posted July 13, 2006 09:22 AM
murder...yuck http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/hezbollah-threatens-haifa/2006/07/13/1152637794016.html
Hezbollah threatens Haifa
Smoke rises from Beirut international airport after it was hit by Israeli warplanes today.
Photo: Reuters
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July 13, 2006 - 10:00PM
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Hezbollah guerillas threatened today to attack the major Israeli port city of Haifa and its surroundings with rockets if Israel strikes the Lebanese capital Beirut and its southern suburbs.
Such a strike would be the deepest ever into Israel by Hezbollah guerillas, who fired volleys of rockets against towns of northern Israel during the past day.
It was not clear if Hezbollah rockets have the range to hit Haifa, located about 30 kilometres south of the border.
The Israeli army said several Hezbollah rockets overnight had landed more than 20 kilometres south of the border, showing that Hezbollah has managed to extend its missiles' range.
"The Islamic resistance warns against targeting civilians and the infrastructure," a statement read on Hezbollah TV said.
"It [resistance] specifically announces that it will quickly shell the city of Haifa and nearby areas if the southern suburbs and the city of Beirut are subjected to any direct Israeli aggression," the statement said.
Earlier today, the Israeli army warned Lebanon to evacuate all residents from a southern Beirut neighbourhood where it believes Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah lives, Israeli media reported.
"We have we passed on a warning to Lebanon to evacuate all civilians from the [southern] neighbourhood of Beirut, which is a Hezbollah stronghold and where Nasrallah lives, and where the organisation's headquarters and weapons stockpiles are," the Ma'ariv NRG news website quoted a senior army official as saying.
Israel Radio carried a similar report.
The army said it had no comment on whether Nasrallah was a target for assassination.
An Israeli helicopter gunship killed Nasrallah's predecessor, Sheik Abbas al-Mousawi, in 1992.
Rockets fired at northern Israeli town of Safed
Lebanese guerillas fired three rockets at the northern Israeli town of Safed today and seven people were injured, one seriously, witnesses and medics said.
The rockets hit an immigrants' absorption centre and a college. Another rocket fell near a gas station.
Safed had not been targeted by rockets since the 1990s.
Israel bombs Beirut airport
Israel today bombed Beirut's international airport and enforced a naval blockade of Lebanon, a day after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight.
Israel's heaviest air campaign against Lebanon in 24 years smashed the airport's runways and also targeted Hezbollah television.
The newly refurbished Rafik al-Hariri International Airport is named after the slain former prime minister.
A police officer said there were no casualties when missiles fired from fighter jets hit the runways before dawn, leaving large craters in the tarmac.
Lebanese anti-aircraft batteries frantically fired at the invading planes and the airport was shut, forcing flights to be diverted to the nearby Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Lebanon said today the airport would remain shut for at least 48 hours.
"The airport will be partly operational within 48 hours, but reopening the airport is a political decision that will be decided by the cabinet," Transport Minister Mohamad Safadi told reporters.
"The runways have all been hit, although some less than others," he said.
"The closure of the airport has inflicted losses of $5 million only for today. This does not include damages, which will be determined later," an airport official said.
Dawn strikes kill dozens
The airport attack followed dawn air strikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut's southern suburbs and across southern Lebanon, which killed 34 civilians, including eight young children, and wounded 52 people, security sources said.
Ten members of one family were killed in Dweir village and seven family members died in Baflay.
With Lebanon's sea and air links cut, Hezbollah retaliated against Israeli "massacres" by firing 60 Katyusha rockets at Nahariya in northern Israel.
One civilian was killed and at least 21 were wounded.
"In response to the massacres of civilians in the south and assaults on [Lebanese] infrastructure, the Islamic resistance bombarded ... the settlement of Nahariya in northern occupied Palestine with 60 rockets," said a statement by Hezbollah.
Israel's Magen David Adom ambulance service said a 40-year-old woman was killed when a rocket hit her house.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the two soldiers had been seized to force Israel to release Arab prisoners.
Israel insisted it would discuss no such swap and instead launched its military offensive.
In Canberra, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the Australian embassy in Beirut had been closed because of the worsening security situation.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz said Hezbollah would not be permitted to return to its previous positions along the Israeli border.
Israel has long demanded the Lebanese Government disarm Hezbollah, which is an avowed enemy of the Jewish state.
The violence was the worst between Israel and Lebanon since 1996 when Israeli troops still occupied part of the south.
It coincided with an major Israeli offensive into the Gaza Strip to retrieve a captured soldier and halt Palestinian rocket fire.
Despite the flare-up in Lebanon, Israel signalled no let-up in its Gaza assault, mounting an air strike that destroyed the office of Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar.
The Israeli shekel lost as much as 2 per cent against the dollar in early trade. Pressure on the Lebanese pound increased.
Attack on Hezbollah TV station
Two hours after the airport raid, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at the headquarters of Hezbollah's al-Manar TV in the Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik, wounding six people.
Israeli aircraft later attacked an al-Manar transmission tower south of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon, witnesses said.
Israel had promised a "very painful" response to Hezbollah's action of seizing two soldiers and killing eight.
The Israeli assault will increase domestic pressure on Hezbollah, which has refused to disarm in line with a 2004 UN resolution, and add to international calls on the Lebanese Government, led by an anti-Syrian coalition, to act.
"Either Hezbollah are stupid, or they don't care," said Michael Karam, editor of a Lebanese business magazine. "Now we've got no airport, so no tourism and no prosperity."
Hezbollah's cross-border attack yesterday, for which Israel holds the Beirut Government responsible, tore up tacit understandings that had limited border violence for six years since Israeli troops withdrew from south Lebanon.
"The Lebanese Government has now become a buffer squeezed between Israel and Hezbollah," said Amal Saad Ghorayeb, a Lebanese academic and author of a book on Hezbollah.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has said his Government did not endorse the Hezbollah attack.
Apart from the Israeli attack on the Foreign Ministry building in Gaza, a separate air strike near Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip killed an Islamic Jihad militant and wounded another gunman.
The White House condemned the Hezbollah attack and blamed Syria and Iran. Syria said Israeli actions were to blame for guerilla attacks.
Russia and France condemn strikes
France and Russia today condemned Israeli army strikes on Lebanon as "disproportionate".
"We obviously condemn this disproportionate act of war which also has two consequences," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on Europe 1 radio.
"The first is to force anyone wanting to now enter Lebanon to go either by sea or by Syria," he said.
"The second consequence is to run the risk of plunging Lebanon back into the worst years of war with the departure of Lebanese who will want to flee while they were in the process of rebuilding their country."
In Moscow, Russia also slammed Israel's "disproportionate use of force" against Lebanon and Palestinian territory, saying that civilians were being made to suffer.
"One cannot justify the continued destruction by Israel of the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and in Palestinian territory, involving the disproportionate use of force in which the civilian population suffers," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement that also condemned terrorism.
The ministry described the situation as "extremely worrying" and Israel's bombing of Beirut's international airport as "a dangerous step on the road to military escalation."
"We firmly reaffirm support for Lebanon's sovereignty and territorial integrity," the statement said.
Moscow also condemned the abduction of Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants and Hezbollah.
"All forms of terrorism are completely unacceptable," the statement said, calling for the "immediate and unconditional release" of the soldiers.
"All sides involved in the current events should take rapid measures to stop the region sliding into open conflict."
Agencies
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Lindaland
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posted July 13, 2006 09:22 AM
posted July 13, 2006 01:13 PM
