To try to keep up to date on this as many seemed overly concerened, News about it will be posted in this thread in no particular order so as to keep our members up to date. IF you'd like to contribute news or discuss it, here is the thread for it.

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Iran warns of 'fierce response' should Israel strike at Syria

By Haaretz Service and News Agencies

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday an Israeli strike on Syria would be considered an attack on the whole Islamic world that would bring a "fierce response", state television reported.

"If the Zionist regime commits another stupid move and attacks Syria, this will be considered like attacking the whole Islamic world and this regime will receive a very fierce response," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying in a telephone conversation with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The president made the comments after Israel struck Beirut airport and military airbases and blockaded Lebanese ports in reprisals that have killed 55 civilians in Lebanon since Hezbollah gunmen captured two Israeli soldiers a day earlier.

"He (Ahmadinejad) also said it was a must for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to become more active regarding the new crisis created by the Zionist regime," state television reported.

Riyadh faults Hezbollah for current crisis
Saudi Arabia on Thursday blamed "elements" inside Lebanon for the violence with Israel, in unusually frank language directed at guerrilla group Hezbollah and its Iranian backers.

"A distinction must be made between legitimate resistance and uncalculated adventures undertaken by elements inside (Lebanon) and those behind them without recourse to the legal authorities and consulting and coordinating with Arab nations," a statement carried by the official news agency SPA said.

"These elements should bear the responsibility for their irresponsible actions and they alone should end the crisis they have created."

Israel struck Beirut airport and military airbases and blockaded Lebanese ports on Thursday, intensifying reprisals that have killed 55 civilians in Lebanon since Hizbollah captured two Israel Defense Forces soldiers a day earlier.

"They (the elements) are exposing Arab nations and their gains to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter," said the statement, which reiterated Saudi support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against Israeli occupation.

The statement did not make clear what Arab gains might mean.

The IDF said Hezbollah fighters rained more than 100 rockets on northern Israel in their heaviest bombardment in a decade, hitting Israel's third largest city, Haifa. Hezbollah, a group backed by Iran and Syria, denied it had fired on the port city.

Arab governments have agreed to send their foreign ministers to Cairo for an emergency meeting on Saturday to discuss the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

But the 22-member League has not yet seen specific proposals for a joint Arab response to the Israeli attacks.

Major Arab governments other than Syria are not expected to give unqualified backing Hezbollah, or the Palestinian militant group Hamas which is holding an Israeli soldier hostage.

Lebanon asks Security Council to impose cease-fire
Lebanon's government asked the United Nations Security Council on Thursday to order a cease-fire in the cross-border fighting between Lebanon and Israel.

The Lebanese government "calls on the UN Security Council to take a comprehensive and immediate decision for a cease-fire and for lifting the siege [on Lebanon]," said Information Minister Ghazi Aridi after an emergency Cabinet meeting.

"Lebanon's main demand is a comprehensive cease-fire now and an end to this open-ended aggression," Aridi told reporters.

The Lebanese government announced that it was rejecting an Israeli demand to deploy its military in southern Lebanon. According to a government statement, Lebanon rejects the Israeli claim that its military actions are defensive measures.

Lebanese Minister for Social Affairs Mila Mawad on Thursday said the government was preparing to announce its cease-fire proposal to Hezbollah and Israel, under which Hezbollah would be required to free the IDF soldiers it captured on Wednesday. The proposal does not mention the release of Lebanese prisoners.

When asked by a reporter why Lebanon does not disarm Hezbollah, Mawad said the organization was brought into the government to grant its members the feeling they Lebanese.

Israel believes Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah did not intend to ignite such a dramatic escalation when his fighters kidnapped two Israel Defense Forces soldiers and killed eight others on Tuesday.

The move was apparently intended return to the spotlight Hezbollah campaign for the release of Lebanese Samir Kuntar, jailed in Israel for the killing of a Nahariya family.

