'Hezbollah drill prepares to 'occupy the Galilee"

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Over 10,000 Hezbollah fighters participated in the organization's largest military exercise to date last week, which included defensive tactics and preparations to occupy the Upper Galilee, Lebanese newspaper Al-Joumhouriareported.

The report noted that the drill lasted three days and the majority of the soldiers that participated in the exercise belonged to special forces.

According to the "informed source," Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is said to have called for the organization to make the appropriate preparations to occupy northern Israel recently.

It is widely believed that any sort of military action that Israel takes against Iran would be followed by a response from the Lebanese Shi'ite paramilitary organization on its northern border. Last Friday, Nasrallah threatened to rain rockets onto Israel's North as part of his public address on Al-Quds Day.

"Hitting these targets with a small number of rockets will turn ... the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zionists to real hell, and we can talk about tens of thousands of dead," said Nasrallah.

The speech followed a report that Hezbollah had received Scud missiles from Syria in April of this year. The missiles were reported to be old and unusable, but the Hezbollah sources confirmed they had a large arsenal of surface-to-surface missiles. Around the same time the IDF came very close to attacking a convoy carrying weapons from Syria to Lebanon, but at the last moment decided against it, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Currently embroiled in a civil war, Syria is an important supply line for Hezbollah, as it connects the Shi'ite Lebanese organization to the Shi'ite regime in Tehran. Hezbollah was reported to be providing military support for the Assad regime as it tries to suppress a rebellion that has already claimed over many thousands of lives. If the Assad regime falls, the Shiite crescent will fragment, and Hezbollah's supply line from Iran will be geographically cut.

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Original piece is http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=282321

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'Hezbollah drill prepares to 'occupy the Galilee"