UNITED NATIONS – Syrian intelligence officers are actively recruiting Palestinian Arab and Hezbollah sympathizers at home and in Lebanon to disrupt public order and create an atmosphere of instability that would allow Damascus to project force into Lebanon as necessary, according to Syrian and Lebanese dissidents, as well as Israeli officials.

The Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said that forces belonging to Syrian intelligence have increased their presence in Lebanon in recent weeks despite Security Council resolution 1559, which calls on Syria to withdraw all its forces from there.

In an interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Shalom stressed that the resolution called on Lebanon to disarm all militias in the country, including most notably Hezbollah, which in the last few days has shown muscle by organizing demonstrations comprised of hundreds of thousands of people in Beirut. Hezbollah and other Syrian allies in Lebanon are striving to create disorder in the country, he said.

“Syria wants to start internal confrontations in Lebanon to scare the international community as to what could happen once Syria leaves,” Mr. Shalom said. “Syria is up to its neck in negative activity in the region.” He added that even though he was the first government official to praise past Syrian attempts at peace negotiations with Israel, he is now convinced this has been part of an attempt by Damascus to reduce international pressure on Syria.

The president of the Washington based pro-democracy Reform Party of Syria, Farid Ghadri, told the Sun that according to his sources in Aleppo, Syria, intelligence officers have been active recently among Palestinian Arab refugees to recruit potential terrorists.

“We have our own people inside Aleppo,” he said. These contacts, he added, have told him about two Arab “fedayeen,” or fighters, of Palestinian Arab descent who are veterans of Lebanon’s civil war. He said he knew the names of the two, but only agreed to give their ages, 36 and 38. Syrian officers told them recently to “start packing” so they could travel to Lebanon to restart military action there, he said.

Syrian intelligence officials also visited the Nayrab refugee camp near Aleppo in the last few weeks, where they tried to recruit young Palestinian Arab residents. “They were telling them that the Lebanese are going to slaughter them,” Mr. Gadhri said. The reference, apparently, was to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila killings, in which Palestinian Arabs were massacred by Christian Lebanese militiamen.

The president of the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon, Ziad Abdelnour, told the Sun he received similar accounts from Palestinian Arab refugee camps across Lebanon, where several residents were recruited by Syria to prepare for disruption. “If you go to Anjor, it’s like a base of Al Qaeda,” he said, referring to the camp in the eastern Lebanese Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, where many recruits from refugee camps all over Lebanon are sent to be trained.