Posted on 05/28/2006 6:18:26 AM PDT by Dark Skies
Military officials say Israeli jets have fired missiles at two Palestinian militant bases in Lebanon.
The attack has come hours after rockets fired into northern Israel wounded an Israeli soldier.
Witnesses say they have seen columns of black smoke rising from a military base just outside Beirut and another in the eastern Bekaa Valley.
Both bases are run by the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command (PFLP-GC).
Witnesses say they have seen at least two casualties being carried out of the base near the eastern town of Luci, which consists of tunnels dug into a hillside close to the Syrian border.
Palestinian militants at Luci have fired automatic rifles and anti-aircraft guns at the Israeli planes.
The Lebanese army says its anti-aircraft units have responded at the PFLP-GC's large Naameh bunker near Beirut.
Israel says one of the bunkers was used as an arms store.
"Following the attack today, we responded with air strikes against two terrorist targets in Lebanon," an Israeli army spokesman said.
"One of the targets was used to store weapons and ammunition."
Revenge sworn
The exchange has come two days after a senior Islamic Jihad official and his brother were killed in a car bombing in southern Lebanon that the Palestinian group has blamed on Israel.
Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group, which controls the Lebanese side of the border, also blamed Israel for the assassination.
Islamic Jihad officials swore revenge after the car bombing.
It is unclear who fired the rockets into northern Israel.
Hizbollah has had no immediate comment on that attack or the subsequent Israeli air strikes.
The top PFLP-GC official in Lebanon, Anwar Raja, says Palestinian commandos are based in the Luci bunker, which has been around for some 30 years.
But he says it is too early to comment on casualties.
"Israel used the rockets that were fired into northern Israel as a pretext to assault Lebanese sovereignty," he said.
"This reveals the dangers that the Lebanese and Palestinians face from Israel."
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev says Israel plans to lodge a complaint with the United Nations (UN) Security Council over the rocket attack on its northern region.
"This attack demonstrates clearly the need to move expeditiously in implementing UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1680 that call for the disarming of all the armed militia in Lebanon," Mr Regev said.
"As long as these extremist groups remain armed, they will be a threat to stability."
Good. It's difficult to respond if you're dying/dead. I'll take that to mean the strike was successful in getting the right people.
Good for the Israelis, but if I were them, I wouldn't wait to respond until I'd already been attacked. I'd wipe out the damned bases preemptively.
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