DEBKAfile Exclusive: Israeli
intelligence ups estimate of Hizballah stock of Zelzal-2 missiles whose
250km range covers Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
Friday, July 28, 2006, 1:56 PM (GMT+02:00)
Israeli army chiefs fear that Hassan Nasrallah, having received the nod from Tehran Wednesday, will start firing them at central Israel over the weekend.
Although the Israeli air force has destroyed some of these missiles which carry a 600 kilo payload, several dozen still remain. Thursday night and Friday morning, July 28, Israeli bombers struck Hizballah locations in the northern Beqaa Valley where the Zelzal-2 missiles are stored.
DEBKAfile’s
military sources add: The Israeli army discovered the 3.5-on, 8.46
meters long missiles were stored in buildings with strengthened floors
and walls to carry their weight, their roofs removed and replaced with
makeshift coverings such as branches and twigs. These coverings are
dense enough to block the missiles from the view of Israeli aircraft
but are easily removable to enable the rapid launch of the Zelzal from
inside the building where it is stored. The warning by Israel’s
generals about the Zelzal’s deployment also applies to the Mohajer-4, a
pilotless aircraft packed with explosives. In November 2004 and April
2005, this Iranian drone penetrated Israeli airspace undetected.
DEBKAfile reports a war council in
Damascus chaired by Syrian president Bashar Assad, attended by
Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah and senior Iranian official Ali Larijani ...
Daniel Pipes writes in the Jerusalem Post:
Arabs Disavow Hizbullah -
July 26, 2006
The current round of hostilities between Israel and its enemies differs from prior ones in that it's not an Arab-Israeli war, but one that pits Iran and its Islamist proxies, Hamas and Hizbullah, against Israel.
This points, first, to the increasing power of radical Islam. When Israeli forces last confronted, on this scale, a terrorist group in Lebanon in 1982, they fought the Palestine Liberation Organization, a nationalist-leftist organization backed by the Soviet Union and the Arab states. Now, Hizbullah seeks to apply Islamic law and to eliminate Israel through jihad, with the Islamic Republic of Iran looming in the background, feverishly building nuclear weapons.
Non-Islamist Arabs and Muslims find themselves sidelined. Fear of
Islamist advances – whether subversion in their own countries or
aggression from Tehran – finds them facing roughly the same demons as
does Israel. As a result, their reflexive anti-Zionist response has
been held in check. However fleetingly, what The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh calls "an anti-Hizbullah coalition," one implicitly favorable to Israel, has come into existence... Continued: Daniel Pipes
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