Iranian News, Views, resources and music





Israel warns Hezbollah against attacks

Barak warns Hezbollah any attack on Israel will prompt unimaginably painful response from Jewish state.

TEL AVIV - Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday responded to threats by Lebanon's Hezbollah by saying any attack would prompt an unimaginably painful response from Israel, despite the fact that it was Tel Aviv which began making war threats.
"I want to say here, on the border, that I don't recommend that Hezbollah test us because the consequences would be more painful than one can imagine," Barak said during a visit to the Israeli-Lebanese frontier area.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah vowed last week to avenge the killing of top commander Imad Mughniyeh who died in a February 2008 car bombing in Damascus which is widely blamed on Israel.
"I want to tell the Lebanese government we would hold it responsible," Barak said, according to a statement by the defence ministry.
Barak also expressed concern that Syria could transfer weapons to Hezbollah, something he said would "change the strategic balance and force Israel to act," in an attempt to seek an excuse to start another war in the region.
The Israeli Defence Minister failed to mention US weapon supplies to Tel Aviv, which observes see as the real cause of the current “strategic balance”.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap earlier this year.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
With huge public support in the Lebanese south, Hezbollah is poised to make stronger political gains in the upcoming parliamentary elections in Lebanon next June.

Original Article: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=30199