Israel, Hezbollah Campaigns Intensify

JERUSALEM, July 13, 2006

(CBS/AP) Israel blasted Beirut's airport and other Lebanese targets Thursday, bringing its air and naval campaign to the doorsteps of the capital and threatening massive retaliation after guerrilla rockets for the first time reached Israel's third-largest city, Haifa.

The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, called the attack on Haifa “a major, major escalation.” The city, 30 miles south of the border, is home to 270,000 residents

The fighting, which killed 57 people, was a dramatic escalation in the battle between Israel and Hezbollah, an Islamic militant group which has a free hand in southern Lebanon and holds seats in parliament. The Lebanese government, caught in the middle, pleaded for a cease-fire.

But Israel said it was determined to beat Hezbollah back and deny the militant fighters positions they traditionally held along the northern border.

“If the government of Lebanon fails to deploy its forces, as is expected of a sovereign government, we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to remain any further on the borders of the state of Israel,” Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said.

Israel's offensive was its heaviest in Lebanon in 24 years, launched after Hezbollah guerrillas snatched two Israeli soldiers in a brazen cross-border raid Wednesday. Two days of Israeli bombings killed 45 Lebanese and two Kuwaitis and wounded 103. Two Israeli civilians and eight Israeli soldiers have also been killed, the military's highest death toll in four years.

With the airport closed, many tourists were trapped while others drove over the mountains to Syria — though Israeli warplanes struck the highway linking Beirut to the Syrian capital of Damascus early Friday, closing the country's main artery and further isolating Lebanon from the outside world.

The State Department says that about 25,000 Americans live in Lebanon. If the conflict gets worse, the U.S. government has a responsibility to evacuate those who want to leave, which might mean sending in the Marines, reports CBS News correspondent David Martin. But, now that the airport is bombed, the options for evacuating Americans are now a lot more complicated. Marines will have to fly helicopters from nearby Cypress to Lebanon, or from amphibious ships in nearby waters.

Beirut residents stayed indoors, leaving the streets of the capital largely empty. Others packed supermarkets to stock up on goods. Long lines formed on gas stations, with many quickly running out of gas.

Israel said its attacks were intended to prevent the movement of the captured soldiers and hamper Hezbollah's military capacity, reports CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan. The army told Logan that it believes the two abducted soldiers are still alive and they are afraid the captives will be moved to Iran.

Fears mounted among Arab and European governments that violence in Lebanon could spiral out of control in a volatile region already torn by conflicts in Iraq and in Gaza. Israel launched an offensive in Gaza against Hamas, whose fighters are holding another Israeli soldier captured two weeks ago.

The shockwaves from the fighting on two fronts began to be felt as oil prices surged Thursday to a record above $78 a barrel in world markets, also agitated by the threat of supply disruptions in the Middle East and beyond.

President Bush backed Israel's right to defend itself and denounced Hezbollah as “a group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace.”

But he also expressed worries the Israeli assault could cause the fall of Lebanon's anti-Syrian government. “We're concerned about the fragile democracy in Lebanon,” Bush said in Germany.

The European Union took a harsher tone, criticizing Israel for using what it called “disproportionate” force. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he was planning a peace mission.

The United States cast the first U.N. Security Council veto in nearly two years, blocking an Arab-backed resolution that would have demanded Israel halt its military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The Arab League called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned that Israel's Lebanon offensive “is raising our fears of a new regional war.”

Egypt launched a diplomatic bid to resolve the crisis, amid apparent frustration among moderate Arab nations that Hezbollah — and by implication its top ally Syria — had started the fight with Israel.

Israeli crisis is a smoke screen for Iran's nuclear ambitions

By Con Coughlin
(Filed: 14/07/2006)

Hizbollah commits an act of war against Israel by launching a raid across its northern border and kidnapping two of its soldiers. By way of retaliation, Israel commits an act of war against Lebanon by bombing Beirut's international airport and imposing a naval blockade of the Lebanese coast. The head of the Israeli army follows this up by warning that the air force is prepared to bomb any target it chooses in its pursuit of Hizbollah's leadership. Hizbollah, in turn, responds by threatening to shell the northern Israeli port of Haifa and the surrounding region.

