Hezbollah launched a rocket attack into Israel on Saturday, killing 12 children playing on a soccer field. 44 people were injured.
Middle East Airlines, the Lebanese national carrier, has announced day-long delays for several flights originally scheduled to arrive in Beirut on the evening of July 28, 2024. They want to keep their planes out of the country, fearing that Beirut’s airport will be targeted in an Israeli response. The Israeli air force previously took out the Damascus and Aleppo airports in Syria.
Additional Delays now of Middle Eastern Airline’s Flights both to and from Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport and several other Airports across the Region. pic.twitter.com/ad2mIJZVeA
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) July 28, 2024
The U.S. National Security Council has pinned Hezbollah’s responsibility for the attack on the Druze Community in Northern Israel. Rockets were launched from Hezbollah-controlled territory.
Teams are still collecting pieces of the children who were killed in the attack on Saturday. Horrific. pic.twitter.com/NnY89UxMFY
— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) July 28, 2024
The U.S. Department of State has called on Americans to reconsider any and all travel to the region. The Governments of Belgium, France, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Sweden have called for all of their citizens to leave immediately. Senior Israeli officials have stated that their military is preparing for several days of battle in Southern Lebanon and Northern Israel.
Insurance companies have suspended coverage for Middle East Airlines aircraft. That’s a step not even taken despite lack of electricity at the airport for runway lights, fatigued air traffic controllers there working 24 hour shifts up to 96 hours per week, and bullets piercing the cabin of one of their planes.
Beirut-based Middle East Airlines is owned by Lebanon’s Central Bank. The country is undergoing one of the worst crises in the world. Once “the Paris of the Middle East” it’s a shame what Hezbollah and mismanagement have done there.
A country made into a proxy war battlefield for powers near and far is what gives rise to groups like Hezbollah. Iran wasn’t the country that started the use of Lebanon as the playing field for proxy wars. It’s being used to wage a proxy war at the expense of Lebanon as a country and its people started before the collapse of the brutal and crooked Shah’s regime. It was only years later when Hezbollah went looking for allies beside Syria that eventually it found theocratic Iran desperate for allies.
Lebanon has foolishly and cowardly allowed itself to become a colony of Iran. The full cost and ill wisdom of that decision will soon become apparent.
Gary, the first sentence of the third paragraph is very confusing to say the least. I think you meant to say that the NSC blames Hezbollah for the attack on the Druze Community in northern Israel.
Interestingly enough the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Druze community whose children were killed in the attack have been blaming the killing of the children on a far-right Israeli cabinet minister who was in the area. None of the children killed in the Golan Heights this weekend are Israeli, as their parents don’t have Israeli citizenship.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/28/world/video/rocket-golan-heights-funeral-smotrich-digvid
Apparently that far-right wing Israeli cabinet minister isn’t very popular around the Golan Heights area where the soccer-playing kids were killed on the same weekend that at least 30 Palestinian kids in Gaza were killed by Israelis.
The US NSC is accepting that it was a Hezbollah agent whose attack hit the Golan Heights and killed the kids playing soccer there. The Hezbollah agent’s name is known to both the CIA and Mossad and has been publicized since. Not out of the question yet that the attack wasn’t authorized by Hezbollah high-command or that it was a misdirected or misfired attack.
The New Yorker has a long article in the current (July 29) issue on Hezbollah. It’s pretty depressing. Basically the Lebanese government is far too weak to control it, especially since it has Iran’s support. But you know the goal of such groups to destroy Israel isn’t realistic, since that country has both a very strong military and most likely atomic bombs. On the other hand, a goal like destroying these groups is impossible too, since so long as current conditions exist (the hopelessness of Gaza, for example) they will simply reappear. You can go back 3500 years arguing over who is right, but the ones who suffer are always those who just want to be left alone to live their lives in peace.
@drrichard A further outrage is that UN “Peacekeeping Troops” (so-called) have been stationed on the border since 2006 to prevent just such incursions and bombardments by Hezbollah, but instead of “peacekeeping,” the UN troops have essentially run away and the UN has done absolutely nothing to stop these attacks – which some people seem to think are no big deal because they refuse to recognize Israel’s ownership of the Golan Heights as recognized by the USA and they contest the diplomatic status of the Israeli children who were blown to bits while playing football.
Until the Iranians got their hooks into it, Lebanon was a lovely, peaceful, and prosperous country that wisely sat out the many wars trying to destroy Israel.
They are asking Israel to “free Gaza”. Well…. Lebanon is free from Israel and they are still made up of terrorists backed by Iran. If the Palestinians were let to take over Israel. Can anyone imagine what thing would be like ! ?
@GuWonder You’re defending terror.
