Hezbollah is in possession of long-range missiles capable of carrying a chemical warhead, a Lebanese parliamentarian said according to a report Sunday.Khaled Zaher, from the anti-Hezbollah al-Mustaqbal party, told the Saudi al-Watan newspaper that Syrian President Bashar Assad had transferred significant amounts of weaponry to Hezbollah, including the missiles. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps supervised the transfer of the weapons and helped build and design the launching pads in Lebanon, he said.
Zaher alleged that the missiles were deployed in bases in northern Lebanon — near the border with Syria — and in the central Lebanon city of Baalbek, some of them underground. He interpreted recent statements by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who said “Israel will face what it hasn’t faced in the past,” as an assertion that the missiles can reach Tel Aviv.“We consider these bases a threat to regional security and a service to the Iranian agenda,” he said. “This has led us more than once to request that the international community put these military sites under its supervision.”He said that the missiles were deployed in “areas that no one can approach or come close to. This indicates the danger of what these sites possess. We are certain they are long-range missile bases placed exclusively under Hezbollah’s command.”In July, another politician from the March 14 alliance, of which the al-Mustaqbal party is the largest faction, said that Lebanon “is occupied by a terror organization called Hezbollah,” and that anyone who sits in a government with the Shiite group is a traitor.Last week, a defected Syrian general told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that Assad had been sending his chemical weapons to Hezbollah and Iraq in order to avoid giving them up for destruction as he agreed to do according to the terms of a Russian-brokered agreement.Last month, the general, Zaher al-Sakat – who commanded a chemical weapons unit attached to the Syrian army’s Fifth Division — made a similar claim in an interview with the Washington Post. In mid-September Al-Watan reported that Assad was smuggling chemical weapons out of Syria via tunnels connecting Syrian and Lebanese villages, while the Lebanese newspaper Al-Mustaqbal reported that 20 trucks laden with equipment used in the manufacture of chemical weapons were driven across the border from Syria into Iraq.Israel has said in the past it would take action to stop Syrian chemical or advanced, “game-changing” weapons from reaching Hezbollah. A series of airstrikes in early 2013 — widely attributed to Israel — that reportedly destroyed missile convoys heading from Syria into Lebanon as well as damaging a chemical weapons production site, apparently put those words into action.Last week, international inspectors arrived in Damascus to begin the monumental task of overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons in the middle of a civil war.The inspectors from a Netherlands-based chemical weapons watchdog have around nine months to complete their mission, which was mandated by a Russia-brokered agreement with Syria and calls for finding, dismantling and eliminating Assad’s estimated 1,000-ton arsenal.Their task was endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution that calls for Syria’s chemical stockpile to be scrapped by mid-2014. The deadline is the tightest that the experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have ever faced.The inspectors’ mission was born out of a deadly chemical attack on opposition-held suburbs of Damascus on August 21. The US and its allies accuse the Syrian government of being responsible, while Damascus blames the rebels.The chemical attack prompted the Obama administration to threaten punitive missile strikes against the Assad regime, touching off weeks of frantic diplomacy that ended with last week’s UN resolution.Stuart Winer and AP contributed to this report.

Rouhani, on Iranian TV in May, detailed how he broke nuclear pledge

Candidate’s interview from just before his election gets fresh attention as West seeks to judge Iran’s credibility ahead of new negotiations

By Times of Israel staff October 6, 2013, 12:58 pm 1-The Times of Israel

He clarified that this was not his solo success, but was rather thanks to the work of “our valuable nuclear scientists. Our beloved ones. We kiss their hands.” But he stressed, “We were the first to initiate this. By ‘we,’ I mean the whole government, not Hassan Rouhani. By we, I mean the supreme leader. We were all hand in hand. That is why the supreme leader in his speech of November 11, 2003, said that in those negotiations, the conspiracy of Washington and Israel was shattered.”Iran had taken “the correct stance [in the nuclear talks], without submission and coercion,” he said.Rouhani then again attacked the interviewer, and “the guy who talks into your earpiece” for allegedly misleading viewers, to which Abedini replied: “I have read your book from cover to cover, twice.”“Good job,” retorted Rouhani. “Then read it for a third time, Mr. Abedini. This is how we completed the nuclear enrichment program.”In his speech to the UN General Assembly last week, and in a succession of other statements and inteviews, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alleged that Rouhani, in his current outreach to the West, is misleading it by professing a willingness to negotiate over the nuclear program. Netanyahu warned the international community not to be “fooled” by Rouhani as it enters new diplomatic negotiations set to start next week.As Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005, Netanyahu said at the UN, Rouhani “masterminded the strategy which enabled Iran to advance its nuclear weapons program behind a smokescreen of diplomatic engagement and very soothing rhetoric.” Netanyahu then quoted from Rouhani’s 2011 book, in which he wrote, “‘While we were talking to the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in Isfahan.’ Now, for those of you who don’t know,” Netanyahu explained, “the Isfahan facility is an indispensable part of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That’s where uranium ore called yellowcake is converted into an enrichable form. Rouhani boasted, and I quote, ‘By creating a calm environment — a calm environment — we were able to complete the work in Isfahan.’ He fooled the world once. Now he thinks he can fool it again.”In Rouhani’s address to the UN, on September 24, the president said “Iran poses absolutely no threat to the world or the region,” and offered “to engage immediately in time-bound and result-oriented talks” over the nuclear program, “to build mutual confidence and removal of mutual uncertainties with full transparency.” At the same time, he warned, “Nuclear knowledge in Iran has been domesticated now and the nuclear technology, inclusive of enrichment, has already reached industrial scale. It is, therefore, an illusion, and extremely unrealistic, to presume that the peaceful nature of the nuclear program of Iran could be ensured through impeding the program via illegitimate pressures.”

UN: Destruction of Syrian chemical program begins

Some weapons and production equipment will be neutralized by day’s end, official says

By AP October 6, 2013, 12:45 pm 0-The Times of Israel