Israel Says Lebanon Alone Bears Onus for Consequences of Air Raids on Terrorist Bases

Israel has listed in detail here its air attacks on the “bases of the murder organizations in Lebanon” Thursday and said that “all possible steps” were taken “to avoid injury to residents of the refugee camps.”

The statement, in a letter to the president of the Security Council, reiterated that Israel was “obliged to take all the necessary measures to protect its citizens who are being attacked from Lebanese territory and to foil the commission of atrocities, such as those of Kiryat Shemona, Maalot and Kibbutz Shamir.” In the letter, Jacob Doron, Acting Permanent Representative to the United Nations, asserted that the Lebanese government “and it alone, is responsible for all the consequences, including the results of Israel’s defensive action, arising from the existence and activities of a practically independent regime of the terror and murder organizations in and from Lebanon.”

Doron reiterated that the Lebanese government permitted “the terror organizations” to set up and maintain “and conduct in complete freedom their headquarters, offices, propaganda machinery, bases recruiting activities, training camps, installations and arms caches and it is from Lebanon that the terrorists set out on their nefarious murder missions in Israel and elsewhere.” He asserted that the Lebanese government had waived any right of its armed forces “to enter terrorist bases, including the refugee camps which have come under the domination of the Palestinian murder organizations,” and that even in matters “arising from ordinary criminal offenses, the Lebanese armed forces are denied access to those camps.”