MARJAYOUN, Lebanon - Hundreds of unarmed Hezbollah guerrillas staged military-style exercises in southern Lebanon at the weekend which the media said on Monday were to prepare for any new war with Israel.
Hezbollah sources said that the Shiite militia group staged "manoeuvres" on Saturday and Sunday along the border with Israel -- which itself conducted war games on the other side of the frontier about a week ago.
They said the fighters - banned from carrying weapons under the terms of a UN ceasefire - carried out the exercises away from inhabited areas while Israeli warplanes and reconnaissance drones flew above the region.
Hezbollah's exercises, which involved all military, security and logistic units, were held in remote areas patrolled by the Lebanese army and the United Nations Interim Force in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL), the sources, who did not wish to be identified, said. Both the army and UNIFIL declined comment.
But Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora denied that Hezbollah had staged military exercises.
"We received information from the army command, the Internal Security Forces and the UNIFIL command that there were no manoeuvres or unusual movements by civilian or military elements on the ground," he said.
"From what we gathered, there was a simulation on paper, indoors. What happened was just an indoors simulation which was not implemented on the ground," he told a news conference.
Siniora reiterated that "the army, backed by the internal security forces and the UN forces present to support the Lebanese army, is the one entrusted to protect Lebanon and confront Israel."
Al-Akhbar, a newspaper close to the Hezbollah-led opposition, said the exercises were the "largest scale manoeuvres in the history of Hezbollah" and added that the group's leader Hassan Nasrallah personally supervised them.
The paper said the manoeuvres were "a defensive operation in case of an all-out Israeli war on Lebanon... or an Israeli aggression on Syria" and quoted Nasrallah as saying they were ready to confront "any kind of Israeli threats."
On October 28, the Israeli army staged large-scale war games in the northern Galilee region in a bid to learn lessons from last year's 34-day war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which followed the capture of two Israeli soldiers.
The war ended under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 calling for the disarming of Hezbollah and the Palestinian factions.
Since then, Hezbollah guerrillas have ceased to appear with their weapons in southern Lebanon where the regular army and a boosted UN force are deployed.
Blair blasts Britons over Iraq war