>WW4 File: Hezbollah denies responsibility for rocket attack on N. Israel, IDF returns fire; Russia evacuates more nationals from Gaza, delivers aid

>In the wake of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s implied threat of opening a second front along the Israeli-Lebanese border, three Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon struck the northern Israeli city of Nahariya earlier today. One rocket exploded in a retirement home, injuring two persons. Lebanon’s minister of labor, Mohammed Fneish, a member of Hezbollah, denied that his party/terrorist organization was responsible for the incident. In response to the rocket attack, Israeli troops returned mortar fire across the border. “Nothing happens in Lebanon without a green light from Hizbullah,” an Israeli defense official commented, “Even if it was a Palestinian group who fired the rockets, Hizbullah would have to at least have turned a blind eye to allow the rocket fire.”

Pictured above: This morning Israeli Army Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defence Minister Ehud Barak, and Yoav Galant, chief of the army’s Southern Command met at the Tzeelim military base in southern Israel to assess the situation in Gaza. Photo provided by the Israeli Government Press Office.

Fighting between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas insurgents continue in the Gaza Strip today, amidst predictable condemnation from Islamic and communist regimes. The Jerusalem Post reports that an IDF officer was killed and a soldier lightly wounded in a clash with Hamas gunmen in the central Gaza Strip. Citing Palestinian sources, the Israeli media reported that the air force carried out two dozen strikes on Thursday, killing one Hamas operative and wounding 1o others in Gaza City. An air strike in northern Gaza killed three members of a rocket-launching cell.

Pictured here: Equating Zionism and nationalism in general with oppression, leftists throughout the world reject Israel’s attempt to defend its citizens and territory from the Palestinian insurgency, which is largely Marxist in orientation. On January 2, cadres of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in New Delhi burned a joint effigy of Olmert and US President George W. Bush.

Latin America’s Red Axis is also united in denouncing Israel over the Jewish state’s extirpation of the Hamas insurgency in Gaza. Last Sunday Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega ranted: “I want . . . to ask the international community to make all necessary efforts to stop the criminal acts of the Israeli government against the suffering Palestinian people.” Today 100 Palestinians living in Nicaragua marched through downtown Managua before demolishing a menorah-shaped monument in the city center. The seven-branched candelabrum is Israel’s national emblem. The Palestinian Ambassador to Nicaragua Walid Al-Mua’qat took part in the demonstration, which was endorsed by mass organizations affiliated with the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front.

In Canada left-wing anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head in the form of a proposed ban on Israeli academics teaching in the province of Ontario’s universities. “In response to an appeal from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, we are ready to say Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general,” piously intoned Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Len Rudner, regional director of the Canadian Jewish Congress in Ontario, branded the resolution “unbalanced, unfair and unhelpful.”

Meanwhile, on Thursday Russia evacuated a second group of nationals from the Palestinian territory. The first such airlift occurred on January 2. Moscow is also heavily involved in relief missions for the Palestinian National Authority. Today a fourth humanitarian flight, carrying 28 tons of food and five tons of medicine, arrived in the Egyptian town of Larish, which will then be trucked into the Gaza Strip. KGB-trained PNA President Mahmoud Abbas, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, another KGB asset, is closely aligned with the Soviet strategists.