Arab foreign ministers will hold an extraordinary meeting in Cairo on Saturday to discuss the latest deadly escalation between Israel and Lebanon and the Palestinians.
The meeting “will examine the serious situation in Lebanon and in Palestine, as well as the aggressions and threats made by Israel against them,” the pan-Arab body said in a statement.
Israel launched an unprecedented military operation against Lebanon following an attack on Wednesday by the Shi’ite militia Hizbullah during which two Israeli soldiers were abducted and seven others killed.
Israel also pounded the Gaza Strip, killing 75 Palestinians in a week, as it continued efforts to retrieve another soldier who was captured three weeks ago and turned up the heat on the Palestinian Cabinet led by Hamas.
Meanwhile, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh verbal attack on Israel on Thursday by describing “Zionists” as the “most detested people” on the planet.
The comment came after Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, had met Palestinian groups to voice the Islamic republic’s “decisive support” for their battle against Israel.
“The Zionists and their protectors are the most detested people in all of humanity, and the hatred is increasing every day,” the president was quoted as saying by Iranian state television.
“The worse their crimes, the quicker they will fall,” added Ahmadinejad, who has already called for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map” and relocated as far away as Alaska. Israel, the president asserted in his latest attack, “has blackened the pages of history”.
United States President George W Bush, for his part, vowed this week to “encourage peace” in the Middle East and blamed “terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace” for a dramatic escalation of violence.
“Hizbullah doesn’t want there to be peace, the militant arm of Hamas doesn’t want there to be peace, and those of us who do want peace will continue to work together to encourage peace,” Bush said.
Meanwhile, the death of a first Israeli civilian on Thursday, a middle-aged woman and the injuries of at least another 14 Israelis, only served to heighten tensions and underscore the Israeli government’s intention to smash Hizbullah.
In the early hours of Thursday, Israeli warplanes bombed Beirut’s international airport, Hizbullah and infrastructure targets across the south of the country, killing at least 39 civilians.
Israel also imposed an air, sea and land blockade on the country after the air raids closed Beirut airport, and sent warships into Lebanese waters to restrict access to ports that the military claimed were being used by “terrorists”.
Military and political officials say the primary objective is to push Hizbullah as far away from the border with Israel and to attack “strategic installations” in Lebanon.
The violence is the worst since Israel launched its Grapes of Wrath operation against Lebanon in 1996 and comes six years after it pulled out its troops from the south of the country in May 2006.
Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz vowed the Hizbullah guerrillas would be pushed back from their strongholds on the border with Israel, where the servicemen were abducted.