Conservative Libertarian Outpost

Matthew Fisher, CanWest News Service

Published: Saturday, August 05, 2006

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HALAT, Lebanon — As Hezbollah continued to rain hundreds of rockets down on northern Israel, the wrath of the Israeli air force exploded spectacularly out of a clear blue sky Friday morning on a steep hill above this posh, mainly Christian seaside hamlet 50 kilometres north of Beirut.

A 150-metre long span of a key bridge on the main four-lane coastal highway that links the capital to northern Lebanon was ripped apart and thrown into the dry riverbed below by precision-guided weapons fired from Israeli warplanes.

“Oh my God, it’s all gone,” said nurse Ali Haider, as he peered down at a huge jumble of twisted steel and chunks of concrete and asphalt. “I had had a weird feeling that the Israelis would go after this bridge and now it has happened.”

Passengers in one car died when the bridge collapsed, as did a passerby who was going for an early morning jog.

The attack missed by only 50 metres a group of several dozen Shia children who had fled the fighting in the south with their parents and had been sheltering at a Christian school.

“If we had had any idea that they would attack here, too, we would never have come,” said Suleiman Yusef Suleiman, who had moved here one week ago from a village five kilometres from the Israeli border. “There is no safety anywhere in Lebanon today.”

Three other bridges on the highway, including an even longer span that soars dramatically above the Casino du Liban, were badly damaged as Israel sought to sever routes that it believes Hezbollah has been using to move weapons from Syria and the Bekaa Valley into southern Lebanon.

But the Red Cross and UN humanitarian agencies complained that this route was almost the last way they had to bring emergency supplies into Lebanon, where nearly 900,000 people have been displaced by the fighting in the south and the bombings in Beirut.

Hezbollah, which threatened to bomb Israel’s business centre, Tel Aviv, on Thursday, was not quiet Friday either. It fired 195 missiles into Israel according to police there, killing three members of Israel’s Arab Druze minority. One of the rockets launched Friday landed 75 kilometres inside Israel at Hadera, deeper in the country than ever before, but still 40 kilometres shy of Tel Aviv.

Three Israeli soldiers also died in fighting Friday inside Lebanon’s border with Israel, bringing the total of Israel war dead to 74. Lebanon’s official death tally is nearly 700, but officials believe that the bodies of at least 200 more people have not yet been recovered from collapsed buildings.

Israel not only attacked Lebanon’s principal northern traffic artery Friday, it carried out a series of air strikes across the country. Most of the raids were in the south, in support of Israeli ground troops which have been locked in lethal combat with Hezbollah for many days now.

Southern Beirut was shaken by several waves of bombing overnight and again Friday morning. Israeli warplanes returned to the skies over the capital late Friday.

The deadliest attack of the day was 150 kilometres north of Israel at a fruit farm in the hamlet of Qaa, which is in Lebanese territory in the no man’s land at the northern end of the Bekaa Valley between Lebanon and Syria. As many as 33 men, many of them Syrian Kurds whom Lebanese authorities described as labourers, died when Israel targeted a group of trucks that had just arrived from Syria.

Give them hell Israel! It looks like the whole world is angry with Israel for defending itself. Nothing new about that. I still wonder though why the MSM has failed to properly report about the constant rocket attacks on civilian populations in Israel that had been going on for months. The terrorist’s only understand one thing. Pure unadulterated force. The Lebanese need to learn that if they harbor terrorists there will be consequences. Allow them to hide among your women and children don’t be suprised in the least if some of your loved ones get killed.

Perhaps this should have been placed under “Stupid is as stupid does?”

This entry was posted on August 5, 2006 at 08:29 and is filed under Warfare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.