8-Oct-13: Neither a state nor a government, Hezbollah has a phenomenally large missile arsenal and means to attack

From a Belgian magazine article about what it terms
Hezbollahland, southern Lebanon

Times of Israel today quotes Gilad Erdan, Israel's Minister of Home Front Defence speaking at a conference today at Bar-Ilan University:

“According to an IDF worst-case scenario, Israel could find itself under attack from thousands of rockets that could last three weeks... The Hezbollah organization has over 200,000 missiles capable of hitting any house in Israel.”

While it possesses one of the world's largest offensive arsenals of military rockets, Hezbollah is neither a government nor a state, though it operates from and within the territory of a country (Lebanon) that itself is a member state of the United Nations. Lebanon belongs to numerous other multilateral global organizations, while Hezbollah belongs to none.

While subject to none of the legal obligations that normally apply to a sovereign entity, Hezbollah extraordinarily functions almost entirely under the financial and ideological sponsorship of a sovereign state, Iran. It's a unique, and uniquely lethal, configuration.

Add to this what a Lebanese parliamentarian, Khaled Al-Daher of the Tayyar al-Mustaqbal (Future Movement) party, said to the Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Watan this past Saturday, according to a syndicated report from UPI:

• Hezbollah has long-range missiles stored in underground sites in Lebanon that are capable of carrying chemical warheads. They can (easily) reach Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. "They are stored in a number of locations in the country... There are restricted areas no one can approach or enter. This indicates the seriousness of the contents of those sites..." 
• Syrian President Bashar Assad provided the missiles and chemicals to Hezbollah. His regime transferred some of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile to Hezbollah "its most prominent ally in the region... in an attempt to retain as much of the chemical weapons arsenal as possible."
• The Hezbollah missile arsenal is "a threat to stability in the region" and "serves the Iranians". Iran's Revolutionary Guards supervised the construction of underground bunkers and other sites used to store the missiles. That is why Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah recently warned Israel "will face what you have not seen before".