Hezbollah leader: US, Israel plotting scheme

Jun 17, 2009, 21:40 GMT

Beirut - The leader of the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, charged Wednesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent speech contained the seeds of an Israeli-US 'scheme' being plotted against the Mideast region.

'What is happening in the region is a US-Israeli plan. There is a scheme with a clear division of roles between the US and Israel to divide the Arab region,' Nasrallah said during a night rally in Beirut's southern suburbs.

'We should defend our country against what is being plotted for the region ... which includes a possible relocation of the 1948 Palestinians to Lebanon,' Nasrallah said.

Premier Netanyahu last Sunday offered conditional support for the establishment of a Palestinian state and refused to bring a halt to divisive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The Israeli premier said the Palestinian refugee problem would have to be resolved outside the Israeli state, but he did not mention relocating refugees to Lebanon, so it was unclear what Nasrallah was referring to.

He also imposed new conditions on peace talks, demanding that Palestinians explicitly recognize Israel as a Jewish state and agree not to have an army.

On Monday, Lebanon's President Michel Suleiman described Netanyahu's stance as 'rigid.'

He called on the world community to 'further press the Israeli government to accept just and peaceful initiatives.'

Beirut backs a 2002 Saudi peace plan that offers Israel full normalization of ties with Arab countries in return for a withdrawal from Arab land seized in the 1967 Six-Day War, and a return of Palestinian refugees to their ancestral homes.

There are some 6 million Palestinian refugees living in the diaspora, most of them in Jordan but also in Lebanon and Syria. The refugees left their country in 1948 after the birth of the state of Israel.