18 July 2006

Hizbullah's War of Lebanese Liberation

Hizbullah attack on the Zionist Jim Crow town of Nahariya

Uncle Sam's cable news networks are broadcasting live from Apartheid Israel, droning on incessantly with verbal attacks against Hizbullah and citing the very same Zionist know-nothing sources who have arrogantly and racistly underestimated the Resistance group's operational capacity since the recent escalation of violence started more than a week ago.

The death toll of Apartheid Israel's blitzkrieg continues to mount hourly in both Palestine and in Lebanon. Ma'an reports on Tuesday that, "220 Lebanese, mainly civilians, have been killed and 850 injured since the start of the Israeli attacks on Lebanon one week ago."

On Sunday, the Canadian government confirmed that eight of those killed held Canadian citizenship. Monday's barrage killed including six children from one family and 16 civil defense workers. And a Tuesday report in Middle East Online says that, "on Monday, at least 51 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon and 10 more bodies found." It continued:
Lebanon's grim body count continued to mount on Tuesday, with four civilians - a woman, her two daughters and Sri Lankan maid - killed in an air strike on their villa in the coastal city of Tyre.

A family of at least five people was also buried under the rubble of a house that collapsed after a raid on the village of Qana, whose name is etched in Lebanon's memory after the massacre of more than 100 civilians at a UN base there by Israeli shelling.
Also on Tuesday, the Daily Star elaborates on the devastation Apartheid Israel has brought on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure:
The runways of Rafik Hariri International Airport, the Qoleiaat Airport in North Lebanon and the Riyaq Military Airport in the Bekaa - were all severely damaged, as were the three main seaports of Beirut, Tripoli and Jamil Gemayel.

Communication and television broadcast antennas were also among the first to be targeted...

The main focus of the destruction has been on roads and bridges, however, mostly those linking Beirut to South Lebanon. A total of 38 roads have been cut off by bombs or shells, and 42 bridges have been destroyed....

Severe damage and destruction have also been inflicted on civilian property, with more than 100 homes and residential buildings destroyed...

Several important public buildings have also been destroyed, including the Mayss al-Jabal Hospital and several schools in Kounin. A church in Rmeish and a mosque in Tiri were also severely damaged. An looming fuel shortage was made more imminent by the destruction of fuel containers in Jiyye and 12 service stations...

In addition to the material damage, 144 deaths and 382 wounded had been recorded as of 8 a.m. on Monday, and as The Daily Star went to press, Tuesday's death toll stood at 46.

At least 36,800 residents have fled Beirut's southern suburbs for more secure areas, where they are being housed in public schools.
In reponse to this ongoing collective punishment aimed at both the people of Lebanon and its social and economic infrastructure, the Hizbullah resistance movement continues to strike Apartheid Israel with surprises that stun the Zionists for their unprecedented vigor and force.

In his report on Monday, Robert Fisk writes about the timing and sophistication of Hizbullah's strike on Apartheid Israel.
It now appears clear that the Hizbollah leadership - Nasrallah used to be the organisation's military commander in southern Lebanon - thought carefully through the effects of their border crossing, relying on the cruelty of Israel's response to quell any criticism of their action within Lebanon. They were right in their planning. The Israeli retaliation was even crueller than some Hizbollah leaders imagined, and the Lebanese quickly silenced all criticism of the guerrilla movement.

Hizbollah had presumed the Israelis would cross into Lebanon after the capture of the two soldiers and they blew up the first Israeli Merkava tank when it was only 35 feet inside the country. All four Israeli crewmen were killed and the Israeli army moved no further forward. The long-range Iranian-made missiles which later exploded on Haifa had been preceded only a few weeks ago by a pilotless Hizbollah drone aircraft which surveyed northern Israel and then returned to land in eastern Lebanon after taking photographs during its flight. These pictures not only suggested a flight path for Hizbollah's rockets to Haifa; they also identified Israel's top-secret military air traffic control centre in Miron.

