A Qatari delegation Friday stepped in to help secure the release of Lebanese soldiers and policemen held hostage by...
Kurdish forces engaged in sporadic battles with ISIS around the Syrian town of Kobani on Saturday, seeking to expand...
The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a...
The following are a selection of stories from Lebanese newspapers that may be of interest to Daily Star readers. The...
MP Walid Jumblatt decided to postpone his resignation to May at the request of Speaker Nabih Berri after a meeting...
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BEIRUT: U.S. and French diplomats expressed concern over an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel following remarks made by party Secretary-General Hasan Nasrallah, a report said.
An-Nahar Saturday said that members of the Lebanese government received calls from U.S. and French diplomats who were unnerved by Nasrallah's speech, in which he warned that Hezbollah was prepared to respond to any Israeli attack.
Nasrallah warned Friday that his group would respond to any Israeli attack at any time and in any place. He also said that the Israeli airstrike that killed six Hezbollah fighters and a top Iranian general in Syria’s Golan Heights this month had shattered the rules of engagement that had governed the military confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel in south Lebanon in the past.
The unidentified diplomats, who feared further escalation as a result of Friday’s fiery speech, said that Nasrallah should have echoed the moderate stance of Prime Minister’s Tammam Salam instead.
During Thursday’s Cabinet session, Salam urged all parties to avoid any escalation. “Don’t give Israel any chance to drag us in to war,” he was quoted as saying.
Salam also voiced Lebanon’s commitment to U.N. resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, as well as the presence of UNIFIL peacekeepers along its southern border.
A Hezbollah attack wednesday killed two Israeli soldiers in the Shebaa Farms in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike that killed six party fighters and a top Iranian general in Syria's Golan Heights on Jan. 18.
Hezbollah's Wednesday attack involving a salvo of anti-tank missiles on an Israeli military convoy was answered by artillery fire from the Israelis, which killed a Spanish UNIFIL peacekeeper.
Spain and Israel have agreed to a joint investigation to look into his death.
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MP Walid Jumblatt decided to postpone his resignation to May at the request of Speaker Nabih Berri after a meeting...
WASHINGTON: The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported Friday.
Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that U.S. and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on Feb. 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.
He was killed instantly by a car bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of a parked car, which exploded shrapnel in a tight radius, the Post said.
The bomb, built by the United States and tested in the state of North Carolina, was triggered remotely by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv who were in communication with Central Intelligence Agency operatives on the ground in Damascus.
"The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute," a former U.S. intelligence official told the newspaper.
A senior Hezbollah commander, Mughniyeh was suspected of masterminding the abduction of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people.
He was also linked to the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks at Beirut airport in 1983, in which 241 American servicemen died, and the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, in which a U.S. navy diver was killed.
The CIA declined to comment to the Post about the report.
According the newspaper, the authority to kill required a presidential finding by George W. Bush. Several senior officials, including the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and the national security advisor, would have had to sign off on the order, it added.
- 'Find, fix and finish' -
The former officials that spoke to the newspaper said Mughniyeh was directly involved in arming and training Shiite militias in Iraq that were targeting U.S. forces, and though it occurred in a country where the United States was not at war, his assassination could be seen as an act of self-defense.
"They were carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks," one former official told the Post, referring to alleged Hezbollah operations in Iraq.
They added that getting approval from the most senior echelons of the U.S. government to carry out the attack against Mughniyeh was a "rigorous and tedious" process, and it had to be proven that he was a true menace.
"What we had to show was he was a continuing threat to Americans," the official told the Post.
"The decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was self-defense."
The newspaper said that during the Iraq war, the Bush administration had approved a list of operations aimed at Hezbollah, and according to one official, this included approval to target Mughniyeh.
"There was an open license to find, fix and finish Mughniyeh and anybody affiliated with him," a former U.S. official who served in Baghdad told the Post.
According to the newspaper, American intelligence officials had been discussing possible ways to target the notorious Hezbollah commander for years, and senior US Joint Special Operations Command agents held a secret meeting with the head of Israel's military intelligence service in 2002.
"When we said we would be willing to explore opportunities to target him, they practically fell out of their chairs," a former U.S. official told the Post.
Though it is not clear when the agencies realized Mughniyeh was living in Damascus, a former official told the newspaper that Israel had approached the CIA about a joint operation to kill him in Syria's capital.
The agencies collected "pattern of life" information about him and used facial recognition technology to establish his identity after he walked out of a restaurant the night he was killed.
