Barrage of Katyusha rockets hit N.Israel town from Lebanon
Pastor Dale Morgan
Sunday June 17, 11:41 PM Reuters
*
Barrage of Katyusha rockets hit N.Israel town from Lebanon*
By Benny Dagan
KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel (Reuters) - Katyusha rockets hit the northern
Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon on Sunday,
the Israeli army and police said.
It was the first such attack since last year's war between Israel and
Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
There were no casualties.
A Hezbollah spokesman denied any link to the attack. A security source
in Lebanon said Palestinian fighters were suspected of firing the
rockets from southern Lebanon into Israel, an area bombarded by
thousands of Hezbollah Katyushas last July and August.
Palestinians fought a small-scale civil war in the Gaza Strip, south of
Israel, last week, in a setback to their hopes of founding a state there
and in the West Bank. Many more Palestinians live as refugees in Lebanon
and other countries.
A new Palestinian emergency government was sworn in the West Bank on Sunday.
Another Lebanese security source said three rockets were fired from near
the Lebanese village of Taibeh, two of which landed in northern Israel.
Another landed near U.N. peacekeepers in the Lebanese village of Houla,
he added.
"We're ascertaining the facts on the ground," said Yasmina Bouziane
deputy spokeswoman for the UNIFIL peacekeepers.
Witnesses in south Lebanon said a Lebanese army patrol found the launch
site near Taibeh where a fourth Katyusha rocket apparently failed to launch.
Israeli emergency services and police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said
there were no casualties reported in Kiryat Shmona but a car and
roadways were damaged.
One television channel showed a car with its front smashed and with a
shattered windscreen as well as an apparently shrapnel-sprayed company
sign in a local industrial park.
The strike came as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas named an
emergency government following the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by
Hamas Islamists who had led the government Abbas dismissed on Thursday.
Fighting in Gaza has divided the four million Palestinians living there
and in the West Bank. Many more Palestinians live in refugee camps in
Lebanon, as well as other neighbouring countries.
An international peacekeeping force was deployed in southern Lebanon
last year after the war to prevent rocket attacks.
"We were outside the factory when suddenly there was a frightening
boom," one man told Israel's Channel 2 television.
"We saw a black cloud in the sky and we came over to inspect the damage
and we saw this," he said, pointing to a hole in the road next to the
damaged car, which had apparently been empty.
(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis, Adam Entous and Alastair Macdonald
in Jerusalem and Yara Bayoumy and Nadim Ladki in Beirut)