Word: hizballah
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...numbingly familiar in the Middle East, like a recurring nightmare that many would rather keep stored in the recesses of memory. But the conflagration involving Israel and its neighbors has erupted once more--and no one knows how bad and destabilizing it may get. Israel's ferocious response to Hizballah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, which came a little more than two weeks after Palestinian militants from Hamas seized an Israeli corporal and smuggled him into the Gaza Strip, has produced the worst Arab-Israeli cross-border conflict since Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The great bulk...
...normal times, the hills of northern Galilee fill with tourists, some of them pilgrims seeking out the places where Jesus walked 2,000 years ago. Today those hills are burning. It is in Galilee that the rockets fired by Hizballah militants in Lebanon typically fall, occasionally scoring a direct hit on someone vulnerable, more often forcing inhabitants to move into bomb shelters. In the escarpment hamlet of Shomera, Israelis like Gabriel Peretz, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast, can do little more than brace for the next attack. "The situation is very bad," he says, his sentences punctuated...
...mayhem and destruction, the crisis hasn't yet escalated into the kind of full-scale, multicountry war that rocked the Middle East in 1948 or 1956 or 1967 or 1973. But that's not exactly cause for comfort. The lethal exchange of firepower between Israel and Hizballah will likely not let up until someone--the U.N., nervous Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia or possibly the U.S.--intervenes and persuades one or both sides to stop. A British official told TIME that Prime Minister Tony Blair is personally pressing President George W. Bush to send Secretary of State Condoleezza...
...Hizballah is the wild card. There is always the possibility it could try to order up terrorist attacks against Israeli and Western targets around the world. If pushed to stop fighting, the group could lash out against its critics in Lebanon, unleashing the forces of civil war that ravaged the highly sectarian country for 15 years until 1990, and creating a new field of instability even as the U.S. struggles with crises in places like Iraq and Iran. Israel's strikes against Lebanon have provoked Shi'ite radicals in Iraq, who are threatening to attack U.S. troops in retaliation...
...Arab enemies, what we're seeing today is not simply a replay of hackneyed set pieces in the Middle East. With new governments in place in the three key nodes of the crisis--Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority--and fighters within the radical Islamist groups--Hamas and Hizballah--eager to assert their agendas, the region is going through a period of dramatic and in some ways radical change. The volatility has added new fuel to the motivations and ambitions that have defined why they fight. And that poses a challenge for the international community--not least a U.S. Administration...