Former Lebanese President Amine Gemayel, head of the majority-Christian Lebanese Kataeb Party, said Sunday that the time has come for Hizbullah and PLO factions in Lebanon to disarm. He also took a swipe at the loyalty of Hizbullah to Lebanon and called to resist making Arab refugees in Lebanon permanent citizens of the country. 
"They tell us that they withdrew their arms from the streets, only to hide them in staircases." -- A. Gemayel
"The time has come for the state to claim the weapons inside and outside the Palestinian refugee camps," Gemayel said. "The time has come for Hizbullah to hand over its weapons to the state." Such armed militias in Lebanon, he explained, exposed the country to the threat of Israeli attack and negatively impacted the economic situation. "The nation cannot bear two states, and the state cannot bear two armies and the army cannot bear the presence of arms outside its authority," Gemayel said.
Loyalty to Lebanon, Gemayel went on to explain, means "refraining from loyalty to other countries, restricting weapons to the state's institutions and rejecting the naturalization of the Palestinians." When the Lebanese state can protect its own people, he said, the people will not "seek protection from external forces." Gemayel called for building the economy "through [international donor conferences] Paris I, II and III, and not through [Iranian missiles in the Hizbullah arsenal] Zelzal 1, 2 and 3."
The Kataeb chief chided, "They tell us that they withdrew their arms from the streets, only to hide them in staircases." Gemayel was addressing a gathering of party loyalists, allies, political leaders and Arab diplomats who had gathered in a northern suburb of Beirut in memory of Amine Gemayel's son Pierre, a government minister who was assassinated in 2006. Syrian and Islamist agents are suspected of being behind the attack. A subsequent car bombing, in September 2007, killed another Kataeb MP, Antoine Ghanem.
On the same day as the Gemayel memorial, Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri called for the Hizbullah militia to keep its arms: "Resistance should remain in the heart of the south, which will always be in the heart of Lebanon."
Speaking at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Hizbullah is "three times stronger than it was before the Second Lebanon War," which took place in the summer of 2006. The ongloing "integration of Hizbullah with the country of Lebanon exposes Lebanon and its infrastructures to a deeper Israeli hit in the event of a future conflict," Barak warned, confirming at least one of Amine Gemayel's arguments against armed non-governmental militias.