What started as a minor border skirmish appears in serious danger of spiralling out of control into full-scale war. That is certainly how the latest conflagration is being viewed by the world's financial markets, with oil prices soaring and stock prices tumbling. There has even been the reappearance of the familiar transatlantic diplomatic fissures, with President George W. Bush asserting Israel's "right to defend herself" and the French foreign minister condemning Israel's attacks on Lebanon as "a disproportionate act of war".

Proportionality rarely features in the political landscape of the Middle East, and the determination of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert to use all the means at his disposal to recover his country's two kidnapped soldiers has resulted in Israel launching its most devastating assault on Lebanon since its ill-fated invasion in 1982.

There is every possibility that Israel might once again find itself embroiled in the Lebanese mire if Hizbollah continues firing rockets at towns and villages in northern Israel, as it did yesterday, killing two more Israelis.

The primary, almost sacred, duty of an Israeli prime minister is to defend the Jewish people by any means at his disposal, and no prime minister, least of all one with the undistinguished military career of Mr Olmert, can tolerate the constant terrorisation of Israel's northern population.

But whether Israel's assault on Hizbollah's Lebanese infrastructure will lead to open warfare is questionable. To start with, the Lebanese government, newly liberated from its Syrian occupiers, is in no position to defend itself against Israel's military superiority. It has no air force and no army that could compete with the Israelis.

Likewise the Syrians, for all their recent imports of Russian, Chinese and North Korean military hardware, know better than to take on the Israelis, who last month demonstrated their air superiority by "buzzing" the summer palace of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with their American-made F-16 fighters.

In the absence of any credible military power to oppose them, the Israelis are free to pursue their main objectives with impunity, namely the recovery of the kidnapped soldiers and the destruction of the military network that Hizbollah has been allowed to establish in southern Lebanon since Syria completed its withdrawal last year.

The Israelis' first priority is their soldiers' recovery, which would explain the naval blockade, the bombing of Beirut airport and the threat to bomb the main Beirut-Damascus highway. However much the Hizbollah leadership might claim to be a legitimate, democratically elected political party, the reality is that it is, and always has been, a proxy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who finance, train and equip the militia as a means of maintaining a permanent security challenge to Israel's northern border.

In the past, captured Israeli soldiers and airmen have been transported via Syria to Iran for safekeeping while Hizbollah undertakes the tortuous negotiating process. By forcibly closing the main exit routes, the Israelis are trying to ensure the soldiers remain in Lebanon.

The Lebanese can protest that the Israelis are guilty of a massive over-reaction in their response to the plight of two kidnapped soldiers, but the Beirut authorities have only themselves to blame for allowing Hizbollah to maintain a permanent armed presence in southern Lebanon.

Lebanon's Sunni Muslim and Christian political establishment received a great deal of international support and encouragement, particularly from the White House, during the heady days of the "cedar revolution", which saw the Lebanese finally succeed in throwing off the yoke of their Syrian oppressors after President Assad's regime was directly implicated in the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.

For all the goodwill that attended the emergence of the first truly independent Lebanese government for more than 30 years, the Lebanese have singularly failed to rein in Hizbollah, despite repeated requests from the United Nations and Israel to curb the radical Shia Muslim militia's activities in southern Lebanon.

As a consequence, Hizbollah has been allowed to develop what in effect amounts to a state within a state, with its own well-equipped private army - all of it funded by the Iranians. It was rockets provided by the Iranians that were used in the initial diversionary attack that preceded the kidnapping raid. And senior Israeli military officers are convinced the anti-tank weapon used to destroy their Merkava tank, with the loss of its four-man crew, originated from Iran, not Lebanon.

