Lebanon's Syrian-backed Hizbollah guerrillas attacked Israeli positions in a disputed border zone on Saturday, defying diplomatic pressure for calm on Israel's volatile northern frontier. The attack came a day after Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded that Syria rein the group in, and after Hizbollah's other patron Iran signaled it did not want violence on the Israeli-Lebanon border to spark a wider conflict. Witnesses said Hizbollah fighters fired anti-tank missiles, mortar rounds and machineguns at Israeli troops in the Shebaa Farms, a 10 square mile patch of uninhabited land by the Lebanese border and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. In a statement, Hizbollah said its fighters had scored "direct hits" on Israeli posts in Shebaa Farms. Smoke and flame rose from the Rweisat al-Alam hilltop, where witnesses said Hizbollah's rockets had hit an Israeli tank. Israeli responded by shelling locations near the Lebanese border town of Kfar Shouba. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
I still think most of this is for internal Lebanese consumption. |