JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel's Aman military intelligence does not think that Syria or Lebanon's Hezbollah militia will carry out a largescale offensive against Israel in 2008, an Israeli daily said on Sunday.
Aman said that Israel had regained its so-called force of dissuasion during last year's 34-day war with Hezbollah, launched by the Jewish state after a deadly cross-border raid in July in which two servicemen were seized.
It also believes that Israel demonstrated its ability to strike in the north, an allusion to a raid in Syria on September 6 in which Israeli warplanes bombed what media reports have said were possible nuclear targets deep within Syrian territory.
The Aman report was cited by the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot daily.
In Gaza, the Islamist Hamas movement continues to reinforce militarily in the territory where it violently seized power in mid-June, the report said.
Hamas forces "have organised like a veritable army into battalions and regiments" with the aim of inflicting the maximum casualties on Israel should it launch a widescale offensive in the territory.
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