Lebanon war emboldens Palestinians-security chief

JERUSALEM, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Palestinians waging an almost 6-year-old armed uprising against Israel have been emboldened by the performance of Hizbollah guerrillas in the recent Lebanon war, Israel's domestic intelligence chief said on Tuesday.

The remarks by Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin looked likely to stoke public criticism of the inconclusive 34-day Israeli assault on Hizbollah and of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's vision of unilaterally ceding some occupied land to the Palestinians.

"In general, the terrorist organisations want to adopt the Lebanese model," Diskin told parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. "It has resulted in efforts on their part to build up a deterrent capability against Israel."

He said Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip and West Bank considered Hizbollah's firing of thousands of rockets at the Jewish state during the war a strategic success and admired its use of bunkers to resist Israeli troops and of roving anti-armour crews to destroy or disable Israeli tanks.

In Gaza, which Israel quit in Aug. 2005 after 38 years of occupation, Palestinian factions were stepping up efforts to smuggle in through neighbouring Egypt military grade rockets to bolster their homemade short-range arsenals, Diskin said.

"They have (also) constructed bunkers and anti-tank capabilities of the kind we have seen in the war in southern Lebanon," he said. Militant sources declined to discuss their combat plans, but acknowledged that Hizbollah had already added to its prestige among Palestinians for attacks widely seen in the Arab world as having speeded Israel's withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000.

Though a Shi'ite group with different religious doctrines to the predominantly Sunni Islam practiced in the West Bank and Gaza, Hizbollah has openly backed the Palestinian uprising.

Like the dominant Palestinian militant faction Hamas and smaller Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah advocates Israel's destruction.

DETERRENCE

The Lebanon war was sparked when Hizbollah killed eight Israeli soldiers and abducted two others in a July 12 border raid. At least 1,200 mainly civilian Lebanese and 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed before an Aug. 14 truce.

Israel's failure to retrieve its captive troops, kill Hizbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah or cripple the guerrilla group militarily seriously sapped Olmert's popularity at home.

But the prime minister, who argued that the offensive would boost Israel's military deterrence, got an unexpected validation this week when Nasrallah said in an interview that he would not have ordered the border raid had he known it would mean war.

Diskin said Palestinians had divided views on Israel's handling of the fighting, which began with weeks of shelling from the air, land and sea and was followed by a short ground sweep.

"On the one hand, Israel is perceived as having acted in crazed, unexpected and disproportionate manner, but on the other hand, the Israeli Defence Forces are perceived as an army that does not fight and is afraid of face-to-face combat," he said.

"But they (Palestinians) also see the anger in Israel and are afraid Israel will take it out on them," he said.

Largely eclipsed by the fighting in Lebanon, Israel has been waging a parallel campaign in Gaza to recover a soldier snatched by Hamas and other gunmen in a June 25 cross-border raid. Almost 200 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, have died.

There has also been steady violence in the West Bank, another territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and where Palestinians seek statehood.

Israeli commandos killed two Palestinian militants in a West Bank shootout on Tuesday. Israeli security sources said the dead men, from an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction, were suspected of orchestrating suicide bombings and other attacks under instructions from Hizbollah.

(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza)

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