President Shimon Peres Sunday rejected
Hizbullah was non-committal, and
President Peres (pictured below) told visiting Danish Foreign Minister Lene Espersen Sunday, “Israel is certain that long-range, accurate Scud missiles are being smuggled from Syria into Lebanon. Syria must stop acting one way and speaking another way. Their support for terror can no longer be hidden.”
The
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem told the country’s official news agency, "We warn the United States not to adopt false Israeli allegations and we say what destabilizes the security of the region is in fact beefing up Israel with all the latest U.S. weaponry and abetting Israeli allegations at our expense."
Muallem compared the accusation to what allegedly was American slander against Iraq before the war there. The United States claimed that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction but had not been able to prove the allegations. Several reports have stated that Iraq sent the WMDs to Syria before the American invasion.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit, who met Lebanese officials last week and supports the Lebanese-Syrian axis, called the reports “laughable lies.”
Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah did not confirm or deny the reports but maintained that his terrorist army has a “legal, moral and humanitarian right” to own weapons “to defend honorable people oppressed and threatened by the cancerous existence of the State of Israel.”
The Arab Media Watch group has charged the British media with biased coverage of the Scud smuggling claim. It said that Israeli and American statements “have been given more prominence than Syrian and Lebanese government denials.”
It also complained that 55 percent of the reports stated that Hizbullah is a threat to Israel while only 45 percent reported that Israel is a threat to Lebanon and Hizbullah.