Tensions ran high on Israel’s northern border on Tuesday after the army threatened retaliation for a Hezbollah attack that killed one soldier and wounded another, despite suggestions they might have strayed into Lebanese territory.
Monday’s attack, in which an anti-tank rocket was fired at a military bulldozer clearing mines along the border, was the worst flare-up on the frontier since an Israeli air raid on an alleged Palestinian base in Syria last October, the first attack on Syrian soil in three decades.
Senior defence sources cited by Israel’s top-selling daily Yediot Aharanot said the army was considering a retaliatory strike deep inside Lebanon.
The blitzed bulldozer that the troops had been operating was clearly visible on Tuesday a few metres north of the fence erected by the Israeli army after it ended its 22-year occupation of south Lebanon in May 2000.
Hezbollah said the vehicle had crossed into Lebanese territory but the Israeli army insisted it had never left Israeli soil, saying a river marked the United Nations-demarcated ”Blue Line” at that point and the fence was to its south.
”In the area where the incident happened, the international border is marked by a river and the Israeli fence is about 10m south of that. The devices [bulldozers] were between the river and the fence,” a spokesperson said.
The defence sources cited by Yediot said Hezbollah could be ”setting a new precedent in order to dictate new rules of the game … according to which any crossing of the fence, even if it does not include the crossing of the international border, will encounter a harsh response”.
Sources in the army’s northern command told the paper that a strike far into Lebanon was an option.
”It is conceivable we may have to operate deep inside Lebanon again, as we did already after the severe terror attack at Maxim restaurant,” one officer said, referring to a suicide bombing in northern Israel in October that left 21 Israelis dead.
The commander of Israel’s northern border region, General Benny Gantz, warned that the attack would not go unpunished.
”Those who are on the northern side of the border would do well to be worried,” he said, charging that both the Lebanese government and its Syrian patron were ”allowing Hezbollah to act at the border”.
The Hezbollah attack followed an upsurge in activity by Israeli warplanes over Lebanon after the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appeared to rebuff peace overtures from Damascus.
Sharon warned a parliamentary committee on Monday that any resumption of talks would ultimately force a pullout from the occupied Golan Heights.
The hawkish premier has frequently rejected the idea of withdrawing from the strategic plateau that Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and unilaterally annexed 14 years later.
In the West Bank, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei met with foreign diplomats and officials for talks about Israel’s controversial West Bank separation barrier, his office said.
At the meeting, Qorei asked them to ensure their respective governments formally notified the International Court of Justice in The Hague of their position on the controversial barrier Israel is building through the West Bank.
The court is to debate the legality of the project on February 23.
The barrier was also expected to be the central issue at talks between Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath and his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, in Moscow later on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in the West Bank, Israeli troops began dismantling an illegal Jewish settlement outpost near Nablus, settler sources said.
About 150 settlers flocked to the Kfar Tapuah outpost, where they claimed the army was behaving ”violently”.
So far, the Sharon government has ordered the removal of nine such outposts, but until now, not one has been cleared, largely because of appeals to Israel’s supreme court.
Israel also maintained its pressure on militant groups, warning the radical Hamas movement that even its wheelchair-bound spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, was a legitimate target for assassination.
”For us, Sheikh Yassin is a target for liquidation, given that there is no distinction to be made between the political and military leadership of Hamas,” said Chief of Staff General Moshe Yaalon. — Sapa-AFP