Group Claims Rocket Strike on Israel

53 minutes ago

CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida in Iraq said Thursday that it fired a barrage of rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel this week, in a rare claim by the group of a direct attack against the Jewish state.

The statement, on an Islamic Web forum where al-Qaida in Iraq often posts statement, could not be independently verified.

Israel blamed Tuesday's rocket attack on a radical Palestinian militia and bombed one of its bases near Beirut. Israeli officials would not immediately comment on the al-Qaida statement.

The U.S. State Department said it could not immediately confirm the claim.

"A group of al-Qaida lions planned ... a new attack on the Jewish state," the al-Qaida statement said. "The brothers accomplished their mission as it was planned and succeeded in their escape."

It said the al-Qaida fighters fired 10 rockets into northern Israel.

In Tuesday's attack, a volley of rockets landed in a residential neighborhood of the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona, causing damage but no casualties.

Israel responded with airstrikes against a base of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a pro-Syrian Palestinian militia. The PFLP-GC denied firing the rockets, as did other Palestinian factions and the Shiite Hezbollah guerrilla group.

Without referring to the claim, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, the head of Israeli army intelligence, said Thursday in an interview with Israel's Channel 10 TV, "Today al-Qaida is turning its focus to the heart of the Levant - Syria, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, the countries around us, and to Israel."

Though it frequently rails against Israel in its propaganda, al-Qaida has rarely launched direct attacks against it.

The group claimed responsibility for a November 2002 suicide bombing of a hotel frequented by Israelis in Kenya that killed 15 people, including three Israelis. The same day, militants from al-Qaida tried to shoot down a chartered Israeli plane leaving a nearby airport.

The groups' branch in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been battling U.S. and Iraqi forces for two years and leading a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and kidnappings in that country.

But al-Qaida in Iraq has been expanding attacks to other parts of the Arab world. It claimed to have carried out a Nov. 9 triple suicide bombing against hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman, that killed 60 people.

In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said he had no information to corroborate al-Qaida's claim and instead repeated U.S. demands that Lebanon impose security control over southern Lebanon and disarm militias like Hezbollah and Palestinian groups.

"You have armed attacks from a territory under control of terrorist groups on Isarel. That's unacceptable. It should be unacceptable to the Lebanese government, it's unacceptable to the international community," Ereli told reporters.

Lebanon has refused to send its military or security forces into southern Lebanon since Israel's 2000 withdrawal from the area, leaving it open for Hezbollah fighters to control the region.

The United Nations has demanded Hezbollah and other forces be disarmed, a demand the guerrilla group and the Lebanese government have rejected.

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