Israel, Lebanon exchange rocket fire

Nov 29, 2011, 19:28 GMT

Tel Aviv - The Israeli army said Tuesday it had returned artillery fire after rockets were launched from Lebanon into northern Israel for the first time in two years. No injuries were reported on either side.

A little known group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for the firing of rockets from southern Lebanon.

'With God's willing one of our rocket brigades managed to shell the settlements of the Zionist enemy in northern Palestine from southern Lebanon,' a statement received by the Lebanese website el- Nahsra said.

The Lebanese Army and UNIFIL, the United Nations peace keeping force in southern Lebanon, found a rocket launcher and stopwatch in a valley near the Christian southern Lebanese village of Ain Ebel, a UN official said.

Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said four Russian-made Katyusha rockets had landed shortly after midnight. Three of them landed in two Israeli villages near the Lebanese border and a fourth was found in a bush.

Fragments hit a chicken coop, killing dozens of chicks, as well as a gas tank, which caught fire.

The last time rockets were fired from Lebanon to Israel was in October 2009. The Abdullah Azzam Brigades also claimed credit for those attacks.

The Israeli military said it regarded the latest incident 'as severe, and holds the Lebanese government and the Lebanese Army responsible for preventing any rocket fire toward Israel.'

UNIFIL Commander Major-General Alberto Asarta Cuevas described the incident as 'serious' and said it was 'clearly directed at undermining stability in the area.'

'It is imperative to identify and apprehend the perpetrators of this attack and we will spare no efforts to this end working in cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces,' he said in a statement.

The UN commander called for maximum restraint to prevent an escalation.

In August 2010, four people were killed in an exchange of fire between Israeli and Lebanese troops sparked by a misunderstanding about a tree that needed pruning. That incident underscored the fragility of the calm that has prevailed at the border since the second Lebanon war of 2006.

Adullah Azzam was a Palestinian Islamic scholar and former mentor of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. He was killed by a bomb in Pakistan in November 1989.

The same Sunni group had last year threatened to use violence to thwart a visit to Lebanon by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It also said it was behind a July 2010 attack on a Japanese supertanker in the Persian Gulf's Strait of Hormuz, between Iran and Oman, and behind an August 2005 rocket attack in the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba. The latter was aimed at, but missed, a US Navy ship.

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