Jul 11, 2014

Lebanese and Israeli officials have confirmed that at 6:30 a.m. on July 11, unidentified parties fired two missiles from ​Hasbaya, in southeastern Lebanon, toward Israel. The Israeli response was swift. Minutes after the rockets fell, Israeli army artillery shelled the area where the rockets originated as well as surrounding forest. Lebanese authorities indicated that an earlier attempt at a rocket launch had been made hours before, at 2 a.m., but the rocket, at a nearby location, had exploded on the ground due to a technical malfunction.

About two hours after the successful firings, Lebanese authorities disseminated a story that the army had conducted a comprehensive field survey of the area and had found two 107-caliber Katyusha rockets. More important, the army was for awhile able to track the suspect who had fired the missiles. According to the army, he was wounded and taken to a hospital in the region. The army is trying to identify the hospital to arrest him.

This development consumed political and military discussion in Lebanon, coming as it did during the Israeli war on Gaza and amid talk of the emergence of Sunni extremist cells in Lebanon. Some had wondered whether the Lebanese front would be ignited to support the Palestinians in Gaza. A source close to Hezbollah was quick to tell Al-Monitor that the party had nothing to do with the rocket launches. In fact, they considered the firings to be “suspicious rockets, designed to implicate Lebanon and its resistance in a battle that serves Israel in time and place.”

The source also said, “The real battle now is in Gaza and is being directly led by the Palestinian resistance. Any real and honest support of them would not shift attention from their struggle and cause and would not move the media, political and diplomatic focus away from Gaza, where the battle actually is, into southern Lebanon, where the battle is contrived.”

He added, “The ones helping the Palestinians in their battle are the ones who send them arms and ammunition into Gaza and who provide Gaza with [powerful] rockets, which threatened the vicinity of the Israeli Knesset two days ago and which landed near the Dimona reactor. The July 11 rockets on the other hand were a sick joke, amateurish and pathetic, because some of them didn’t even cross the Lebanese international border and might have landed on the Lebanese side instead of the Israelis'.”