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A munitions explosion at the home of a Hezbollah leader in south Lebanon has led to Israeli accusations that the Iranian-backed movement is stockpiling weapons in villages across the war-scarred territory, raising tension along the volatile border.
Israeli President Shimon Peres declared Tuesday that Hezbollah has turned Lebanon into a "powder keg" and is "preventing peace between Jerusalem and Beirut."
Israeli officials and security sources in Lebanon said that at least five people were killed in the blast Monday night at the two-story building owned by Abdel Nasser Issa, a local Hezbollah chieftain.
Hezbollah claims the blast was a "garage accident" and that the only casualty was Issa himself. It said the explosion occurred as Issa was examining ordnance left over from Hezbollah's 34-day war with Israeli in July and August 2006.
South Lebanon, a battlefield for decades in the Arab-Israeli conflict, is strewn with unexploded rockets, mines, bombs and shells, so that account has some plausibility.
But Israeli military intelligence claims that Hezbollah has some 300 arms dumps, many hidden in civilian buildings, across the panhandle territory that borders the Jewish state.
Israel says Issa's home in the village of Tayr Filsay, about 6 miles north of the Israeli frontier and 10 miles east of the ancient Phoenician port city of Tyre, was one such arms dump.
There has been some evidence of these alleged Hezbollah caches in the area between the border and the Litani River in defiance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 war.
That resolution prohibits Hezbollah having weapons south of the Litani in the zone patrolled by U.N. peacekeepers.
A house in the South Lebanon village of Khirbet Selm was blown up July 14 when an arms cache, reportedly containing dozens of 122mm Katyusha rockets, exploded. Both villages are inside the peacekeepers' operational area.
 Hezbollah said they were damaged metal doors, not arms.
Such murky events as these are not unusual in volatile south Lebanon, which Israel occupied or controlled from March 1978 until it unilaterally withdrew in the face of relentless Hezbollah attacks in May 2000.
But what makes them so explosive is the confrontation between the United States and Israel on the one hand and Iran on the other over the Islamic republic's nuclear program.
Israeli leaders have repeatedly threatened unilateral and pre-emptive military strikes to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
In that event, Iran would likely order Hezbollah to unleash massive rocket attacks on Israel, as it did in 2006, only these would be far more intense and destructive.
Israel's much-vaunted military failed in that conflict to knock out Hezbollah as a military force and it has remained unfinished business for the Jewish state as the movement rearmed, supplied by Iran and Syria.
The 13,000-strong U.N. force lacks the capability to enforce Resolution 1701, which calls for Hezbollah's disarmament. Lebanon's army has neither the capability nor the will to take on Hezbollah.
Lebanese sources say Israeli intelligence gave the U.N. force the location of some 100 of the alleged Hezbollah arms dumps and requested they destroy them.
According to the U.S.-based Strategic Forecasting security consultancy, the French contingent of the U.N. force finally blew up the Khirbet Selm dump after the Israeli army threatened to do so themselves if no action was taken.
Indeed, one version of Monday's events is that the explosion at Tayr Filsay was in fact the result of sabotage by three Arabic-speaking men who arrived in the village in a van bearing the markings of Lebanon's state electricity company.
The men said they were upgrading meters in the area and were shown into Issa's home to do their work. According to this version, the explosion occurred around 8.30 p.m., three hours after they drove off.
The identity of the apparently phony electricity crew, whether Israeli agents or U.N. troops or someone else, remains unknown.
But the intrigue surrounding and the murky machinations that constantly occur in South Lebanon underline the extreme volatility of the crisis that grips the region and could trigger another war.
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