Weapons exposed after a July 14 explosion in southern Lebanon were being actively maintained and indicate a violation of a UN-brokered resolution that ended hostilities between Lebanon and Israel in 2006, a senior UN diplomat said Thursday.
There is an "actively maintained" weapons cache in southern Lebanon, the UN's head of peacekeeping Alain Le Roy said during a briefing of the Security Council.
Following a briefing by Le Roy, carried out upon a request by the United States, US Ambassador Alejandro Wolff told reporters that the Under-Secretary-General confirmed the weapons in southern Lebanon were current and not only weapons brought there prior to 2006. Wolff also addressed the pelting of UN peacekeepers with stones following the explosion, which hampered the initial investigation.
Israeli officials have cited the incident as evidence that Hizbullah is rearming in the region.
On Wednesday a senior Hizbullah official said that the explosions were set off by old shells, not a secret arms cache.
Comments made by the organization's deputy leader Sheikh Naim Kassem were the first on the nature of the explosion.
The explosions occurred in village an abandoned building in the village of Khirbat a-Silm, about 15 kilometers from Israel.
Israel's ambassador to the UN Gabriela Shalev called for "concrete" steps to confront a "new reality" in the region immediately after the incident, saying that it was a "flagrant" violation of the Security Council resolution. The series of explosions that rocked the area reflect "larger efforts by Hizbullah to rearm itself, in direct contravention of resolution 1701," Shalev wrote.
