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The Reporter: Israel's contingency planners see possible fight on three fronts
Leslie Susser

The Israeli army is preparing contingency plans for fighting on three fronts if the U.S. attacks Iraq, The Jerusalem Report has learned. Defense officials say the plans for the coming year cover the possibility of simultaneous warfare against Hizballah in the north, Palestinians in the territories and Iraq to the east. It assumes Hizballah might attack before a U.S. move against Baghdad, to draw world attention to the Israeli-Arab arena and induce Washington to postpone its campaign.

Hizballah leaders are concerned that if the U.S. succeeds in toppling Saddam Hussein they would be next in line in the U.S. war on terror, explains Ely Karmon, an expert on Hizballah at the Herzliyah-based International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism. In a recent paper, he quotes Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah as saying: "We are facing a real battle, in which the fate of the whole conflict will be determined. We have not yet reached the last straight in which we use all the means at our disposal. When we do, Hizballah will use every bullet it has, till the very last one, in an all-out war.

Karmon says Hizballah is highly confident of success; it takes pride in having expelled Israel from South Lebanon, it receives $10 million a month from Iran and now has an estimated 8,000-10,000 Katyu-sha rockets at its disposal. An undisclosed number of these are long-range 220-mm rockets received from Syria over the past few months, which could reach targets in Haifa and beyond.

By attacking Israel, Karmon says, Hizballah hopes to provoke massive retaliation against Syria that would draw first Syria, and then possibly other Arab countries and Iran, into a full-scale war.

But would Syria go along with this, or turn on Hizballah to get Israel off its back? Karmon

quotes a Western diplomat as saying Nasrallah�s influence on Syrian leader Bashar Asad is "hypnotic." But he also points out that the fundamentalist Hizballah and Asad�s secular Ba�athist regime have little in common. Indeed, Hizballah�s long-term goal is to turn Palestine, Lebanon and Syria into Islamic states.

August 26, 2002

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