The chief of Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah movement said on Saturday it had a "legal" right to own any weapon it wishes, but would not confirm or deny Israeli allegations it was stockpiling Scud missiles.

"The Scud (issue) emerged a while ago... and it created a lot of fuss," Hassan Nasrallah said in his first public reaction to the controversy, according to a statement from Hezbollah's press office.

"We do not confirm or deny if we have received weapons or not, so we do not comment and we will not comment," he told a committee in charge of security, financial and logistical backing for Hezbollah, adding: "This is our position."

Hezbollah has a "legal and humanitarian right to own any weapon it wants to protect people oppressed and threatened by Israel's cancerous presence."

The controversy erupted in April when Israeli President Shimon Peres accused Syria of supplying its Lebanese ally Hezbollah with the missiles, a charge Damascus denied.

Washington, which has sought a rapprochement with Damascus, further fed the controversy as Defence Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran and Syria of arming Hezbollah with sophisticated weaponry, without specifying they were Scuds.

Gates warned at a joint news conference Tuesday with Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak that Hezbollah has "far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world."

On Saturday Nasrallah dismissed talk that the controversy about Hezbollah weaponry was a prelude to a new armed conflict.

"When the US defence minister Gates says that Hezbollah has more weapons than most governments in the world... whether this is right or wrong, I will not comment," he said.

"I don't believe that all this fuss about the missiles is a prelude to a war, and God willing I am right. It is not a climate of war."

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad about the risks of sparking a regional war if he supplied long-range Scud missiles to Hezbollah.

It is the only Lebanese group that did not disarm after Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, arguing that its weapons were necessary to fight Israel which it later faced off in a devastating conflict in 2006.