Www.startfor.com had an interesting perspective on the latest Israeli & Lebanon border clash last week.
Startfor said that clashes on the Israeli-Lebanese border normally involve Hezbollah guerrillas and the last major incident happened four years ago and resulted in the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war. However, this time the Lebanese army appeared to have opened fire on Israeli troops engaged in routine maintenance of the border fence. The Israeli troops responded with small arms, artillery and attack helicopters. Three Lebanese troops, one Israeli soldier and a journalist lost their lives in the clash.
The Startfor report went on to say that since the war in the summer of 2006 – especially given its outcome in which Israel did not decisively defeat Hezbollah – there has been a constant fear as to when the next war would take place between Israel and pro-Iranian Lebanese Shia Islamist guerrillas.
There have been various reports suggesting that the armed clash may have been engineered by Hezbollah to deflect attention away from the fact that the group is being implicated in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al Hariri.
A news report on Saturday said that the Lebanese President Michel Suleiman toured the area where Lebanese and Israeli military forces clashed and vowed to arm the country’s troops with advanced weaponry.
It seems that the Lebanese Army is becoming more and more a tool of Hezbollah.
