Word: hezbollah
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...Jewish state's army set up home in Lebanon 22 years ago to protect its northern borders from attacks by Palestinian and later by Lebanese guerrillas. But the occupation became Israel's albatross as it lost hundreds of soldiers over the years and still failed to eliminate Hezbollah. Israel had hoped to negotiate its withdrawal as part of a wider peace agreement with Syria, which would then police southern Lebanon. But despite the breakdown of those talks, Prime Minister Ehud Barak was under strong domestic pressure to end a deeply unpopular occupation...
...Having called Syria's bluff by withdrawing from Lebanon without an agreement with Damascus, Israel is now forced to find a way of preventing rocket attacks from Hezbollah or dissident Palestinian groups. It has warned that any attacks will be met with overwhelming force in the form of air strikes - and it has made very clear that it will include Syria's extensive military installations in Lebanon on the target list. But Israel's hasty retreat left a lot of weapons in the hands of local militants who're not necessarily under Hezbollah's (or any body else's) discipline...
...Syria's President Hafez Assad. He had warned Israel that leaving Lebanon without a Syrian security guarantee would leave the Jewish state dangerously exposed; now he has to consider whether to allow or encourage further attacks on Israel or to keep the peace. While it doesn?t directly control Hezbollah, Syria tolerates and at times encourages the guerrillas' actions against Israel, and also acknowledges it has the power to stop them. While Assad will be tempted to allow a period of instability along the border to underscore Syria?s indispensability to Israel's security, the danger is that Israeli retaliation...
...HEZBOLLAH...
...absence of a peace deal with Syria - which Barak had hoped would rein in Hezbollah - Israel had hoped that its Lebanese allies would hold their own long enough to string a line of U.N. peacekeepers between the guerrillas and the Israeli border. But the instantaneous collapse of the South Lebanon Army has rendered that impossible, even in the unlikely event that the U.N. force, whose role in Lebanon has never been more than that of spectators, had been willing to insert itself between two armies who have reached no peace agreement. That leaves Israel's northernmost population centers vulnerable...