Israeli media reports have implied that Israeli Special Forces teams were responsible for the wiretapping operations a mile or more inside Lebanese territory where Hezbollah is thick on the ground, and were behind the explosions at the supposed arms caches.

There is, of course, no conclusive evidence that Israel commandos were responsible for any of these incidents, presumably intended to unnerve Hezbollah as it rebuilds its military forces after its 2006 war with Israel.

But for some weeks, the Israeli military has been claiming that Hezbollah has an estimated 300 arms caches hidden in houses and other civilian buildings in most of the 160 villages, almost exclusively Shiite, dotted around the panhandle south of the Litani River, a Hezbollah stronghold.

The Israelis have repeatedly claimed that the Lebanese army, deployed in the Shiite-dominated south under the U.N.-brokered cease-fire that ended the 34-day 2006 war, and the 13,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in the south have done nothing to eliminate these alleged dumps, which violate Security Council Resolution 1701.

So, analysts suspect, they may be doing it themselves.

Since 2006 the Israelis have conducted a major intensification of their intelligence-gathering operations in Lebanon.

Since late 2008 Lebanese security authorities and Hezbollah's counter-intelligence apparatus have rounded up some 70 suspected agents -- nearly all Lebanese citizens -- who allegedly were spying for Israel's intelligence services.

Their main mission was to track and locate senior Hezbollah commanders and officials, their safe houses and command centers, as well as the movement's arsenals, particularly its underground missile depots.

These cells, which included a retired general in the internal security service, two serving army colonels and a former mayor, were also involved in the assassination of several Hezbollah leaders and Palestinian radicals in recent years, according to Lebanese authorities.

One of the main targets of this vast espionage operation inside Lebanon, unprecedented in its scope and intensity, was to penetrate the elaborate fiber-optic communications system Hezbollah has constructed to boost its capabilities in any future conflict with Israel.

This has been done since 2006, linking the southern front along the border north to Beirut and on to the Hezbollah heartland in the Bekaa Valley in the northwest of the country along the border with Syria, a vital supply route for arms and supplies.

The Lebanese army has said that the Israelis destroyed two wiretapping devices themselves with remote-controlled explosive charges once they had been uncovered in south Lebanon Saturday and Sunday. A third device was blown up by Lebanese troops.

The widespread arrests have undoubtedly seriously damaged Israel's intelligence capabilities inside Lebanon.

Arab military analysts suspect that the Israelis are having to engage in more aggressive and innovative tactics to keep Hezbollah off balance while trying to rebuild its secret agent networks in Lebanon -- no easy task with so many operatives rounded up.

It is difficult to determine whether the Israelis are engaging in actual covert operations or simply seeking to spook Hezbollah with some pyrotechnics and a lot of disinformation in the twilight war in South Lebanon.

"Hezbollah can no longer deny that a mysterious hand is at work destroying its weapons depots and the logistical infrastructure it has installed in South Lebanon. They believe this hand belongs to the Israeli army's special operations units," according to Debkafile, an Israeli Web site.

It specializes in security matters and is widely seen in the Arab world as a conduit for Israeli intelligence to dispense disinformation.

Still, the events of recent weeks have caused some jitters in the south, for decades the only hot front in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel occupied the south from March 1978 to May 2000, when it unilaterally withdrew under constant Hezbollah attack.

With Hezbollah currently armed with some 40,000 rockets -- by Israeli count -- that would be unleashed if Iran, Hezbollah's master, was ever attacked, Israel will go on probing, and provoking, Hezbollah to spy out the changing battle space in south Lebanon.

Expect more mysterious explosions.

earlier related report
Commentary: Middle East brain waves
by Arnaud De Borchgrave
Washington (UPI) Oct 23 - Unless former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, President Obama's special Middle Eastern envoy, is prepared to commute by government executive jet for the next five to 10 years, this isn't a bad time to turn in his badge. Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's vice prime minister and minister for strategic affairs in Israel's 32nd government, talked his way through Washington's corridors of power this week, spelling out the Jewish state's refurbished negotiating posture for a Palestinian state. Bottom line: The Nobel Peace Prize will not help Obama's quest for an independent homeland for the Palestinians by the end of his first term. Even if re-elected, the geopolitical prize would most probably elude him again.

Israel wants to slow down the whole process of negotiations with the Palestinians. Obama wants both parties to accelerate. But Congress seldom allows any daylight between Israeli and U.S. positions.