Mak fails to recognize that Lebanon’s use as a proxy war battleground and its related civil war was not the doing of theocratic Iran. The civil war in Lebanon literally started while Iran was a US and Israeli ally.
The Golan Heights is illegally occupied by Israel. Until the crazy Tr*mp Administration, Israel was the only country in the world which recognized the Israeli-occupied parts of the Golan to be legally annexed by Israel. Now it’s pretty much just the US and Israel who claim the Golan is a legal part of Israel — while nearly all other countries refuse to countenance and recognize Israeli’s annexations of war booty as being legal.
The Druze of the Golan Heights are mostly opposed to Israel, and the opposition seems to be growing as Israel moves in thousands upon thousands of more Israeli settlers into the Golan Heights and reminding the Druze that they will get marginalized in their own birthplaces on the Golan much like Israel has done to the Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank.
If the Lebanese gov. and the normal Lebanese ppl. cannot control Hezbollah than let the IDF eliminate the infestation once and for all.
By the way Erdogan should stop threatening Israel with occupation. He surely needs to remember what happened to Saddam Hussein and Gaddaffi..and yes the USA will not tolerate any attacks against Israel !
Hezbollah launched a rocket attack into an illegal israeli settlement in Syria on Saturday, killing 12 children playing on a soccer field. 44 people were injured.
I fixed it for you.
Joe the Warmonger hasn’t learned the lesson of what happened because of the removal of Saddam Hussein as the dictator of Iraq in the way it was done (including at the urging of the “Israel can do no wrong” crowd): Israel faces worse strategic threats and closer strategic threats post-March 2003-invasion of Iraq than it did pre-2003 invasion of Iraq. And unlike Iraq and Libya, Turkey is a member of NATO. Does Israel really want to take on Turkey and be the undoing of NATO? Well, given how much of a Putin kiss-up the rogue Netanyahu regime had been until October 7th last year, maybe Netanyahu and his ideological fellow travelers are game for that. More likely before it comes to that, Israel or someone else will try to arrange for an assassination of Erdogan — after all, Erdogan has made a lot of enemies outside of Turkey and even many inside Turkey.
James didn’t note that the killed children playing soccer were not Israeli settlers — they were Druze natives. Which is in some ways sort of surprising since there are now way more Israeli settlers in that part of Israeli-occupied territory than there are Druze. And the Israeli plan is to move in another 50,000 Israeli settlers (on top of the large number of Israeli settlers already there) into the Golan to use it as an excuse and opportunity to never return back the war spoils of victory/domination.
Geez,
GUWonder – seems to be a crazed leftwing jew-hating terrorists supporter.
Druze community have full citizen rights in Israel a d they serve in the Israeli army.
They are good people and good citizens.
It’s a shame people like GUWonder exist in the world.
@GUWonder I imagine you are going through some extreme cognitive dissonance to have posted these assorted ramblings, and maybe realizing that you have been empathizing with the wrong side.
It is of course correct that the problems in Lebanon pre-date the Iranian Revolution and can be traced back to 1971 when the Soviet backed PLO and Palestinians were expelled from US Backed Jordan where they had lost a bloody war against the King aided primarily by Pakistan as a US Proxy – since Jordan’s military had been largely destroyed by the Israelis in 1967. But while this set the fuse of instability, it was not until the Iranians began to use the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah as an occupational army to essentially occupy large swaths of Lebanon and use it for the purposes of Iran and not the Lebanese people.
You can continue to claim that the Golan Heights are occupied by Israel, but you might as well claim that the US occupies California. Israel won the Golan in a war of self-defense and annexed it – as it did Jerusalem – and those territories are now governed as Israel and the people who live there are residents of Israel. The Druze – who are not Muslim and considered infidels by many Muslims – who live in the area were persecuted when it was part of Syria, are a stalwart part of Israeli civil society, and serve in the civil service as well as the Israeli military and officer corps at rates exceeding Jews,.
So the inescapable fact is that Iran’s colonial army in it’s Lebanese colony intentionally launched rockets into Israel, blew up 12 children playing football, and injured dozens more. Of course, one may just shrug and say this is totally fine as the Golan Heights used to be Syria and that Israel should just drop the issue and do nothing in response to these atrocities – as they think Israel should have done nothing in response to the mass rape, mass murders, and mass kidnapping of October 7 – but reasonable people understand that those with self-respect don’t act like this.
We can all ask ourselves if we could ever live with ourselves seeing our daughters and grandmothers raped, our children subjected to torture and mass murder, while the perpetrators continue to hold the survivors hostages, and now to have children playing football blown to smithereens by Iranian puppets, and do nothing about it but give a stern lecture. I wouldn’t have any self-respect if I did nothing in response, and wouldn’t have any respect for anybody who did nothing in response, and I think that most reasonable people would agree even if traditional racial and religious resentments make it impossible for others to ever empathize with Jews or their state or anybody allied with it. We can consider this the litmus test.
