MrBishop
Well-Known Member
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Hezbollah militants crossed into Israel on Wednesday and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel responded in southern Lebanon with warplanes, tanks and gunboats, and said seven of its soldiers had been killed in the violence.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the soldiers' capture "an act of war," and his Cabinet prepared to approve more military action in Lebanon — a second front in the fight against Islamic militants by Israel, which already is waging an operation to free a captured soldier in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli army said three soldiers were killed in the initial raid, and four others were killed when their tank went over a land mine in southern Lebanon.
Olmert said he held the Lebanese government responsible for the two soldiers' safety, vowing that the Israeli response "will be restrained, but very, very, very painful."
Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said he will not release the captives except as part of a prisoner swap. He said the two soldiers were "in a safe and very far place."
"No military operation will return them," he told a news conference in Beirut. "The prisoners will not be returned except through one way: indirect negotiations and a trade."
Israeli jets struck deep into southern Lebanon, blasting bridges and Hezbollah positions and killing two civilians, the Lebanese officials said.
The Israeli military planned to call up thousands of reservists, and residents of Israeli towns on the border with Lebanon were ordered to seek cover in underground bomb shelters.
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Welcome to a war on two fronts....anyone for three
DAMASCUS - Syria said on Wednesday Israel was responsible for an operation by its ally Hizbollah in which two Israeli soldiers were captured.
“Occupation is what provokes the Palestinian and Lebanese people,” Vice President Farouq al-Shara told reporters.
“The resistance in south Lebanon and among the Palestinian people decides solely what to do and why.”
Syria supports demands by Hizbollah, a Shia group also backed by Iran, for Israel to pull out of Shebaa Farms, an area near the Golan Heights which the United Nations says is Syrian land, but which Syria describes as Lebanese.
It also supports the group’s demand for Israel to free several Lebanese prisoners still in its jails, including at least one who has been in captivity for more than two decades.
Shara, a former foreign minister, did not say whether he expected Israel to launch strikes against Syria in retaliation for the Hizbollah operation.
Israel has already hinted it could assassinate members of Hamas’s exiled leadership in Syria after the military wing of the Palestinian movement took part in an attack that captured an Israeli soldier near Gaza on June 25.