The next attack - concealed by Israel's censors - was directed at this facility. Codenamed "Apollo", Israeli military scientists work deep inside mountain caves and bunkers at Miron, guarded by watchtowers, guard-dogs and barbed wire, watching all air traffic moving in and out of Beirut, Damascus, Amman and other Arab cities. The mountain is surmounted by clusters of antennae which Hizbollah quickly identified as a military tracking centre.
Hizbullah's surprises continued on Friday when one of Apartheid Israel's Saar-5 Class Destroyers that had, only hours before, been filmed firing at Lebanon was sunk by "a Chinese-made, radar-guided cruise missile with a 100-kg warhead, the C-802." The Daily Star quoted a statement given by Hizbullah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Al-Manar TV:
"You have chosen war against people who have brains, capacities and expertise. The surprises that I have promised you will start now.

"Look into the middle of the sea, facing Beirut, the Israeli warship that has pounded the infrastructure, people's homes and civilians - look at it burning. It will sink and with it will sink scores of Israeli Zionist soldiers. This is just the beginning,"he added.
Built "in Pascagoula, Mississippi, by Northrop-Grumman shipyards, using U.S. military aid funds," the obliteration of the destroyer offers a concrete example of both Uncle Sam's complicity in all military action undertaken by Apartheid Israel as well as Hizbullah's political sophistication in targetting the ship. Fisk observed the same thing. He pointed out ironically that:
The Israelis were [Monday] trumpeting the fact that the missile was made in Iran as proof of Iran's involvement in the Lebanon war. This was odd reasoning. Since almost all the missiles used to kill the civilians of Lebanon over the past four days were made in Seattle, Duluth and Miami in the United States, their use already suggests to millions of Lebanese that America is behind the bombardment of their country.
The Daily Star's report of the attack continued, adding that:
An Israeli military spokesman admitted that an Israeli naval ship had been hit in Lebanese waters, apparently by a rocket. The spokesman said the damage was not serious and that there were no casualties.
Predictably, the Zionist spokesman was lying. The attack killed 4. In the same speech, Nasrallah spoke of additional attacks, reported in Middle East Online:
"We will use all means. As long as the enemy has no limits, we will have no limits," he said, while protesting over the deaths of civilians, mostly women and children, in Israeli air strikes in southern Lebanon even as they were being evacuated.

"Surprises are coming. Our forces are still intact, and we are the ones who are choosing the time and the place" for the attacks, he warned...

Stressing that his fighters were focusing on military targets rather than civilians, Nasrallah said the attack intentionally did not target petrochemical plants in the city "because we do not want to push things into the unknown".

"Our weapons are not for revenge ... but for the deterrence of the mad members of the government of Ehud Olmert..."

He said Hezbollah's strength was ensured by its "secrecy ... and the enemy does not know our capabilities ... and bases his judgement on wrong information."

And he emphasized that "the Zionist enemy is ignorant of what we have".
When a Hizbullah rocket barrage hit a train station in the Jim Crow city of Haifa on Sunday, killing 9 Zionist settlers and injuried 30 more, Hizbullah proved Nasrallah prophetic yet again. Since then, Apartheid Israel has closed the city's port.

Yaakov Katz reported on Monday in the pro-Apartheid Jerusalem Post that, "Thirty-five people were wounded in Hizbullah rocket attacks throughout the north on Monday. In the worst of the assaults, 11 were wounded, one seriously, when a building was struck by a Katyusha rocket in Haifa. On Monday night an unspecified strategic site was also hit, causing power outages across the region."

On Tuesday, the same paper reported:
One person was killed on Tuesday afternoon in Nahariya following a rocket barrage on the city... Another man was reportedly wounded in the northern city...

Nahariya mayor Jackie Sabag said 12 Katyushas had fallen on the town, and called on all residents to stay inside their bomb shelters.

Meanwhile, sirens rang through Haifa's streets as casualty reports arrived from Haifa, Kiryat Shmona, Safed and other cities in the North.


