Breaking News NEWS
Israel Blames Hezbollah in Explosion
JERUSALEM — Israel said Wednesday that a two-story building that held a Hezbollah arms cache exploded in a village in south Lebanon a day earlier and that the arsenal was a violation of the United Nations resolution that brought an end to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. The building was on the outskirts of the village of Khirbet Slem, some 12 miles from the Israeli border. The exact cause was not clear, officials said. No one was killed or injured, the authorities in Lebanon said. “This epitomizes the problem that we are facing in south Lebanon,” Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, head of the Israeli military’s operations branch, said in a telephone briefing for foreign journalists. “This nonstate terror organization is growing and becoming a semimilitary organization. It poses a major threat to the state of Israel.”General Kochavi said the building “contained a lot of mortars, shells and rockets and other kinds of ammunition,” adding that Israel believed the process of rearming by Hezbollah had mushroomed in the past three years despite the United Nations resolution and the presence in southern Lebanon of international peacekeeping troops.Resolution 1701 calls for the area that includes Khirbet Slem to be free of any armed personnel or weapons other than those of the Lebanese government and United Nations forces. Israel says Hezbollah has thousands of rockets hidden in the area.“What we are trying to say is that there is an intensive process of trying to establish a terror entity on our doorstep,” General Kochavi said. “This is something the world must acknowledge. This is a reminder. We hope it will be a wake-up call.”The general added that United Nations troops had tried to get to the site of the explosion but had been stopped by Hezbollah. He said the organization, which is supported by Iran, uses the villages of the south as a major base of operations, which deeply concerns Israel. Future TV in Lebanon reported that after the explosion, Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army quickly surrounded the site. It said Tuesday that the blast was caused by a Hezbollah ammunition dump. It also reported that “sources close to Hezbollah” were claiming the explosion was caused by Israeli cluster munitions. Three years ago, after a crossborder raid into Israel by Hezbollah that was accompanied by rocket fire and resulted in soldiers being killed and captured, Israel invaded Lebanon by sea, air and land for 34 days until a truce was negotiated. During that war, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into Israel and portrayed itself as having stood up to the behemoth to the south. That helped it gain popularity in the region and an important role in the Lebanese government.
View original here :
Israel Blames Hezbollah in Explosion
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...8 views
None
