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Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader threatens Israel over maritime oil

27 July 2011 04:18 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement, threatened Israel Tuesday over a disputed maritime oil field claim, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com website.

"Those who put a hand on the Lebanese territories that have oil assets will have their territories harmed in return," said Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah during a ceremony to mark the fifth anniversary of Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel.

The feud over offshore gas fields has deepened since Israel’s cabinet on July 12 approved a map of the country’s proposed maritime borders with Lebanon to be submitted for a UN opinion.

Since Israel announced last year that it had discovered massive gas deposits in the underwater Leviathan and Tamar fields off its Mediterranean coastline, Lebanon has declared that the fields are located inside its waters.

According to Israeli reports, they hold an estimated 25 trillion cubic feet of gas.

Lebanon’s Energy Minister Gibran Bassil has said Beirut will not give up its maritime rights and accused Israel of "violations of (Lebanese) waters, territory and airspace, and today our oil rights."

Israel and Lebanon are still formally at war and the two neighbors have never agreed a maritime boundary.

Hezbollah in 2006 fought a deadly war with the Jewish state in which most of Lebanon’s major infrastructure was destroyed.

Nasrallah warned the Israelis against "stealing" Lebanon’s resources.