Israel has scuttled its from-the-top-down negotiating strategy, which had Mitchell meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders who then mouthed platitudes until their next meeting. The new posture is what Israeli topsiders call from-the-bottom-up. In other words, you start with itemized minutia, for which Mitchell's good offices would be a waste of his manifold talents. Key topics like final borders, the return of refugees, the dismantling of Israel settlements, the status of East Jerusalem, a security fence along the Jordan River against terrorist infiltrators from Jordan; all would be postponed sine die. The ostensible reason for the change is the refusal of Palestinian interlocutors to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a national home for Jews from anywhere (there are about 15 million in the world, including 5.5 million in Israel, 6 million in North America, and 2.5 million in Europe and Russia).

Instead, the Israelis want to talk about the details of a truly demilitarized Palestinian entity. Haggling over the number of guns and ammo depots allowed for a non-army military with non-army uniforms would keep negotiators busy for months. Air rights would be disallowed by Israel. But Palestinians want small commuter aircraft that would fly to Amman, Jordan, and Damascus, Syria. Israeli settlements now sit astride the West Bank's water aquifer. Palestinians want their share. This would entail dismantling part of the $2.5 billion wall-fence-razor wire that snakes 420 miles in and out of the West Bank. That, too, could stretch months into years.

The more Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his Likud hard-liners think about the strategic dimension of an independent state, the more they conclude it would be a victory for Muslim radicals. Hamas, the radical Palestinian organization that now rules Gaza, is entirely dependent on Iran's Revolutionary Guard-cum-Mullah regime. It also has a strong underground in the West Bank.

As Ya'alon adjusts his geopolitical specs, he sees nothing but 360 degrees of trouble for Israel. A revanchist Palestinian state on its borders, staring wistfully at Israel's Mediterranean border, which was once Palestine's, could quickly morph into a hostile entity. Israel's strategic thinkers also see the Sunni-Shiite conflict rearing its ugly face in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen. On the mental map, the laser pointer traces an axis of trouble from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan and Somalia.

The ruling Likud Party sees the entire region divided between "jihadis and moderates," with radical Islam aligned against the West, a struggle that started with Islamist revolutionaries seizing power in Iran in 1979. Western civilization, say Israel's leaders, is the jihadis' "main enemy." So further territorial concessions in the West Bank, they now conclude, would merely empower jihadis. This alone should convince Mitchell that he is embarked on mission impossible.

As proof of their latest arguments, Likud leaders say moderate Arab leaders recognize the main threat to their region is Iran, not Israel. So the core of the Middle East problem is Iran and its nuclear ambitions, not the Arab-Israeli dispute. They hope for tougher sanctions between now and the end of the year. They see the Iranian regime a shambles with the Revolutionary Guards struggling to keep control against the "Twitter" revolutionaries. And if Tehran hangs tough into 2010, Netanyahu plans to reassess the military option -- with or without the United States.

For the first time, Israeli leaders concede privately Iran does indeed possess formidable asymmetrical retaliatory capabilities that go from mining the Strait of Hormuz, interrupting 25 percent of the world's oil flow, to mayhem up and down the Gulf, all of which could shoot oil up to $300 per barrel or more and plunge Western economies into outright depression. But they also believe the U.S. Navy would quickly demine Hormuz and silence Iranian missile batteries firing at U.S. warships. This, of course, would bring the United States into open conflict with Iran. And while Obama might hesitate to be cast as Israel's only ally in a regional war, Congress would quickly lend its support.

Israel's leaders were stunned by the U.N.-commissioned Goldstone report on the Jewish state's 2008 assault on Gaza in which almost 1,400 Palestinians, including 900 civilians, and only 13 Israeli soldiers were killed. Richard Goldstone, the South African Jewish jurist who led the investigation and authored the U.N. report, accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Predictably, he was quickly tagged as a "self-hating Jew." But he is one of his country's most respected personalities, at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid and a key legal architect of the new South Africa.

All of which has led some to speculate the two-state solution for the Palestinians and Israel has gone the way of the dodo. Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told this reporter in Cairo last week, "This is now headed for a one-state solution. But it's probably 10 years away." Does all this mean Israel has a historically short "shelf life"? Said one ranking Likud official, "We've had 100 years of Zionism, 62 years as a Jewish state, and we're now 6 million. With what we've achieved in science, agriculture, the military, we're not about to disappear."

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