Additionally, the Iranians have been directly involved in helping to develop the impressive network of control towers and monitoring stations along Israel's border that enabled Hizbollah to mount its audacious kidnap plan in the first place. The real danger of any escalation in the current outbreak of violence in Lebanon lies not in Beirut but in Teheran.

Certainly the Israelis are well within their rights to hold Beirut accountable for Hizbollah's provocative presence on their northern border, which has effectively become Iran's front line in a country it disparagingly describes as "the Zionist entity".

It is also well known in both Beirut and Jerusalem that Hizbollah does not act without first consulting its paymasters in Teheran, whether it is to seize British hostages such as Terry Waite and John McCarthy, as it did in the mid-1980s, or Israeli soldiers today.

Nor can it be coincidence that the Israelis' abduction in southern Lebanon happened to occur the day after a meeting between Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, and the EU over Iran's nuclear programme broke up in Brussels without agreement.

Iran's intransigence over its uranium-enrichment programme, which many experts believe is part of a clandestine effort to develop nuclear weapons, has even resulted in the Chinese and Russians finally agreeing to back Washington's long-standing demand to refer Teheran to the UN Security Council.

For the ayatollahs in Teheran trying to find a way out of their nuclear difficulties, what better way to divert the world's attention from their nuclear-enrichment programme than to provoke a fresh Middle East crisis between Israel and its neighbours?

Scores killed as Israel strikes Lebanon

Thursday 13 July 2006, 21:59 Makka Time, 18:59 GMT

Israeli helicopters late on Thursday attacked Beirut airport, setting fuel tanks ablaze, in the second attack on Lebanon's only international air facility.



Israel first struck the capital's airport early in the morning and began enforcing a naval blockade, expanding reprisals since Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers a day earlier.



Police said 52 Lebanese civilians, including 15 children, were killed in attacks on Hezbollah targets in Beirut's southern suburbs and across southern Lebanon.



Security sources said the air strikes in south Lebanon also wounded 100 people. Ten members of a family were killed in Dweir village and seven family members died in Baflay.



Israeli warplanes later blasted runways at the main army air base in eastern Lebanon near Syria's border.



Lebanese police said that Israeli jets had dropped two bombs on the runway at the Rayak air base in the eastern Bekaa Valley, damaging it.



There were no reports of casualties.



Lebanon said on Thursday its only international airport will remain shut for at least 48 hours.



Mohammed Safadi, the transport minister, told reporters that "The airport will be partly operational within 48 hours, but reopening the airport is a political decision that will be decided by the cabinet,"



"The runways have all been hit, although some less than others," he said.



Retaliation



The air strikes triggered Hezbollah fighters to retaliate by firing rockets at northern Israel.



Israel media said at least 70 rockets had slammed into towns and villages in northern Israel.



Worst affected was the coastal city of Nahariya, nearly 10km south of the Lebanese border.

The Magen David Adom ambulance service said a 40-year-old woman was killed when a Katyusha rocket hit her apartment in Nahariya. Medics said 27 people, including children, had been wounded in the city.



They said seven rockets hit Safed, killing a man and wounding many.



Safed is some 15km inside the Israeli border with Lebanon and among the furthest struck.



Hezbollah said it had fired 60 rockets at Nahariya.



Hezbollah also said on Thursday that it would bombard Israel's third-largest city of Haifa if it targets Beirut. Haifa is 35km south of the Lebanon border.

Israel blockades Lebanon and bombs Beirut

ISRAEL has imposed an air and sea blockade on Lebanon as part of a major offensive after two of its soldiers were seized.

Air strikes closed the country's only international airport and Israeli ships have entered Lebanese water to block ports.

A TV station run by the militant group Hezbollah, which captured the soldiers, was also hit in Israel's heaviest air campaign against Lebanon for 25 years.

In its overnight attacks, Israeli aircraft and artillery targeted roads and bridges as well as Hezbollah positions and houses of guerrilla members and leaders.

