Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has blamed Hamas for triggering Israel's deadly raids on Gaza, by not extending a six-month truce with the Jewish state.

28 Dec 2008 19:08:52 GMT

BEIRUT, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Sunday he had asked his fighters in south Lebanon to be on alert for the possibility of an Israeli attack on Lebanon.

"I have asked the brothers in the resistance in the south specifically to be present, on alert and cautious because we are facing a criminal enemy and we don't know the magnitude of the conspiracies," Nasrallah told a religious gathering in Beirut's southern suburb. They were his first comments on a bloody Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip.

Egypt must open the Rafah crossing or be considered a 'partner in the killing of Palestinians the IDF,' Hizbullah chief says.

Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Sunday called the IDF's offensive in Gaza a "humanitarian disaster and assailed Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit's statement according to which Hamas was to blame for the Israeli assault.

"What they are doing is casting blame on the victim," Nasrallah said in a televised address to a rally staged by the Shiite group in Lebanon. "Yesterday we heard a senior Egyptian official blame the victim. Can we allow such behavior from an Arab figure?"

Moreover, the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat quoted a Hizbullah source Sunday as saying his organization would not join Hamas and open a second front in the current fighting because it was not interested in a conflict with Israel at this time. In other words, it was concerned about the Israeli reaction.

Trying to duplicate that equation in the south is what lies behind Operation Cast Lead.

The goal is not to take out all the rockets and missiles in the Gaza Strip - at this point a seemingly impossible task - but rather to uproot from Hamas the desire to launch those missiles and rockets by smacking the organization so hard it will think innumerable times before returning to its old modus operandi.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been careful in setting modest goals for the operation: there is no grandiose talk of destroying Hamas, or even destroying their ability to hit Israel. They are talking about changing the security environment in the south, and the way they want to do this is not by uprooting all the missile launchers in Gaza, but rather by uprooting the will inside Hamas to launch their missiles - not because they can't, but because they are simply afraid to.