At least seven Katyushas fell on Haifa, according to reports.
The report goes on to describe that rockets also hit other Zionist-occupied, Jim Crow cities: Karmiel, Tiberias, Safed, in open territories near Shlomi...

Meanwhile, nine casualties of Katyusha rocket attacks - including three soldiers - were still hospitalized on Tuesday in Nahariya.

For Apartheid Israel, Hizbullah's ongoing sophisticated attacks have proven to be a serious problem. Monday's Wall Street Journal further elaborates on the Zionist conundrum:
Despite Israel's most intense aerial and sea offensive in more than three decades... Hezbollah has nonetheless fired more than 1,000 missiles into Israel in the past five days.

Israeli military officials and politicians responded by promising to expand their offensive in Lebanon even further in the coming days. Nonetheless, officials said it remains unclear how, or even if, Israel will find a military means of eliminating Hezbollah's rockets, which are well concealed and are presented as potential targets for just fleeting moments before launch. "It's a big problem for us," a senior Israeli military official said Sunday. "The launchers pop up only for a few minutes before the rocketgoes. We just can't get to them all."
Even as some of the Apartheid State's leaders - Avi Dichter and Tzipi Livni in particular - continue to float requests to the UN for assistance, others have begun to openly call for a ground invasion. Karby Legett's Journal piece gets to the heart of what makes such a strategy untenable:
For Israel, the problem is that, unlike conventional Arab armies, Hezbollah doesn't keep its weapons in normal places. It hides them in the homes of its supporters, in remote valleys and caves and factory workshops spread across remote villages, according to Israeli and Lebanese military experts and the group itself. Ardent Hezbollah members willing to die for the movement protect these sites. Many are booby-trapped with explosives.

The upshot: getting at Hezbollah's rockets is shaping up to be one of the most complicated tasks ever for Israel's military. "There are no Hezbollah bases anywhere," says Timur Goskul, a former United Nations official who lives in Beirut and has tracked Hezbollah's military capabilities for two decades. "So the only way to find the weapons is to go on foot and look for them."

That reality reflects the core conundrum Israel now faces: defeating Hezbollah means tracking down and destroying this enormous arsenal of missiles as well as equally large amount of explosives and machine guns. But doing that means Israel will likely need to search house by house and cave by cave throughout the hostile territory of southern Lebanon, where the bulk of Hezbollah's missiles are stored, some military officials and analysts here say.

That could potentially create an unprecedented number of civilian and Israeli military casualties. It could also spark strong international controversy and condemnation. Some Israel officials worry that could force an end to the campaign before it makes much progress. Already, signs of such a dynamic emerged over the weekend as a number of European leaders called openly for Israel to end its offensive.
Aparthied Israel is stuck. While neither willing nor able wage a gound invasion that promises to deliver them only more captured soldiers or military casualties. Militarily it stubbornly continues to bomb the same targets over and over again, escalating its collective punishment against the people of Lebanon and Palestine.

Meanwhile diplomatically, it refuses to contemplate releasing any of the more than 10,000 political prisoners as it aims to preserve the guise of caring for its own abducted soldiers and desiring a diplomatic solution. The conditions Apartheid Israel has set for such negotiations betray this lie, however, since it has stipulated Hizbullah's unconditional surrender as a precondition for negotiatiatons.

Obviously Hizbullah has rejected these terms and has stated that, "the Lebanese resistance is preparing a retaliation parallel to Israel's military actions. Hassan Nasrallah will address the people of Tel Aviv and warn them to evacuate the city within one hour. As soon as the delay ends, hundreds of heavy missiles will start landing in the city which has been divided into squares in order to let damage reach every inch of the city. An estimated 500 missiles are expected to land in Tel Aviv in a short period of time."

Such a ferocious attack on Tel Aviv - whether it comes today, tomorrow, or anytime, will change the reality on the ground in the Middle East as nothing has done since Uncle Sam's occupation of Iraq began.