ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Lebanese website blames Hizbullah for Qana deaths

[ IMRA: For original article in French:
www.libanoscopie.com/FullDoc.asp?DocCode=994&Cat=2 ]

Anti-Syrian elements in Lebanon openly point finger at
Hizbullah as guilty of killing of dozens of civilians in
order to curtail plans for disarming group. 'Hizbullah has
placed rocket launcher on building's roof and brought
invalid children inside in bid to provoke Israeli response,'
they write Roee Nahmias YNET 1 August 2006

Is Hizbullah behind the tragic incident in the village of
Qana that claimed the lives of some 60 people? While the
Israeli army continues to investigate the circumstances
leading to the building's collapse, some in Lebanon do not
hesitate to point the finger at the Shiite organization and
claim it is to blame for the death of dozens.

The Lebanese website LIBANOSCOPIE , associated with
Christian elements in the country and which openly supports
the anti-Syrian movement called the "March 14 Forces,"
reported that Hizbullah has masterminded a plan that would
result in the killing of innocents in the Qana village, in a
bid to foil Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's "Seven
Points Plan", which calls for deployment of the Lebanese
army in southern Lebanon and the disarming of Hizbullah.

'Disabled children placed inside building'

"We have it from a credible source that Hizbullah, alarmed
by Siniora's plan, has concocted an incident that would help
thwart the negotiations.

Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard
civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher
on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in
a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In
this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death
of innocents and curtail the negotiation initiative," the
site stated.

The site's editors also claimed that not only did Hizbullah
stage the event, but that it also chose Qana for a specific
reason: "They used Qana because the village had already
turned into a symbol for massacring innocent civilians, and
so they set up 'Qana 2'." Notably, the incident has indeed
been dubbed "The second Qana massacre" by the Arab media.

--opednews.com

Hezbollah Leader Threatens Tel Aviv

By SAM F. GHATTAS
The Associated Press
Thursday, August 3, 2006; 2:37 PM

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Hezbollah's leader offered Thursday to stop rocket attacks on northern Israel in return for an end to airstrikes throughout Lebanon.

However, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah also vowed to fire rockets into Tel Aviv if Israel strikes Beirut proper. Israeli warplanes have repeatedly bombarded Hezbollah strongholds in southern suburbs of Beirut.


A group of displaced Lebanese watch a taped television speech by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on a large screen at a shelter in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Aug. 3, 2006. Hezbollah's leader threatened to send rockets into Tel Aviv if Beirut proper was attacked, but offered a cease-fire in the air war, pledging to halt rocket attacks if Israel stops airstrikes. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian)
A group of displaced Lebanese watch a taped television speech by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on a large screen at a shelter in Beirut, Lebanon, Thursday, Aug. 3, 2006. Hezbollah's leader threatened to send rockets into Tel Aviv if Beirut proper was attacked, but offered a cease-fire in the air war, pledging to halt rocket attacks if Israel stops airstrikes. (AP Photo/Kevork Djansezian) (Kevork Djansezian - AP)
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"If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity... We will bomb Tel Aviv," he said in a taped televised speech.

In issuing the threat, Nasrallah offered his first opening toward diminishing the three-week-old conflict, which has taken more than 500 Lebanese lives and killed more than 50 Israelis.

"Anytime you decide to stop your campaign against our cities, villages, civilians and infrastructure, we will not fire rockets on any Israeli settlement or city," he said.

In his statement, Nasrallah also said his fighters have inflicted "maximum casualties" on Israeli ground troops and that his guerrillas are "fighting until the last breath and last bullet."

The Israelis had extensively leafleted Qana for more than a week before the air strikes, telling civilians to evacuate, and warning just what would happen. Over the same period, Hezbollah pumped 150 Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from in and around this village. Hezbollah are notorious for refusing to allow civilians to evacuate (as U.N. observers have attested), and even preventing their flight at gunpoint. The argument that people "could not get out because the Israelis had wrecked the infrastructure" is rubbish. Once invited by Hezbollah, journalists got into the village quickly, all the way from Beirut. It follows that Hezbollah bears not some, but all of the moral responsibility for civilian deaths at Qana.

The bridges are blown, no traffic can move, the whole country's under surveillance, they've got to run out of rockets soon.

Then how do those journalists get from Beirut to the bomb sites so quickly and easily? Wouldn't you think if traffic can move IN to those areas, traffic can also move OUT? That seems reasonable to me.

The Israelis had extensively leafleted Qana for more than a week before the air strikes, telling civilians to evacuate, and warning just what would happen. Over the same period, Hezbollah pumped 150 Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from in and around this village. Hezbollah are notorious for refusing to allow civilians to evacuate (as U.N. observers have attested), and even preventing their flight at gunpoint. The argument that people "could not get out because the Israelis had wrecked the infrastructure" is rubbish. Once invited by Hezbollah, journalists got into the village quickly, all the way from Beirut. It follows that Hezbollah bears not some, but all of the moral responsibility for civilian deaths at Qana.

Thursday 27 JULY



Israel decided to step up its air campaign and call up more reservists Thursday, but said it would not expand its ground offensive after suffering the worst casualties of the 16-day bombardment on Lebanon.


The Israeli security cabinet agreed to increase air attacks on Lebanon and authorized an additional mobilization of reserve troops, which the media said could number several tens of thousands.

Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon told the Israeli army radio that international talks the previous day in Rome, which broke up without agreement on a ceasefire call, gave Israel "authorization" to press its offensive.

Ramon warned that Israeli forces will consider all people who remain in south Lebanon as combatants, in a grim hint that the already heavy civilian casualties in Israel's northern neighbor there were likely to rise further.

"Everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hezbullah, we have called on all who are there to leave," he said.

"Bint Jbeil is not a civilian location, we have to treat it like a military zone," he said in reference to a border town of up to 30,000 people.

The European Union said, however, said that Ramon's interpretation of the Rome meeting result was "totally wrong," and that Mideast hostilities should stop now.

The Israeli army radio cited another minister on the Israeli security cabinet as saying: "We should raze the villages in south Lebanon if needed".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunday 30 JULY


Mothers embraced their dead children in shock Sunday as rescue workers tackled the rubble and dust of buildings flattened by Israeli bombing raids on the southern village of Qana that killed at least 59 civilians. Out of whom 37 children between the ages of 2 to 13 years old.
Prime Minister Fouad Saniora denounced Israel's "war crime", vowing there was no place for talks until Israel ceased its attacks.

"There is no place on this sad morning for any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional ceasefire as well as an international investigation into the Israeli massacres in Lebanon now," Saniora said at a press conference.

Israel's Qana massacre sparked protests in Beirut and forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cancel an expected visit Sunday with Seniora.

Thousands of demonstrators flocked to downtown Beirut to join angry protestors.


Rescue workers using only their bare hands searched through piles of debris while distraught women joined in to retrieve the bodies and take them away.

Among the buildings hit in the two hours of raids on the southern village of Qana was a shelter where dozens had fled to escape Israeli bombardment of areas thought to be even more exposed.

"After the bombardment there was dust everywhere. We couldn't see anything. I succeeded in getting out and everything collapsed. I have several members of the family inside and I do not think there will be any other survivors," said a distraught Ibrahim Shalhoub, 26.

"The bombing was so intense that no-one could move. Rescue efforts could only start this morning," said the man, one of just five people believed to have survived the strike on the shelter.

The bodies of 37 children were among those recovered from under the rubble of dozens of a building which collapsed after the bombardment, said Salam Daher, the civil defense chief in the region.

"I retrieved my son and my husband, Sheikh Mohamad, who were wounded. But when I came back to get my daughter who had stayed in the shelter, it was too late because the building had crumpled," cried a woman identified as Rahba.

Terrified mothers held up and then embraced the bodies of their dead children, still wearing the pajamas they had gone to sleep in. The bodies were covered in dust.

A day earlier, warplanes struck outside the market town of Nabatiyeh, crushing a house and killing a woman, her five children, and a man in a nearby house, Lebanese security officials said. In the southern port city of Tyre, volunteers buried 31 victims of the bombardment in a mass grave, among them a 1-day-old girl.

Qana was the site of an Israeli bombing of a United Nations base on April 18, 1996 that killed 105 people who had taken refuge there during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" offensive -- also aimed at wiping out Hezbullah.

Ten years later tragedy has returned to Qana.

"There was a first bombardment at 1:00 am (2200 GMT Saturday)," said resident Ghazi Aaidibi. "A few people went out of the shelter and about 10 minutes later a second bombardment destroyed it. There were 63 people inside, from the Shalhub and Hashem families."

Rescue operations had to stop in the morning over fears that the final storey of the building was about to collapse.

And as the recovery efforts continued, Israeli jets continued to launch sporadic raids around the outskirts of Qana.

Meanwhile Lebanon's main international border crossing was closed, a day after Israeli warplanes targeted the road to Syria, further increasing the country's isolation, an AFP correspondent at the scene said. Heavy bombs had gouged out large craters on the road leading to the Syrian border at Masnaa in eastern Lebanon, he said.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

But the IDF failed to provide important details about the attack, Human Rights Watch said. First, it did not say whether it believed that Hezbollah fighters were in or around the building at the time of or directly prior to the attack, which would potentially make the building a legitimate target. Its failure even to make this claim suggests that fighters were not present.

That conclusion was supported by two eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch, who said that Hezbollah was not in the area when the attack took place. Human Rights Watch researchers who visited Qana the day after the attack found no destroyed military equipment in or near the home. None of the international journalists, rescue workers and international observers who visited the scene has yet reported seeing evidence of Hezbollah military presence in the area, and rescue workers have not yet recovered any bodies identifiable as Hezbollah fighters.

Second, the IDF did not clarify why it believed that Hezbollah fighters were in the building, rather than civilians. According to Muhammad Mahmud Shalhub, who was in the basement during the attack, 63 members of the extended Shalhub and Hashim families sought shelter in the building when the first Israeli bombs hit Qana in the early evening of July 29. It remains unclear why the IDF, with superior aerial surveillance, did not know the families were there.

"Why did the Israeli military consider the building 'suspicious'?" Roth asked. "What information did it have to reach that conclusion?"

The IDF also repeated previous statements that it had warned Qana residents to evacuate, thereby suggesting that it was the victims' fault because they chose to remain. But in Qana and other villages in southern Lebanon, thousands of residents have been unable to leave the area because they are sick, wounded, do not have the means to leave or they fear Israeli attacks on vehicles.

"The Israeli military cannot warn people to leave and then attack at will," Roth said. "The warnings are not an excuse to shoot blindly at anyone who remains."