7 Israelis were killed and 57 more were wounded.
2 IDF soldiers were killed and 31 others were wounded in Lebanon.
4 Israeli civilians were killed and 26 others were wounded in Katyusha attacks in Israel.
1 Israeli civilian was killed in the Diaspora as a result of the war.
The IDF is claiming 30 Hezbollah fighters were killed in Southern Lebanon so far today. 1 Lebanese soldier and 1 Lebanese civilian were also killed.
The IDF carried out many airstrikes in various parts of Lebanon during the early part of Saturday.
76 Israelis, 46 servicemen and 30 Israeli civilians, have been killed so far. In addition, 2 Diaspora Jews have been killed, apparently as a result of the heated passions unleashed by the war.
925 people have been killed and 3,823 have been wounded so far in Lebanon. Hezbollah has suffered ~80 KIA, other militias have lost ~ a dozen or so men, and the Lebanese military has lost 26 men. All told, 839 Lebanese civilians have been killed.
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An IDF commando force attempted to land north of the city of Tyre at 1 AM Saturday, but was hit with withering fire by local Hezbollah defenders. They were dropped in by helicopters, similar to the operation the other day at the hospital in the Bekaa Valley. 10 sailors were wounded, 2 seriously, and the force was forced to make a retreat. IDF helicopters circled overhead, firing down on the local defending force.
The Lebanese army, to their great credit, opened fire on the helicopters with anti-aircraft guns and the IDF helicopters fired back, hitting a Lebanese armored vehicle and destroying it.
It's about time the Lebanese army starting defending their country. The IDF claimed that 7 Hezbollah fighters were killed in the operation. 1 Lebanese soldier and 1 civilian were also killed in the fighting.
The attack targeted the Hezbollah missile crew that fired at Hadera Friday night. First reports said that the IDF retreated without completing the mission. Later reports said that the mission took out the missile crew that fired on Hadera.
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Hezbollah has two new antitank missiles and a new RPG launcher to add to its arsenal.
In addition to the Russian AT-3 Saggers, AT-4 Spigots and AT-14 Kornets, Hezbollah is also using Russian AT-13 Metis-M Saxhorn antitank missiles (an excellent weapon - one of the best of the Russian AT series) and has somehow managed to obtain French-German MILAN antitank missiles (a top-of-the-line weapon). Two Merkava tanks were damaged and 7 IDF soldiers were killed by antitank weapons in the past two days.
The MILAN uses a tandem (dual) warhead - a small warhead at the front of the missile and a larger warhead at the rear of the missile, in order to defeat reactive armor. It uses High Explosive Antitank (HEAT) rounds, which utilize a shaped charge to defeat most armor, including reactive armor. The MILAN can punch through an amazing 7 1/2 feet of solid concrete and has a 95% hit rate.
The AT-13 also has a HEAT tandem warhead that is capable of defeating reactive armor. It also comes with a thermobarbic warhead that sets off a fuel-air explosion. Thermobarbic weapons produce more explosion for their size than any other modern weapon system.
In addition to the antitank guided missiles (ATGM's) above, Hezbollah has also managed to obtain Russian RPG-29 RPG launchers , the latest top-of-the-line of the Russian RPG series. The RPG-29 is actually capable of defeating most, if not all, of the latest model tanks. The RPG-29 also has both HEAT and a thermobarbic warheads. In trials, the RPG-29 has actually surpassed the excellent Kornet missiles against tanks.
Hezbollah is getting both the RPG-29 and the METIS-M antitank missiles from Syria, along with 220mm and 302mm missiles packed with antipersonnel warheads. The METIS wire-guided missile can fire up to 4 rounds per minute. Hezbollah is also thought to have obtained Kornets from Syria, though there is no evidence that they have yet used them in this war.
The Kornets are not wire-guided like many other Russian anti-tank missiles, but are laser-guided, and have a range of up to 3 miles. This eliminates many problems with wire-guided missiles, including that any obstacle along the way can trip up the wire. Note that the wire-guided missiles actually pull a very thin wire along behind them as they fly towards the target.
