"The phones are ringing," Khodr Nureddine, a member of the Hezbollah politburo, said in an interview. "People are calling to join."
Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on Hezbollah at St. Andrews University in Scotland, believes the recruitment is a move to beef up Hezbollah in the event Israel pulls out of Lebanon.
"This reflects a worry among Hezbollah about being disarmed in the long run. If Israel were to withdraw, Hezbollah would face losing its armed side and much of what makes them unique. This [recruitment] would make it harder to disarm them because they would be larger and more popular," Ranstorp said.
For Israel's powerful army, the effort to mass-market a fundamentalist guerrilla group adds insult to injury. This has been "the worst year so far" for Israel in the war against Hezbollah, according to Uri Lubrani, the Israeli Defense Ministry's civilian expert on Lebanon.
The military setbacks and high casualties have spawned calls for a unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon from mothers of Israeli soldiers and some opposition political leaders, and a poll taken after the Insariyeh debacle showed a majority of Israelis supporting the idea.
This, in turn, is hurting Israeli troop morale and fostering concern among members of Israel's proxy force, the South Lebanon Army, that Israel will abandon them. It also apparently is affecting the willingness of the residents of southern Lebanon to cooperate with Israeli soldiers.
"This is a long, hard, very frustrating process. They [Hezbollah] are becoming more and more sophisticated," Lubrani said. "The men [soldiers] are disturbed by the fact that they have become the object of controversy and a pawn in the hand of politicians."
Israel's military establishment opposes a unilateral withdrawal from the hills of southern Lebanon, arguing that Hezbollah would continue to fight, but in the towns of northern Israel. They say only negotiations with Syria, the de facto power in Lebanon, can bring about a pullout with lasting peace. Syria sees the guerrilla force as a club in its battle with Israel for the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War.
Hezbollah has long declined to say whether it would keep fighting Israel if the Jewish state's soldiers were to withdraw from southern Lebanon, although in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel after his son's death, Nasrallah seemed to go further than before toward saying his forces would continue their battle.
