Resolution 1701 was adopted on Aug. 11 and ended the 34-day war between Hizbollah and Israel three days later.
BEIRUT: Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group said on Saturday it would exercise self-restraint in the face of what it regards as Israeli breaches of a UN Security Council resolution which ended the war between them.
"We see how Israel is violating resolution 1701," Hizbollah deputy Secretary-General Naim Kassem said in a statement. "Despite that, we as a party have decided to exercise self-restraint during this period to expose more of the US and Israeli misdeeds."
Resolution 1701 was adopted on Aug. 11 and ended the 34-day war between Hizbollah and Israel three days later. Since then the United Nations has accused Israel of breaking the truce by launching a commando raid in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. The New York-based body has also criticised the Israelis for regularly violating Lebanese airspace.
Israel described the commando raid as a defensive operation designed to cut off arms supplies to Hizbollah and said that, as such, it did not constitute a breach of the resolution, which allows it to act in self-defence.
The Jewish state also defends its military flights over Lebanon, saying that in the absence of effective border controls, they are necessary to prevent weapons smuggling.
Since the war ended there has been only sporadic violence in southern Lebanon and Hizbollah has fired no rockets into Israel.
In a newspaper interview published on Saturday, Kassem said Hizbollah had been taken by surprise by the ferocity of Israel's response to its cross-border raid on July 12, in which Hizbollah guerrillas seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight.
"We were expecting the Israelis would respond at the most by bombing for a day or two or some limited attacks or targeting certain places, such that it would not go beyond three days and some limited damage," Kassem told an-Nahar daily.
Instead, Israel bombed Hizbollah targets and Lebanon's civilian infrastructure for over a month in a war which displaced more than 900,000 people. Israeli attacks killed nearly 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and did damage worth billions of dollars. Israel lost 157 people, mostly soldiers inside Lebanon.
"Frankly we were surprised by the great size (of the Israeli response) and by this serious attack," Kassem told the paper.
Two days after the war began, Hizbollah learned that Israel and the United States had been planning an attack in September or October, he said. US media have also said the United States was enthusiastic about Israeli plans to strike Hizbollah.
"Israel was not ready. In fact it wanted to prepare for two or three months more, but American pressure on one side and the Israeli desire to achieve a success on the other ... were factors which made them rush into battle," Kassem said.
The Israeli army said it would not comment on the state of its planning at the start of the war as this was a "political matter".
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