The thinking is that Hezbollah may be waiting until the IDF penetrates deeper into Lebanon to use the Kornets.
Approximately 20% of the ATGM's fired at Merkavas have penetrated the armor and either damaged or destroyed the tank and/or caused casualties.
At Marwahin, a border town directly across from the Israeli town of Zarit, there are signs that a Merkava and an IDF armored bulldozer were wrecked. At Ramiye, a burnt-out Merkava is stuck up in the trees (!). Between Ramiye and Debel a couple of miles from the border, there are signs of more destroyed armor.
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Early on Saturday, Hezbollah Katyusha rockets slammed into Kiryat Yam, Kiryat Motzkin and Kiryat Haim in Israel, killing 1 civilian and wounding 16 more. A direct hit by a missile set a house on fire. A vehicle and a field were in flames.
Later, a Katyusha rocket hit the Bedouin Arab village of Arab al-Aramshe, next to Shlomi on the Israel-Lebanon border, killing 3 women who were sitting on their back porch. That village is a mixed Christian, Muslim and Druze Arab village. Speaking of Arab villages in Israel, take a look here at a map of all the Arab villages in Israel that are currently receiving no state services at all.
The reason is because after the 1948 War, 93% of the land was declared to be for Jews only, and was administered by the Jewish National Fund for that purpose. Since Jews only owned 7% of the land before independence, many Arab villages were included in that 93%. These villages "squatting on Jewish land" were declared illegal.
Part of the consequence of that illegality is that they receive no state services. In the Negev, Bedouin "illegal villages" are frequently destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, sometimes on 10 minutes notice. For years, Israel has been spraying the agricultural fields of these Bedouins with poison via airplanes.
It is an outrage and a symptom of Zionist control of the US media that the American public are never told of such outrages. It goes without saying that all of the above are blatant symptoms of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state. Much more on the tragedy of the Israeli Bedouins can be found in my prior post here.
The Druze are an interesting people. Apparently a split from Ismaili Shia Islam (itself a highly diverse sect) dating back to the 900's, they have diverged so far from mainstream Islam that many do not consider them to be Muslims anymore. However, the Druze officially refer to themselves as Muslims, but individual Druze often say they are not Muslims.
They survived centuries of Orthodox Sunni brutality by ensconcing themselves in the mountains of Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, the only places where the sect is found. They do not accept converts, like the Alawi sect, to which they share a number of similarities, and outmarriage to other groups is forbidden, though some Druze are starting to marry out nowadays.
Interestingly, Druze women are held in fairly high esteem for a Middle Eastern "Muslim" culture. In particular, women often serve as priests.
They believe in the transmigration of souls (reincarnation), and over 50% of Druze youth recall a past life. During the Lebanese Civil War, they played a major role and their fighters were feared and often vicious. Many seemed unafraid to die and fought almost suicidally due to their reincarnation beliefs. Radio announcer Casey Kasem is a Lebanese Druze.
Like the Alawi and the Yezidis, the Druze have two religious groupings, an inner group of initiates making up maybe 10% of the group who are granted access to some or all of the tenets of the religion, and an outer group of believers, who practice the rituals of the religion but who are denied access to most of the core tenets of the religion.
Since the core tenets of the Druze religion are kept secret in this way, it has been hard for outsiders to determine the exact nature of the Druze religion. A similar situation exists for the Yezidi and the Alawi. See my prior post on the Yezidis here. A good overview of the Druze religion and people can be found here.
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An additional 10 Israelis were wounded in Katyusha attacks throughout the day. 170 Katyushas have rained down on Israel so far on Saturday, 120 in a 1 1/2-hour period in the afternoon. Tiberias, Safad, Shlomi, Kiryat Shemona, Safad, Nahariyah, Maalot, Accra, Kiryat Yam, Kiryat Motzkim, Kiryat Bialik and Kiryat Haim were all hit.
