By Staff Reporter
On Tuesday, hundreds of handheld pagers used by members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah simultaneously exploded across Lebanon, killing at least 12 people, including two children. Nearly 3,000 others were wounded, many of them critically.
No one has claimed responsibility for the operation, but it is not hard to guess who is behind it: Israel, a nation that specialises in terrorising selected Arab civilian populations under the pretence of fighting terror. Since October of last year, this same nation has busied itself carrying out genocide in the Gaza Strip, where officially more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed but the true death toll is likely many times higher.
And while the ostensible targets of Tuesday’s attack were pager-wielding Hezbollah members, it was carried out with the full knowledge that the fallout would be indiscriminate and that massive civilian casualties would ensue. But that is the whole point of terrorism, is it not?
Hezbollah, it bears underscoring, owes its entire existence to the terroristic 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that slaughtered tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. Israel’s torture-happy occupation of southern Lebanon persisted until May 2000, when the Israeli military was ignominiously forced to withdraw its forces by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance.
In 2006, Israel returned to Lebanon in a 34-day assault on the country that decimated Lebanese infrastructure and killed an estimated 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians. After all, a nation that thrives on perpetual war cannot afford to let too much time elapse in between blowing things up.
Of course, Israel perpetually claims to be acting in self-defence – and wantonly detonating pagers across Lebanon has apparently now been added to the “defensive” repertoire. But a glance at history reveals that, as in Palestine, Israeli machinations in Lebanon have traditionally been driven by distinctly predatory motives.
Source: Aljazeera