If this attack was in Israel, then I suppose you would agree the Kerch Strait bridge doesn’t cross an international border.
What set the fuse of instability in Lebanon was Israel’s displacement of the Palestinians and the choices various parties near and far thereafter made to deliberately make Lebanon the playing field for proxy wars. That civil war/proxy war preceded Iran’s involvement in Lebanon as a supporter of belligerents. Israel’s involvement in Lebanon as a supporter of belligerent activity precedes by a good bit and then some Iran’s relevance as such in Lebanon. Then and later each of them did their part by exploiting the set into stone static demographic-based power-splitting arrangement among the various religious communities within Lebanon and their own dirty games with encouraging violence.
In 1971-1974, Lebanon was not the mess it became during the Civil War/proxy war. It was prime time to party in “the Paris of the Middle East”.
BobbaTheSponge again demonstrates an inability to face facts that don’t fit into his narrative designed to justify Israel’s violations of international law and has an imagination that runs wild with false characterizations about others when the facts presented are not convenient to Bobba.
I stand with Israel by defending the need for a Jewish-majority Israel within the pre-67 territory granted it under international law. I don’t support the rogue Netanyahu regime and the Likudniks who destabilize the region and milk America while pretending as if they are our allies.
The Druze inside Israel are not the Druze of the Golan Heights. And the Druze of Syria in the Golan don’t seem all that thankful for being made into a minority by Israeli settlers occupying the Golan. Even inside Israel proper; the Israeli Druze and Israeli Bedouin are increasingly dissatisfied with their inequitable treatment within Israel as non-Jewish Israelis. Judaist supremacists are bad for Israel’s standing in the world and they are also a danger to Israel’s long-term security.
It’s a shame people like Bobba find informed commentary to be problematic and want to wipe it off the face of the planet, but Bobba will be Bobba and so will Bobba’s ideological fellow travelers.
Her/his/their
SMR’s mentally lost too and can’t stick to the facts.
I oppose terrorism whether terrorism comes from non-state actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah or from state actors such as the rogue Netanyahu regime.
The entire Middle East could become a warzone by the end of the week. If so, the travel aspect will be planes between Europe and Asia needing to reroute almost twice the distance as usual. Some airlines like Emirates and Qatar will be stuck on a proverbial island.
This will be especially tough while the Paris Olympics are ongoing/ending.
@Pat Emirates will have no problem, as it can simply overfly Israel when it would have overflown Lebanon. Qatar won’t have that option and will have to go further out of the way.
@GU Wonder
It’s time to move out of your parents basement and get a life.
We aren’t interested in hearing your drivel on every post that has some connection to Hamas war.
Maybe get a political job as you seem perfect as a Democrat spokesman/woman/thing…
Moe seems a bit intimidated by facts being shared and by having Likudnik-supporting narratives checked by facts which provide historical perspective about the belligerent activities in and around Israel.
People aren’t things, for people are people. But give it to people like Moe — who are fans of dehumanizing “the other” — to try to call out other people as “things”. Then it’s no surprise that we see the hypocrisy of trying to rationalize and support barbaric terrorism of some sort while not doing so with barbaric terrorism of all sorts — that’s misanthropy in a world where the philanthropic alternative is to denounce terrorism of all sorts regardless of the involved tribalistic affinities of the belligerent players.
@GU WONDER: You’re only an expert at reading things on the internet. applying your personal opinion , and trying to monopolize blog comments.
THE idiot, GUWonder chimes in again.
I couldn’t care less that loungeabuser is clueless about me. What is more telling that is loungeabuser (like mike s) hasn’t even provided a rational fact-based challenge to the content of my comments. Sign of mental poverty? Perhaps. It’s also a demonstration of an inability or unwillingness to recognize that there are some people with informational privileges not limited to the internet and whose connections with the political players of relevance and extensive reading of ink on paper goes back to well before there was even Compuserve, Prodigy and other such dial-up internet services and that such offline reading never stopped. 😉
Waste of time challenging an idiot. Idiots are a lot like stupid people, they can not be taught. Ignorant people want to be taught and can be, but it takes years for people to become idiots. Those minds are now hard wired and unchangeable. Waste of time.
@Mak, the Lebanese government does not have control over the Hezbollah controlled areas of southern Lebanon.
It is very possible that the kids were not the intended target but that the missiles missed their target. That shouldn’t make anyone feel better.
Listen to yourself, Derek. If we had terrorists in texas firing missles at Mexico we would eliminate the bastards. Lebanon is just as responsible as Hezbollah for these atrocities because they do nothing to stop it.