Word: hizballah
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Most Israelis didn't need an official commission of inquiry to tell them that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a major hash out of last summer's war in Lebanon. When Hizballah kidnapped three Israeli solders last July, Olmert launched a massive military campaign whose stated goal was beyond reach: to end Hizballah's existence as a military threat. Instead, Israeli ground troops found themselves bogged down in deadly urban combat with Hizballah guerilla whose tenacity and tactics the Israelis were unprepared for. That, together with the barrage of rockets into northern Israel that continued until the cease-fire went...
...mood in the Shi'ite-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut is equally toxic. Here, young men grumble at the constraints imposed on them by Nasrallah. "Hizballah keeps telling us to be calm and that they don't want a war. But we are tired of Sunni insults," said Ali Hijazi, 22, a mechanic. Lebanon has been gripped in political deadlock for almost five months with neither the opposition nor the government showing any willingness to yield to the other side's demands. Yet for all the bitterness generated by the crisis, there is little appetite for a return...
...disappearance - an ominous echo of the kidnappings and murders of the 1975-1990 civil war - triggered a massive police manhunt. The Ghandour and Qabalan families are both connected to the political party of Walid Jumblatt, leader of Lebanon's Druze community and arch-foe of the militant Shi'ite Hizballah. And Lebanese long accustomed to a tradition of clan blood feuds immediately drew attention to the grievance of the Shamas family, a tough Shi'ite clan originally from a village in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, some of whom live in the Ouzai slum quarter of southern Beirut...
...said a friend of the Shamas clan who gave his name only as Jawad. Since Monday, friends say, some of the Shamas brothers have switched off their cell phones and gone into hiding. The uncompromising Bekaa clans are notoriously determined in matters of honor and revenge, which is why Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah took the unusual step of twice emerging from hiding to deliver personal pleas for restraint to the Shamas family. Hizballah is deeply worried that the political crisis created by the standoff between the opposition bloc that it leads and the Western-backed government is aggravating sectarian...
...whoever killed Ghandour and Qabalan paid no heed to the respected Hizballah's leader's entreaties...