DAMASCUS, 5 May 2003 — Several Palestinian factions said it was business as usual for their offices in Damascus yesterday, a day after US Secretary of State Collin Powell said Syria had begun to clamp down on them.

“This is just talk, it’s a storm in a cup because we are merely media offices,” Abu Jihad Talaat of Islamic Jihad told Reuters. “The position of (Syrian President) Bashar Assad is very clear toward the Palestinian people’s rights.”

In Beirut, Hezbollah fighters said yesterday they were confident Lebanon and Syria would not bow to US demands to rein them in and vowed to keep up armed resistance to Israel.

Palestinian group Hamas, whose Damascus office Washington demands Syria close to get in line with US plans for the Middle East after the Iraq war, also shrugged off US pressure and said its fight with Israel would continue.

The demands came from US Secretary of State Colin Powell — in Lebanon and Syria on Saturday on his first visit to the region since US-led troops ousted Saddam Hussein — who renewed a US call to put Lebanon’s army on the border with Israel, in place of Hezbollah fighters.

“I doubt anyone would answer their call, for as long as there is (Israeli) occupation, no one can even propose disarming the resistance,” Sheikh Hassan Izzedine, a senior official of Syrian and Iranian-backed Hezbollah, told Reuters.

“We are not worried a bit about the future and we consider ourselves people with a just cause and we reject any threat.”

Since helping drive Israel from south Lebanon in 2000 after a 22-year-occupation, Hezbollah has periodically clashed with Israeli troops in a disputed border zone that Lebanon and Syria claim is Lebanese, but which the United Nations sees as Syrian land occupied by Israel.

Lebanon has resisted pressure to fully deploy its army in the area, and Hezbollah officials yesterday echoed the Lebanese government’s argument that doing so would be tantamount to guaranteeing the Jewish state’s security.

“We have to distinguish between sending the army to the border...and the army being protection for Israel, defending the Zionist entity and being a policeman for Israel in the region,” Hussein Khalil, an aide to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, told Hezbollah’s TV station.

Powell also ordered Syria to close down the offices of Hamas and at least two other groups while in Syria on Saturday, and told reporters later in Beirut that Syria had responded.

But a senior official of Hamas, speaking from Lebanon, denied that anything had changed for the group in Syria, where it maintains offices the Syrian government has defended as strictly limited to media activity.

“I haven’t been informed of any such thing,” Hamas Lebanon head Usama Hamdan told Reuters, when asked whether the group’s offices in the Syrian capital had been closed.

“The Americans know well that our presence is part of the Palestinian presence in Syria and Lebanon and that it’s not voluntary. It is forced, because of the occupation of our land and the expulsion of Palestinians (at the creation of Israel),” he said.

Visitors to the group’s Damascus headquarters, as well as those of Islamic Jihad — another faction Powell demanded Syria shut down — were told on Saturday that senior officials were traveling.

Hamdan said Hamas, which rejects the framework of negotiations with the Jewish state and has taken credit for bombings that have killed scores of Israelis during the Palestinian uprising, was insulated from US pressure.

“Our activities in Damascus are limited to begin with, so when they talk of narrowing the scope for activity that is already the situation,” he said.

“I am not aware of any group told to close its offices, but maybe some groups with many offices might be asked to reduce the number of their offices, but that is only a maybe,” said one Palestinian official, who asked not to be named.

Marwan Abou Sami, a member of the political office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said the groups had not been told officially of any move to shut their offices.

In a recent meeting with Palestinian groups, Syria’s Foreign Minister Farouq Al-Shara “did not talk of the closure of any offices and did not offer any advice that we join (the policies of) the Palestinian Authority,” said Abou Sami.