Israel sees Hezbollah surpassing pre-war firepower

JERUSALEM, Feb 19 (Reuters) Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas are replenishing rockets launched or destroyed during their war with Israel last year and will soon have a more powerful arsenal than before, a top Israeli intelligence analyst said today.

The remarks in parliament by Brigadier Yossi Baidatz, chief of research in Israel's Military Intelligence, looked likely to fuel public ire at a 34-day conflict that many Israelis believe undermined their national security by failing to rout Hezbollah.

''Hezbollah is building up more firepower than it had before the war. Some of this ordnance has arrived, and some is still en route from Syria,'' a spokesman for the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee quoted Baidatz as saying in the briefing.

The assessment drew a response from Defence Minister Amir Peretz, who has argued that Israeli forces, by overrunning Hezbollah positions along the border, prepared the groundwork for a more effective UN peacekeeper deployment.

''Power comes down to more than just counting rockets,'' the panel spokesman quoted Peretz as saying at the session. ''Let's remember that Hezbollah's network of outposts has been demolished.

It is not even at a quarter of its pre-war status.'' The Knesset discussion took place amid increasingly defiant rhetoric by Hezbollah, a Shi'ite militia which, since the war, has launched a wave of protests against the Western-backed government in Beirut.

Hezbollah's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said in a speech on Friday his group was stockpiling arms for a possible new round of face-to-face fighting with Israel.

''We in the resistance publicly say that we have weapons. We make public that we are completing our readiness for what is bigger and more dangerous. We make public that we are moving arms to the front,'' Nasrallah told a rally in Beirut.

Israeli and Lebanese troops exchanged fire on the frontier on February 8. No one was hurt.

Israel went to war after Hezbollah killed eight soldiers and abducted two in a July border raid. Around 1,200 mostly civilian Lebanese were killed in the offensive. Hezbollah rocket salvoes and ambushes killed 158 Israelis, most of them troops.

Under an August 14 truce, the United Nations boosted its peacekeeper forces in southern Lebanon, known as UNIFIL.

A UNIFIL spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the statements from Hezbollah and Israel.

UNIFIL has said in the past that its mandate is to ensure Hezbollah does not have a military presence south of the Litani river. UNIFIL is not authorised to monitor for any arms smuggling by Hezbollah from its patrons Syria and Iran, both of which say their support for the group is purely political.

REUTERS AKJ RN1949