The northern Israeli city of Haifa was hit today by a rocket. Hezbollah has denied launching the rocket (right!) but they threatened earlier today to hit Haifa if the Israelis attacked Beirut, which they have already done. My guess is that Hezbollah is either lying — surely not! — or communications have been cut off so that one Hezbollah terrorist camp doesn’t know what the other terrorists camps are doing.

Israel considers the attack on Haifa to be a “major, major escalation” to the current mini-war.

From in.the.news.co.uk:

The northern Israeli industrial coastal city of Haifa has been struck by a rocket, which seems to have fulfilled threats made by militant Lebanese group Hizbullah earlier in the day.


However, the Shia Muslim group has denied firing the missile, despite launching rockets throughout the day into Israeli territory.



Haifa was previously though to be outside of the militant’s firing range, being almost 20 miles from the Lebanese border, but even though there are no reported casualties from this latest incident, Danny Ayalon, the Israeli US ambassador, said the Haifa explosion represented a “major, major escalation” in the growing crisis.

…

“Since this morning, Israeli naval vessels have enforced a full naval closure on Lebanon because Lebanon’s ports are used to transfer both terrorists and weapons to the terror organisations operating in Lebanon,” confirmed a military spokesman.


The Hizbullah kidnappings are being seen by many as a deliberate attempt by Muslim insurgents to further heighten tensions in the Middle East, following Cpl Gilad Shalit’s capture in a cross-border raid by Palestinian militants over two weeks ago.



Israeli aircraft, artillery and gunboats launched a series of strikes on targets in Lebanon early this morning, including bridges south of Beirut.

…

Hizbullah sources have indicated that they will launch a full-scale assault on the coastal town of Haifa if Israel continues to attack Beirut, with Israel warning residents of the capital’s outlying regions to evacuate.


Yesterday Israeli air strikes targeted suspected Hizbullah posts and bridges, after the group revealed it had kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers, now identified by Israeli army officials as Ehud Goldwasser and Elgad Regev.



The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has vowed that Hizbullah militants will “pay a dear price for their actions” describing the attacks as an “act of war”.



Both Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbullah and the hard-line Palestinian movement Hamas are demanding that Israel releases Muslim prisoners in exchange for the safe return of the Israeli soldiers that they are separately holding.

A big hat tip to Wizbang on this one. According to various news sources, including FOX News and the Associated Press, Israeli Foreign Minister Mark Regev announced that Israel has information that Hezbollah is trying to take the two kidnapped soldiers to Iran. If this is true, expect the following to happen:

1. Syria will become a target for the Israeli war juggernaut. Syria and Iran both back Hezbollah (though Syria hedges its bets by also supporting a competing faction of Hezbollah) and Syria has not fully complied with UN orders to completely move its troops out of Lebanon. The United States will back, if only tacitly, Israel’s attack on Syria because Syria is a strong supporter of terrorism. Not only that, but Syria is training terrorists and allowing them to freely enter Iraq through the Syria-Iraq border. By attacking Syria and decapitating terrorist operations there, the destabilizing force of Syria throughout the entire region — including Iraq — will be stopped.
2. Iran will also be targeted by Israel. Don’t forget that Hezbollah was established by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who came to Lebanon in 1982 during the last war Lebanese war with Israel. The odds are good that Israel will take this opportunity to knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. The world will condemn this action but the world comdemns every action Israel takes anyway, so they have nothing to lose. The US and Iraq will allow, perhaps “accidentally,” Israeli warplanes and missiles to attack Iran while preventing Iranian warplanes from entering Iraqi and Jordanian airspace.
3. Israel will put Gaza out of business. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry building has already been taken out — look for one or two buildings housing the Gaza “government” to be destroyed every day.
4. What now looks like a drawn-out war may well turn out to be a fairly short war as Israel will probably decide to mercilessly pound the enemy into a pulp instead of allowing things to drag out they did in the last major fight with Lebanon back in 1982. By minimizing the length of the war, Israel will prevent a “peace movement” from forming either in Israel or the US. The Islamofascists are masters of media manipulation and the western media are willing partners in disseminating their lies (see Mere Rhetoric’s excellent article on how the Washington Post interprets compromise to really mean Israeli surrender).

While I was writing, this news has been confirmed by the Associated Press, CNSNews, and others.