Israel Continues its Withdrawal from Lebanon While Hizbollah Refuses to Disarm

On the one side, Israel pulled its forces out of two more areas in South Lebanon today, and French Major General Alain Pelligrini, the head of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said that Israel should have completed its withdrawal from Lebanon by the end of the month. On the other side, Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, speaking at a huge "victory" valley today, rejected international calls to disarm his Lebanese guerrillas and said that Hezbollah still had more than 20,000 rockets after a month of war with Israel. According to Reuters, Nasrallah warned the reinforced United Nations peacekeepers who are deploying in southern Lebanon as Israeli forces withdraw not to seek confrontation with Hizbollah. "Your [the UN Peacekeepers] mission is not to spy on Hizbollah or to disarm the resistance," he told a crowd packed into the Shi'ite Muslim suburbs. "There is no army in the world that can (force us) to drop our weapons from our hands, from our grip," he declared.

Actually, the Israel Defense Forces can and will cause Hizbollah's weapons to drop from their cold dead hands, if Israel's leaders and the world community allows the IDF to do the job. Israel is complying with Security Council Resolution No. 1701, the basis for the current ceasefire, while Hizbollah flaunts its intention not to comply before the world. Will the UN now act? Probably not. As the above photo of Nasrallah being chummy with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan illustrates, in the eyes of the world body, Israel can do no right and its enemies no wrong.