The raids left 27 people, including several children, dead. A family of ten and another family of seven were killed in their homes in the village of Dweir near Nabatiyeh.

Israel has said it holds Lebanon responsible for the soldiers' capture and views it as an "act of war". Israeli Agriculture Minister Shalom Simchon said today: "The government wants to change the rules of the game in Lebanon and make the Lebanese government understand that it is responsible for what happens in Lebanon."

Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz said his forces would in future not allow Hezbollah guerrillas to occupy positions along the southern Lebanese border.

The Lebanese government has said it did not know of the Hezbollah operation, did not condone it and bore no responsibility for it. The Cabinet, which includes two Hezbollah ministers, urged the UN Security Council to intervene. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for the immediate release of Israeli soldiers and condemned Israel's immediate retaliation. "We would not want to see an expansion, an escalation of conflict in the region," he said.

US Assistant Secretary of State David Welch, on a visit to Cairo, said the capture of the two soldiers was "a very dangerous escalation" that "puts at risk all the effort that's being put forth by many to find a solution to the current situation."

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert has already said he held the Lebanese government responsible for the two soldiers' safety, vowing that the Israeli response would be "restrained, but very, very, very painful".

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has said military strikes will not win the two soldiers' freedom, saying they will only be released as part of a prisoner swap.

"No military operation will return them," he told a news conference in Beirut. "The prisoners will not be returned except through one way: indirect negotiations and a trade."

Early today, warplanes struck the runways of Beirut's international airport in the Lebanese capital's Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs. The airport was closed after three rockets hit shortly after 6am. Two flights approaching the airport were diverted to Larnaca in Cyprus.

The Israeli military confirmed it had struck Beirut airport, saying the facility was "a central hub for the transfer of weapons and supplies to the Hezbollah terrorist organisation".

A spokesman said Israeli jets had hit 40 Hezbollah targets.

Among the dead in the overnight raids were ten children.

Hezbollah guerrillas retaliated by firing rockets at the northern Israeli coastal town of Nahariya, killing a 40-year-old woman.

The attacks came as Israel continued a separate offensive in the Gaza Strip over another captured soldier. Israeli jets attacked the Palestinian foreign ministry building in Gaza City, killing at least ten.

EU: Israel Uses "Disproportionate Force" in Lebanon

The worsening situation in the Middle East has the world's attention, including that of the European Union, which has accused Israel of "disproportionate use of force" in Lebanon. Violence has continued into Friday.

Israel has broadened its offensive on Lebanon, with fighter bombers striking the airport and residential buildings in the southern suburbs of the capital, as well as blasting fuel storage tanks and cutting off the main highway to Syria.



Three people were killed and 55 wounded in the air strikes, police said Friday. Beirut airport officials said one of their three runways was hit by an Israeli missile on Friday morning.



The attacks brought to 51 the number of Lebanese killed since Wednesday when Israel began retaliating for the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas in a raid across the southern Lebanese border.

One of the fatalities was a Hezbollah guerrilla; the remaining 50 killed were civilians.



Meanwhile, Hezbollah guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets at two communities in northern Israel Friday, causing no injuries but raising to 150 the number that had hit the region in the last 48 hours, a military source said.



The rockets exploded near the kibbutz of Baraam, close to the Lebanese border.



A blitz of rockets



On Thursday, two Israeli civilians were killed and more than 50 wounded in similar rocket attacks on the north. A blitz of around 130 rockets have been fired from southern Lebanon in the last 48 hours, a military source said.



In the south, three makeshift rockets fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip landed in the southern desert town of Sderot, exploding but causing no casualties or damage, the military said.



Israel has launched two deadly offensives in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip following the abduction of two soldiers by Hezbollah guerrillas and another serviceman by Palestinian militants, including Hamas loyalists, last month.



At least 76 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza offensive and around 50 people have been left dead by relentless attacks on Lebanon.



