President Bush said Thursday night that he was outraged by the Iraqi missile strike on Israel and that the coalition of international forces in the Persian Gulf was attacking all Iraqi missiles sites that could be located.
“The president is outraged at and condemns this further aggression by Iraq,” said White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater.
Israeli Ambassador Zalman Shoval confirmed the “unprovoked attack” on “purely civilian targets” at a news conference at the Israeli Embassy here late Thursday night.
The government of Israel, supported fully by the opposition, “reserves the right to respond in any way it deems fit,” Shoval said. But he refused to say whether Israel would retaliate.
The ambassador said he had received calls from Secretary of State James Baker, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and White House officials, who told him they were “devastated” by the attack. He said this feeling was expressed in their voices.
The White House later said Baker had telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to discuss the situation. “The secretary assured the prime minister that the United States is continuing its efforts to eliminate this threat,” the White House said in a statement.
Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier Thursday that most of the fixed missiles sites in western Iraq, the area nearest Israel, had been knocked out by U.S. and other warplanes in the first hours of “Operation Desert Storm.”
He said a “high priority” of the U.S.-led operation was to destroy Iraq’s 76 mobile SCUD missile launchers. The chief problem, he said, was locating them.
Shoval said the attack on Israel “jeopardized the lives of both Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, who live next to each other.”
He pointed out that Israel had maintained a low profile at the request of the United States and kept out of the conflict since Iraq invaded Kuwait last Aug. 2.
“The Israeli government, supporting America’s political aims and complying with the United States government requests, decided to refrain from a pre-emptive attack” on the Iraqi missile launchers that threatened it, the ambassador said.
He said that as a result, “the State of Israel and the people of Israel” had paid “the dearest price of any of the countries in the world which have faced Iraq’s aggression, except Kuwait itself.”
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