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Lebanon Scorns Israeli Threat of Heavy Retaliation
Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud Friday rebuffed Israel's threat of "heavy retaliation" to possible Lebanese guerrilla attacks, the official National News Agency reported.
Hammoud said this kind of threat was "not a new thing." "Its (Israel's) leader will launch this threat whenever there is a domestic crisis," he said.
He said "it is Lebanon's sovereignty that is violated and we are also suffering the increasing casualties caused by land mines in south Lebanon that were left by Israel."
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is facing early elections two years ahead of the end of his tenure, said Israel will forcefully move to defend its citizens and soldiers and will not accept any violation of its sovereignty.
He threatened again to mount "heavy retaliations" against Lebanon if fresh guerrilla attacks were unleashed against the Israeli army from south Lebanon, the strongholds of the Hezbollah group.
"The army will retaliate heavily for any Hezbollah attack against an Israeli target," Barak said in a statement released in Jerusalem Thursday.
The Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah, or Party of God, has vowed to escalate the attacks aimed to drive Israeli forces out of the disputed Shebaa Farms area at "all cost and sacrifices."
Lebanon said its border with Israel will not see a peace as long as Israel occupies the Shebaa Farms, a 200-square kilometer land on the border between Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
Lebanon claims sovereignty over the farms while Israel insists that it seized the farms from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and their fate should be decided in its negotiations with Syria.
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