant group, the most powerful military force in Lebanon.

On Thursday, Ahmadinejad is scheduled to make a trip to the Shiite heartland in the south and the Israeli border, which will emphasize Iran’s support for Hezbollah’s fight with Israel.

Residents of southern Lebanese villages were heading to Bint Jbeil, a border village that was bombed during the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war, to greet the Iranian president Thursday afternoon. The village, barely two and a half miles (four kilometers) from the border, is dubbed “the capital of resistance” because it was a center for Hezbollah guerrilla action against Israel during Israel’s 18-year occupation of the south, which ended in 2000.

Many students in the south skipped school Thursday to await Ahmadinejad.

His arrival also exacerbated fears among many Lebanese — particularly Sunnis and Christians — that Iran and Hezbollah are seeking to impose their will on the country and possibly pull Lebanon into a conflict with Israel. Many say the trip could aggravate tensions in a country with a long history of sectarian strife.

	It is a provocative and destabilizing visit
FM spokesman Yigal Palmor

Israelis wary ahead of Ahmadinejad border tour

Israelis were on Thursday warily watching their northern border for a rare opportunity to see up close the arch-enemy of Israel– Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad, who is on a two-day trip to Lebanon, was expected to make a controversial tour of the southern border region during the afternoon which has been slammed by the United States and Israel as “provocative.”

Southern Lebanon is often seen as the frontline in a proxy war between Israel and Iran.

While Israeli leaders slammed the visit as a provocation, for many ordinary people it presents a chance to glimpse the Iranian leader, a man deeply reviled in Israel for his questioning of the Nazi Holocaust and predictions of the Jewish state’s demise.

“It is a provocative and destabilizing visit,” foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP. “It appears his intentions are blatantly hostile and he is coming to play with fire.”

Ahmadinejad’s visit is “like a landlord visiting his domain,” Palmor said, while other officials said the move signified the final transformation of Israel’s northern neighbor into an “Iranian client state.”

Thursday’s tour will see the sharp-tongued Iranian leader coming the closest he has ever been to the Jewish state, standing just four kilometers (little more than two miles) from the border as he tours villages destroyed during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

He is set to stop in Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah bastion devastated during the war, and in Qana, targeted in 1996 and again in 2006 by deadly Israeli air strikes.

For many, it was the sheer proximity of the Iranian leader that caught their attention. “Ahmadinejad a kilometer away,” said the front page of the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper, while its rival Maariv ran with: “Ahmadinejad — closer than ever.”

	It’s clearly a provocation and it’s not pleasant for Israel.But there is no panic. They also see the opposition inside Lebanon
Eldad Pardo, an Iran analyst at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem

Unlikely to be intimidated

Nevertheless, analysts said it was unlikely Israel would be intimidated by the visit.

“It’s clearly a provocation and it’s not pleasant for Israel,” said Eldad Pardo, an Iran analyst at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “But there is no panic. They also see the opposition inside Lebanon.”

Ahmadinejad’s visit is seen as a boost for Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which fought a devastating 34-day war with Israel in 2006.

Hezbollah has been locked in a stand-off in recent months with the Saudi- and Western-backed parliamentary majority of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, some of whose members have been deeply critical of the Iranian leader’s visit.

Tensions have risen over unconfirmed reports that a U.N.-backed tribunal is set to indict Hezbollah members over the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father, ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, in a massive car bombing on the Beirut seafront.

During the 2006 war, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets, many supplied by Iran, into northern Israel in a conflict which killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and around 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.

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