2 Rockets Hit Northern Israel
Katyushas Fired From Lebanon Cause No Injuries, Police Say

By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 9, 2008

JERUSALEM, Jan. 8 -- Two Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon struck a small town in northern Israel early Tuesday, causing no injuries, Israeli police and army officials said. It was the first such attack on that region in six months.

The rockets crashed down on a road in the western Galilee town of Shlomi, said police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld, the day before President Bush is scheduled to arrive in Israel in an attempt to invigorate peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

In an apparently unrelated incident hours after the rocket attacks, a roadside bomb struck a U.N. vehicle near the southern Lebanese town of Sidon, lightly wounding two peacekeepers. Yasmina Bouziane, spokeswoman for the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, which monitors the border with Israel, said there was no immediate assertion of responsibility for the attack, the first on UNIFIL involving casualties since six Spanish and Colombian peacekeepers were killed by a roadside bomb in June.

In response to the rocket attacks, Israel filed a complaint against the Lebanese government with UNIFIL, said Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, who added that it was not yet clear who fired the rockets.

A senior Lebanese army official in Beirut, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied that the rockets were fired from Lebanon, calling such reports "baseless and completely fabricated," the Associated Press reported. Bouziane said UNIFIL was investigating but had no further comment.

In Shlomi, a few miles south of the border with Lebanon, shrapnel from one of the 107mm rockets struck a wall of a house, causing minor damage, Rosenfeld said. Katyushas, developed and first manufactured by the Soviet Union, are fired from mobile launchers and lack a guidance system.

While Palestinians have conducted daily rocket attacks on Israel in recent weeks from the Gaza Strip -- where Israel's army has launched a series of deadly raids -- Tuesday's strike was just the second on northern Israel since the end of the 2006 war between the Israeli army and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement.

During that conflict, Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets at northern Israeli towns and cities, killing 43 civilians and causing hundreds of thousands of residents to evacuate the region for several weeks. More than 1,000 Lebanese -- the majority of them civilians, according to Lebanese officials and human rights groups -- were killed in the conflict, along with 119 Israeli soldiers.

A commission convened to investigate Israel's conduct of the war said recently that it will publish its final report Jan. 30. Israel's management of the conflict has drawn wide public criticism.

The last Katyusha attack on Israel's north came in June when a pair of rockets struck the town of Kiryat Shemona, causing no injuries, Rosenfeld said. That time, a previously unknown group, the Jihadi Badr Brigades - Lebanon Branch, asserted responsibility.