Hezbollah prepares for 'victory' rally in bombed Beirut suburbs

Hundreds of thousands of people packed Beirut’s bombed-out suburbs for a Hezbollah “victory over Israel” rally today, where guerrilla leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah was expected to deliver a historic speech about his group’s weapons.

Roads toward Lebanon’s capital were jammed with cars and buses waving Hezbollah flags, ahead of what was billed as the country’s largest rally to showcase the group’s insistence that it won’t disarm.

Hundreds of Hezbollah supporters from across south Lebanon began marching toward Beirut a day earlier.

Nasrallah will deliver a “landmark historic speech” about his group’s weapons, Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahhal said. Nasrallah will outline “prospects for the next stage in Lebanon” and address international calls for his group’s disarmament, as well as the deployment of UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon, which for years has been controlled by the militant group, Rahhal said.

The UN-brokered cease-fire that ended fighting between the guerrillas and Israel on August 14 calls for Hezbollah to eventually be stripped of its weapons, but Nasrallah has so far been defiant.

The group would not say whether Nasrallah would speak in person or address the rally by video link. But Lebanon’s two leading newspapers, An-Nahar and As-Safir, reported that Nasrallah would show up.

Nasrallah’s presence would serve as “a strategic, political and security challenge to all Israeli threats” to kill him, As-Safir reported.

It would be the guerrilla leader’s first public appearance since July 12, when Hezbollah’s cross-border capture of two Israeli soldiers sparked a 34-day war and forced him into hiding.

Nasrallah had called for the rally to celebrate what he described as the “divine and historic victory” over Israel. It was seen as a show of Hezbollah’s strength at a time of increased friction with the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora.

Hezbollah’s popularity among Shiites soared after it withstood weeks of punishing Israeli bombardment and kept firing rockets into northern Israel. The group has refused to give up its weapons. But the pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian group has come under renewed criticism from anti-Syrian factions who form a majority in Lebanon’s government and accuse Hezbollah of doing Damascus’ and Tehran’s bidding.

Hezbollah is armed with thousands of rockets and Nasrallah has said his arsenal survived the Israeli onslaught. He boasted in a TV interview last week that the guerrillas – and their weapons – were still at the Israeli border in south Lebanon.

The guerrillas have long kept a low profile. They rarely carry weapons in public and have sought to calm the fears of other religious communities in Lebanon by insisting that their arms are to fight Israel and won’t be turned against their fellow Lebanese. But many Christian and Druse minorities, as well as the large Sunni Muslim community, are unconvinced and have called for the state and its military to be the only armed force in the country.

As Hezbollah celebrated, Israeli soldiers continued to withdraw from south Lebanon, in an area south of the Mediterranean coastal town of Naqoura, and near Maiss al-Jabal in the northern Galilee panhandle, a UN statement said.

A statement by the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, said Indian and Ghanaian peacekeepers would set up checkpoints and conduct patrols in order to confirm the Israeli withdrawal and co-ordinate the deployment of Lebanese army units to the area tomorrow.

UNIFIL’s commander, French Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini, welcomed the latest withdrawal, which meant Israeli troops have vacated most of south Lebanon.

“I expect the rest of the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) troops to finalise their withdrawal by the end of the month ... We are almost there,” he said.

In Beirut’s southern suburbs, hundreds of thousands of people had already arrived at the rally site on foot, in buses and in cars, chanting Nasrallah’s name and waving Lebanese and Hezbollah flags. The site, a barren 37-acre area about a mile from the flattened headquarters of the guerrilla group, quickly filled with people, police officials said.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television said thousands of buses, minivans and cars were streaming toward Beirut from the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley. Members of Christian parties and pro-Syrian groups in northern Lebanon were also travelling to the capital to participate in the rally, the broadcast said.

During Israel’s 34-day offensive, it threatened to kill Nasrallah. An attempt to assassinate him now was considered unlikely since it would risk plunging the region back into conflict. However, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would not say in comments published yesterday whether Nasrallah remained a target.

“There is no reason for me to notify Nasrallah through the media how we will act. We will not give him advance notice. He is holding a victory march because he has lost,” Olmert told the Israeli newspaper Maariv.