Hizbullah / Hezbollah (just the group)

[Jedburgh]

Hezballah Wages a Propaganda War in the Rubble of South Beirut

...Ghassan Darwish is supervising the erection of dozens of red banners, in English and Arabic over the huge piles of debris left by the air raids...they carry sardonic messages like "Made in the US", "The New Middle East", "Smart bombs for stupid minds" and "Extremely precise target".

The message Hezbollah wants to get over is that this is a civilian area deliberately bombed to rubble by Israel - people's homes, businesses and social centres buried under thousands of tons of crumpled concrete.

The extraordinary thing is that hundreds of people - from the whole Lebanese political and confessional spectrum - are walking through this dusty scene of devastation.

Bulldozers supplied by Hezbollah have cleared safe walkways through the wreckage and yellow tape prevents visitors from entering unsafe buildings or areas not yet cleared of unexploded munitions.

Young men in red baseball caps saying "Ja'a Nasr Allah" (literally, "God's victory has come", but also a pun on the name of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah) are moving through the crowds.

They hand out copies of a letter from the local Hezbollah leadership giving details of how people can receive money for temporary accommodation from the movement and promising "the return of our people whose homes have been damaged by the Israeli aggression".

"We will rebuild this whole area," Mr Darwish proudly tells me. "Hezbollah is not just about rockets and fighting, otherwise people would have left us long ago. We will be victorious in the reconstruction, just as we have been victorious against Israel's army."...