Saturday morning briefs

Holy crap! The Lebanese army actually did something!

For the first time since the beginning of the fighting, the Lebanese army seized Saturday a Grad rocket launcher in a forest some 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) north of the border with Israel. An armed Palestinian and twenty-five rockets were found near the launcher.

The rockets were found some seven kilometers (about 4.3 miles) from a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine training camp, but it remains unclear whether organization members were those who planned to fire the rockets toward Israel.

Interesting that it wasn’t a Hezbullah launcher. Interesting that it was the pals who had it, too. Apparently, the Lebanese army can only disarm palestinians, not Hezbullah.

UNIFIL has figured out that Israel will do what it takes to defend her citizens:

A top UN peacekeeping official on Friday said he feared the war in southern Lebanon would continue until late August and voiced fears Israel would flatten Lebanon’s southern villages and destroy Tyre “neighborhood by neighborhood” if Hizbullah rockets keep landing in the Jewish state.
[…] “I have no doubt that Israel will flatten Tyre if civilian casualties continue in Haifa. Tyre will be taken off neighborhood by neighborhood,” Morczynski said. “I think Israel is contemplating flattening villages, flattening every single house to deny Hizbullah any advantage of urban fighting in the streets.”

As would any other nation, to protect her citizens. But any other nation won’t be condemned by the world for doing so.

Sure, Abbas is working for peace. That’s why he calls Hezbullah his “brothers in Lebanon.”

Hamas had raised the possibility this week of teaming up with Hizbullah to negotiate terms to release of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israel in exchange for the three IDF soldiers.

But Abbas said the situations were too different to coordinate a release.

“Our brothers in Lebanon have their own special case … and we have our special case,” he said while in Alexandria to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

“This is a path and that is another path.”

Which is just a way of covering his ass. Abbas isn’t as stupid as the leaders of Hamas; he knows that publicly allying with Hezbullah is the kiss of death. So he just hems and haws instead.

And of course, the daily barrage of rockets in northern Israel continues. But they didn’t kill anyone, so they don’t count. Right?

Wrong.