The European Union has taken a stance



The European Union and Russia have criticized Israel's strikes in Lebanon as "disproportionate." European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana will travel to the Middle East on Saturday to back United Nations efforts to defuse the growing crisis, the EU's Finnish presidency said Friday.



France is one of the countries which has taken an even sharper tone publicly about the Israeli retaliation.



"This is a disproportionate act of war with very negative consequences for Lebanon, especially because it runs the risk of sparking even more violence which could destabilize the whole region," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said.



US President George W. Bush has said Israel has the right to defend itself, but should not weaken the Lebanese government.



Middle East likely to dominate G8 talks



Bush also said that when the Group of Eight leaders met for their summit in St. Petersburg, countries should, if possible, speak with a single voice in combating crises such as the flare-up in the Middle East. However, Bush's support for Israel that has put him at odds with some members of the Group of Eight nations.



"The attacks did not start from the Israeli side, but from Hezbollah's side," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday. "We call on the powers in the region to seek to bring about a de-escalation of the situation."



The Beirut government, too divided to disarm the Shi'ite faction that effectively controls south Lebanon, has urged the UN Security Council to call on Israel to halt its onslaught when the top world body meets later on Friday.



Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, when asked about the scale of the attacks on Lebanon, told Army Radio his country was following guidelines set by the United States and Russia.



"We will act in the same proportions that Russia is using against the Chechens and the US has used against (al Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden in Afghanistan," he said.

Israel threatens Hezbollah boss

Jerusalem - Israel threatened on Friday to eliminate Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese Hezbollah leader who has long been a thorn in the side of the Jewish state, after the latest crisis over the seizure of two Israeli soldiers.

"Nasrallah decided his own fate," interior minister Roni Bar-On announced on public radio.

"We will settle our accounts with him when the time comes."

The threat came as Israeli forces intensified attacks on Lebanon in pre-dawn raids, striking at the heart of Hezbollah's command headquarters in Beirut's suburbs, amid world concern that the escalation could spark a regional war.

Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shi'ite Muslim movement whose name means Party of God, has retaliated against what it has branded "massacres" with a wave of rocket attacks against northern towns in Israel.

Israel will 'break' Hezbollah

Justice minister Hamon Ramon told army radio Israel would fight Hezbollah with the "same means used by the Americans against Osama bin Laden," the leader of al-Qaeda, or employed by the Russians against "Chechen terrorists".

Defence minister Amir Peretz announced on Thursday that Israel intended to "break" Hezbollah, with the Jewish state in the midst of a deadly air, sea and ground offensive on Lebanon in which around 50 people have been killed.

Two Israeli civilians were killed and scores wounded on Thursday when rockets rained down on northern towns from southern Lebanon. More than half a million residents in the north were ordered into bomb shelters.

'Smash Hezbollah'

Local newspapers were Friday convinced that that the country was facing a supreme test and that Hezbollah, headed by the charismatic 45-year-old sheikh, must be pulverised and that all restraints are off.

"The Target: Nasrallah," cried the front-page headline in the top-selling Yediot Aharanot newspaper; "Smash Hezbollah" screamed rival daily Maariv.

"The decision as to his fate has already been made, and that he will be killed. As of now, this is just a matter of finding the opportunity," Yediot said in an editorial.

Prisoner exchange

Nasrallah, a skilled negotiator and arguably one of the most powerful people in Lebanon, has demanded a prisoner exchange for the release of the two Israeli soldiers, nothing less and nothing more.

"It is for good reason that a parallel is being drawn with the tenacious British resistance against Hitler's blitz in World War II," ran an unequivocal editorial in Israel's Maariv newspaper.

'More dangerous than Hitler'

"Hezbollah must never be allowed to approach the border fence... This threat must be abolished. Nasrallah must die," it added.

Maariv charged that Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Damascus-based Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshaal were "perhaps even more dangerous" than Hitler, responsible for exterminating six million Jews.