Via the NYT: Rockets Fired From Lebanon Into Israel
Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza threatened to broaden on Thursday as at least three rockets were fired into the north of Israel from Lebanon.The rockets, presumably launched in support of Hamas, could presage the opening of a second front. The Israeli Army, in a brief statement, said it “responded with fire against the source of the rockets,” which landed near the town of Nahariya. Two Israelis were slightly wounded, the police said.
So far there has been no claim of responsibility. A spokeswoman for the militant group Hezbollah, which triggered a war with Israel in 2006 by firing rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon, said an investigation was underway. “We are still looking for information about it,” she said.
Now, this could very well be an isolated incident, but it still is worth commenting upon. Many proponents/boosters of the current war in Gaza point to the 2006 war with Lebanon (despite it being considered a mistake at the time) as a model for the attack on Gaza (at least policy-wise) because, after all, there hadn’t been any rocket attacks on the north. As such, after this operation, the argument goes, there will be no more rocket attack in the south.1
If, however, it ends up that Israel is still facing the threat of rocket attacks from the north, even after the the 2006 war, then it begs the question of whether they won’t still be facing the threat of rocket attacks from Gaza in, say, 2011. The answer is actually pretty self-evident, and has been from the start: the likelihood is that at the end of the day, such threats will remain active. This of course, in turn, continues to raise the question as to the efficacy of the current attacks, especially given the high price paid by civilians to this point–a price that will continue to be paid once the fighting is over.
More on the attacks via the BBC: Rockets hit Israel from Lebanon.
Sphere: Related Content- Bill Kristol, for example, articulated this thesis on a recent appearance on Fox News Sunday. [↩]
January 8th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Hezbollah has denied firing the rockets, and the rockets are not the kind Hezbollah has ( http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1231167307373&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull ).
“‘Nothing happens in Lebanon without a green light from Hizbullah,’ (an IDF) official said. … ‘Hizbullah would have to at least have turned a blind eye to allow the rocket fire.’
Mohammed Fneish, a Hizbullah minister in Lebanon’s Cabinet, denied any involvement by the group in the incident. …
An Al Jazeera reporter with close ties to Hizbullah said there was no chance the rockets were fired by the Shi’ite terror group, because the rockets were of an outdated model that Hizbullah had not used for years. Channel 10 also quoted him as saying that had Hizbullah wished to open a second front on Israel’s North it would have fired dozens of rockets and not only three.”
To be sure, Israel isn’t going to stop all rocket attacks forevermore. But they are hoping to get them to drop from 100-200/month to the less than 10/month they were a few years ago.