Word: hizballah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Israel continues its air offensive against Hamas in the Gaza strip, one unsettling specter has emerged from the recent past: the failed campaign to crush the Lebanese militants of Hizballah in July 2006. Lebanon was clearly on the minds of Israel's military planners. Even as Hamas targets were pounded in Gaza, Israeli jets flew low-level saber-rattling sorties over southern Lebanon, a warning to militants not to launch reprisal attacks along Israel's volatile northern border. (See pictures from Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon...
...understanding too late just how frustrated the Lebanese Shi'a were - frustrated by their own government, by the Palestinians, by the Americans, by the French, as well as by the invading Israelis. Nabatiyah quickly metastasized into a vicious 17-year guerrilla war. It would turn out to be Hizballah's Boston Tea Party, and led to Israel's first defeat in the field of battle when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. For us, though, Nabatiyah should be a crucial lesson in how a small act of defiance can turn into a viral contagion. (See the top 10 awkward moments...
...target was a secret nuclear reactor being built with North Korean assistance - a claim that was widely viewed through the prism of false U.S. claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Bush Administration's animus toward Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime over its support for Hizballah and Palestinian radical groups, as well as its failure to curb jihadist insurgents crossing into Iraq...
...Hamas wants the cease-fire to endure because it is consolidating the movement's authority over Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians, and because it wants to beef up its fighting corps to over 50,000 strong. Gaza experts say that Hamas has taken a page from Hizballah's playbook during the 2006 Lebanon war with Israel, and that Gaza is now riddled with tunnels and underground bunkers. Hamas is also believed to have smuggled in longer-range, Iranian-made rockets through smugglers' tunnels leading from Egypt. Reviving the truce has a political advantages for Hamas, too: It makes it easier...
...territory in recent years. In September 2007, Israeli jets bombed a site in northeast Syria suspected of being a nuclear facility. Syria has also been shaken by attacks from within its borders. In February, Imad Mughniyah, posthumously identified as the top military commander of Lebanon's militant Shi'ite Hizballah, was assassinated in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus. Last month, a rare car bomb exploded in the Syrian capital, killing 28 people...