(Thanks to Mari for these two articles)
Israel accused of threatening Lebanese by phone
Lebanon protests to United Nations against Israeli ‘threatening phone calls’ to Lebanese.
BEIRUT – Lebanon’s new telecommunications minister on Thursday accused Israel of bombarding Lebanese people with threatening phone calls, a day after a prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah. “Hundreds of people throughout Lebanon received threatening phone calls on their landlines from Israel,” Gibran Bassil said.
“The phone would ring, the person would answer and they would hear a message saying, ‘This is from the state of Israel. Abandon Hezbollah or there will be another war, like there was in 2006,'” he said.
Bassil, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, the main Christian party in the opposition, said he has written a letter of protest to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“We consider this to be a clear violation of UN Security Council resolution 1701,” Bassil said, referring to the resolution which ended the devastating 34-day war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.
No comment was immediately available from Israel.
Many Lebanese had received similar phone messages urging them not to support Hezbollah during the course of the war which killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
The news comes a day after the bodies of two Israeli soldiers were exchanged for five Lebanese prisoners and the remains of almost 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters.
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Israel threatens to assassinate Kantar
Senior Israeli official says intelligence apparatuses would not rest until Kuntar was assassinated.
TEL AVIV – Israel is threatening to assassinate the Lebanese ex-prisoner Samir Kuntar only one day after his release from its jails in a prisoners’ swap deal with the Lebanese Hezbollah party, Israeli press revealed. The Israeli daily Yediot Ahtonot quoted an unidentified “senior Israeli official” as saying on Thursday that Kuntar, who was released yesterday in a swap deal with Hezbollah had turned into a man sentenced to capital punishment.
“Israel will reach Kuntar and liquidate him”, he told the paper, stressing that the Israeli intelligence apparatuses would not rest until Kuntar was assassinated.
He said that after Kuntar was released from jail there was no “obligation on our part towards him”.
The paper quoted other sources as advising Kuntar not to get out of his home publicly because for people like him “it is not advisable to spend much time walking around in broad daylight”.
Observers say, however, that Israel is already threatened with retaliation after being blamed for the slaying of Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughnieh in February, and may not wish to give the Lebanese resistance movement further cause to retaliate.
Israel still occupies Lebanese Shabba Farms despite international calls on Tel Aviv to withdraw from the territory.
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Commentary: I really had to laugh when I read these articles. Really, how lame and pathetic can the Israelis get to resort to such empty threats? Don’t they know the golden rule of credibility: “never promise, never threaten – just act”? They used to, at least in the past, but the current generation of Israelis is too busy licking the wounds inflicted by the repeated humiliations inflicted upon their collective ego to think about retaining any credibility.
These guys have all the hallmarks of the losers which they have become. Good.
