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Israel targets Hezbollah bunker
20/07/2006 07:20 - (SA)
Jerusalem - Israeli warplanes dropped 23 tons of bombs on a bunker in south Beirut where the army believed senior Hezbollah leaders were hiding, a senior army official said on Thursday, but the group denied the site was a bunker or that its leadership had been hurt.
The jet fighters dropped the tons of explosives on the bunker on Wednesday evening, said Major General Yitzhak Harel, the head of the army's planning division.
The army, he said, had pinpointed intelligence information that Hezbollah's top brass were hiding in the bunker, possibly even the group's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
More targets
"Everyday that passes allows us to collect more and more intelligence, more and more targets, and increase our ability to hit Hezbollah on all its levels, and this is what happened overnight in Beirut," Harel told Israel's Army Radio.
Harel noted that Nasrallah has not been heard from since he gave a televised address on Sunday, but could not say for sure if he or his top commanders had been hurt in the aerial attack.
"I can say that the hits were exact. In the coming hours we will know what really happened," Harel said.
Mosque
Hezbollah said the site of the attack, in the Bourj al-Barajneh neighbourhood in southern Beirut, was actually a mosque under construction.
"No Hezbollah leaders or elements were killed in the strike," the group said in a statement issued shortly after the attack.
"The truth is that the building targeted by the enemy warplanes with 23 tons of explosives is just a building under construction to be a mosque for prayers," said the statement, issued on the group's Al-Manar TV and faxed to The Associated Press.
"It seems that the enemy wants to cover up its military and security failures with lies and claims of imaginary achievements."
'We know what we hit'
Israel's UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman, denied Hezbollah's statement that the site hit was a mosque.
"I can assure you that we know exactly what we hit. ... This was no religious site. This was indeed the headquarters of the Hezbollah leadership," he told CNN.
Hezbollah has a headquarters compound in Bourj al-Barajneh that is off limits to the Lebanese police and army, so security officials could not confirm the strike. Hezbollah media made no immediate mention of any attack.
Aim of eliminating Hezbollah leaders
Israel has said that one of the objects of its offensive in Lebanon is to eliminate Hezbollah leaders. Harel confirmed Thursday that Israel would still try to strike the group's leadership.
"We went to this war with the understanding that at the end of the operation we would have to seriously decrease the strength of Hezbollah, of the entire organisation, to allow the Lebanese government to take control of the southern part of the country, to cancel the situation in which there is a country in a country and to create the conditions to bring home the kidnapped soldiers," Harel said.
- AP
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