Word: hizballah
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...Halutz, - who, as Chief of Staff, is currently commanding Israel's air, sea and land strikes in Lebanon - rejected Washington's offer, claiming that Israel had its own superb weapons. But with the "bunker-busters", says a senior Tel Aviv intelligence source, Israel could have knocked out most of Hizballah's rocket-launchers and possibly brought the war to an early close...
Flying out of Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport recently, after covering the outbreak of violence between Israel and Hizballah, I got the usual treatment for a gentile foreigner: half an hour of questioning by a young security agent before I even got to the counter. He started with "when were you born?" and ended with "how did you get to the airport?" and covered a lot of ground in between. I was accustomed to the drill, having lived in Israel throughout the 1990s as TIME's Jerusalem bureau chief. This, chiefly, is how the Israelis keep aviation safe...
...they made clear they had no need of advice from the self-styled sheikhs of global jihad broadcasting not-quite-live from among the peasants of Waziristan. And the extent of their isolation was most evident in recent weeks when, as the Arab street rallied to the cause of Hizballah in its battle with Israel, al-Qaeda central appeared caught between Arab public opinion and its own instinct to vilify Hizballah as Shi'ite interlopers...
...After a few statements from Qaeda supporters condemning Hizballah, Zawahiri finally urged support for the organization, although it's not clear that anybody cares. For angry young Muslims in search of a warrior icon of jihad, Hizballah's Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah cuts a far more appealing figure as his men trade blows and hold their own with the most reviled enemy of the Islamists than does Bin Laden, whose followers are more likely to target random civilians than "infidel" soldiers...
...that followed; Pushing north to the Litani River would make driving back to the border to refuel and rearm every few days impractical, and Israel would be forced to develop fixed positions and supply lines - something they've carefully avoided until now, because these offer very tempting targets to Hizballah; Deploying up to the Litani wouldn't necessarily eliminate the rocket threat to northern Israel, because even Katyusha rockets fired from north of the river could hit the city of Kiryat Shmona and other Israeli population centers; Once in, the Israelis may find it difficult to easily extract themselves...