|
Hezbollah declares 'open war '
HEZBOLLAH chief Hassan Nasrallah declared "open war" against the Jewish state overnight after emerging unscathed from an Israeli air strike on his home and office in the Lebanese capital. "You wanted an open war, you will get an open war," the Shiite militant leader said in a defiant audio message after the evening raid, the latest salvo in an escalating Israeli air campaign against Lebanon over Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday. "It will be war at all levels... to Haifa, and beyond Haifa," Nasrallah said, referring to Israel's third largest city which commanders there said came under unprecedented rocket fire from Lebanon overnight.An Israeli military spokeswoman declined to describe the evening air strike as an assassination attempt against the 45-year-old Hezbollah chief. She would confirm only that a "Hezbollah terror organisation headquarters was targeted". But Israeli television said that it was a calculated attempt against Nasrallah's life carried out in response to specific intelligence on his whereabouts. Hezbollah television said the strikes "destroyed the building that hosts Hezbollah's secretariat general" and that Nasrallah's house was hit. It was not immediately clear whether he had been in the targeted area. Israeli government ministers had made no bones about their desire to see the Hezbollah leader eliminated. "Nasrallah decided his own fate," Israeli Interior Minister Roni Bar-On told public radio ahead of the strikes. "We will settle our accounts with him when the time comes." The Hezbollah leader's predecessor Abbas al-Musawi was killed in a 1992 Israeli air strike along with his wife and three-year-old daughter. But Nasrallah refused to be fazed by the raid on his home, promising Israeli commanders "surprises" in the movement's resistance to its three-day-old onslaught. The Hezbollah chief hailed a rocket attack launched from the Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut against an Israeli naval vessel patrolling offshore Friday evening as a first example. "Now, off the coast of the sea, the warship which attacked... the southern suburbs... watch it burning and drowning," Nasrallah said. An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed only that "there was a navy ship that was lightly hit along the Lebanese shore," and declined to talk about casualties. The attack on Nasrallah's home and office, which Hezbollah television said his family and bodyguards also survived, was the latest barrage in an escalating Israeli campaign against the movement's political and military infrastructure. The group's command headquarters in the southern suburbs had already come under repeated Israeli air attack, as had the transmitters of its radio and television channels. Hezbollah is widely credited in Lebanon with having been instrumental in Israel's 2000 pullout from the south after a 22-year occupation. By the same token, it has long been one of Israel's foremost foes. "The Target: Nasrallah," the morning's edition of Israel's top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot had screamed in a front-page headline. Another newspaper, Maariv, charged that Nasrallah, along with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Damascus-based Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal were "perhaps even more dangerous" than Hitler, responsible for exterminating six million Jews. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted overnight that the offensive in Lebanon would go on until Hezbollah released the two captured soldiers, halted rocket attacks against northern Israel and disarmed. Hezbollah insists there can be no question of releasing the two Israelis unless Palestinian and Arab prisoners held in Israeli jails are freed in return. Posted by: tipper 2006-07-14 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=159245 |