1 IDF soldier was killed in fighting in early morning fighting in Nabi Al-Awadi in the eastern section of southern Lebanon. The town could not be located on a map. Hezbollah guerrillas fired a mortar at an IDF APC in the town, killing 1 soldier and wounding 1 more.
Saturday afternoon, Hezbollah attacked a group of Israeli troops who were holed up in a house in Aita Al-Shaab with an anti-tank missile. 1 IDF soldier was killed and 19 more were wounded in the missile attack and the ensuing large gunbattle that erupted afterwards between the troops in the house and Hezbollah guerrillas around them.
Hezbollah fired a mortar at IDF troop concentrations on the Israeli side of the border, seriously wounding 1 IDF soldier.
In Blida, in the eastern sector of southern Lebanon, guerrillas fired an antitank missile at IDF forces. IDF forces fired back.
The IDF fired on Hezbollah forces in the village of Rajmin in the western sector of southern Lebanon.
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Hezbollah disgustingly refers to the missile that hit Hadera Friday night as the Khaibar-1. The Khaibar were one of the Arabian Jewish tribes that were defeated in battles by the first Muslims.
They were dispossessed of their lands, many of the males were executed, and many of the females were turned into slaves. The battle of Khaibar was the battle against the Arabian Jews that was led by Ali, patron saint of the Shia, hence its significance in Shia theology and frankly, Shia religiously-based anti-Semitism.
This Khaibar-1 is apparently a 302-mm rocket made in munitions factories in Syria. These factories are joint Iranian-Syrian funded.
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The IDF carried out many airstrikes with jets and helicopters across parts of Lebanon on Saturday, especially in southern Beirut and Southern Lebanon. In some cases, the Lebanese Army heroically fired on attacking IDF helicopters with anti-aircraft weapons. The IDF has now supposedly cut off all access to Lebanon via roads. Relief agencies are complaining that there is no way to bring in relief supplies to the country.
Early Saturday, Molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue in southeastern Brazil in another case of passions being unleashed by the war effecting Diaspora Jews. The synagogue was in Campinas, 60 miles north of Sao Paolo.
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On Saturday night, an Israeli citizen was murdered by a gang of what were apparently Arabs in Sydney, Australia. He had previously been identified as an Israeli by residents of the neighborhood.
I assume that those who killed him were Lebanese Muslims, as there are many of them living in that area. The man was stabbed to death by a gang in a vehicle who confronted him late at night. The gang jumped out of the car, chased the man down and killed him. This would be the second Jew in the Diaspora who has been killed by Muslims as a result of this war.
Previously, a Pakistani man busted into the offices of the Jewish Welfare Federation in Seattle, Washington and opened fire, killing 1 Jew and wounding 5 more, 3 critically. It appears that the "safe haven for the Jews" is not only not safe itself, but actually endangers Jews in the Diaspora!
About a week ago, the Jewish Community Center in Bondi, Sydney was attacked in an attempt to set it on fire. The day before, a dozen or so Middle Eastern men (probably Lebanese) attacked the Paramatta Synagogue in Sydney with a cement block. In addition, windows in some cars at the center were smashed.
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Let us close with a couple of more choice Zionist quotes:
Moshe Dayan himself told Zionist youth at a meeting in the Golan Heights in July 1968. "Our fathers had reached the frontiers recognized in the partition plan; the Six-Day War generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan, and the Golan Heights. This is not the end. After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones. They will extend beyond Jordan...to Lebanon and...to central Syria as well." Israel Shahak, The Zionist Plan for the Middle East (1982)Gee, I thought that Zionist sophist Daniel Pipes said all that Greater Israel stuff was a wicked Arab anti-Semitic lie?
It should be clear, under any future political situation or military constellation, that the solution of the problem of the indigenous Arabs will come only when they recognize the existence of Israel in secure borders up to the Jordan River and beyond it [emphasis added], as our existential need in this difficult epoch, the nuclear epoch which we shall soon enter. Odet Yinon, A Strategy for Israel in the 1980's, Kivunim (1982).
