Last update - 19:38 25/05/2005
Hezbollah: All of northern Israel in our rocket range
By News Agencies and Haaretz Service
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah Wednesday acknowledged for first time that his Lebanese guerrilla group has more than 12,000 rockets and that all of northern Israel is within reach.
"All of the north of occupied Palestine, its settlements, airports, seaports, fields, factories and farms is under the feet and hands of the Islamic resistance," Nasrallah said.
Nasrallah also said that Hezbollah, under mounting international pressure to disarm, would fight anyone who tried to take away its weapons.
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"Any hand that reaches out to our weapons is an Israeli hand that will be cut off," Nasrallah told supporters on the fifth anniversary of Israel's witdhrawal from southern Lebanon.
"If anyone, anyone, thinks of disarming the resistance we will fight them like the martyrs of Kerbala," he said, referring to a battle in Islamic history central to Shi'ites.
The largely Shi'ite Muslim residents of the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, celebrated Nasrallah's words with fireworks and cheering, witnesses said.
Nasrallah told thousands of supporters in the town of Bint Jbeil, part of a southern strip Israel occupied for 22 years, that Hezbollah has over 12,000 rockets capable of hitting the whole of northern Israel.
But he added that Hizbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, would only use its weapons in defense of Lebanon.
"We do not want to drag the region into a war...We want to protect our country..." he said. "Any thought of disarming the resistance is madness."
A United Nations Security Council resolution adopted in September demanded that Syrian forces pull out and all militias in Lebanon disarm. Damascus withdrew its forces in April.