Israel Downs Drone From Lebanon

                                                                 

                           IAF F16 knocks out possible Hizboula drone. They're there for Israelis 24/7.
Nadene Goldfoot
Israel was able to shoot down a drone on Thursday as it came in from the north, Lebanon, which is on the northern border of Israel.

It is thought that the Hezbollah militant groups was behind this attempt to infiltrate.  Of course Hezbollah denies this.  Hezbollah is a Shiite militant group trying to take advantage of the civil war going on in neighboring Syria.

A spokesman from Israel's  IDF  said that an F-16 warplane shot down the drone.  The drone was smashed into the sea about 5 miles from Haifa, Israel's northern port.  Israeli naval forces have been searching for the wreckage.

Lebanon has been made up of a mixed population of which 60% had been Muslims of Sunnis and Shi'a following Hanafi and Jafari fiqhs.  Christians had been the ruling party even though they were a minority until the end of the 20th century, but not today.  It is a small country with only about 4,196,453 population in all.

Major Hadad of Lebanon was a good friend of Israel.  His troops used to patrol the border between Lebanon and Syria in order to prevent terrorism.  He would come into our army hospital in Haifa for his R and R.  His men attacked a PLO group of terrorists in 1982 in retribution and got themselves and Israel in trouble for it, as our general had allowed them to enter the area.  Now the terrorism out of Lebanon isn't even necessarily Lebanese home grown but a neighboring faction and comes from the sky as well. Syria is under the umbrella of Shiite Iran who hates Israel.   Thank goodness for F-16's for defense.

Reference: Oregonian newspaper, 4/26/13, page A6, Israel downs drone, suspects Hezbollah

Drone Over Israel Downed: Possible Hezbollah-Iran Financed Terrorism

Nadene Goldfoot
A drone, possibly from the Lebanese Islamic militant group, Hezbollah, was sited over Israel on Saturday.  Israeli fighter jets shot it down.  That was the first time in the past 6 years that a hostile aircraft got into Israel's airspace.

Hezbollah is backed by Iran.  they are known to have sent drones over Israel before.  Right now Iran and Israel are at odds over the Iranians creating uranium to service A bombs which would be used on Israel.  Iran has threatened Israel saying they are going to destroy her and drive her into the sea and other nasty expletives.  After calling Israel every horrible name imagined and then some, they have the audacity to say that their program is for peaceful reasons only like medicine.

At the same time, Iran is having to deal with their very angry citizens who find the value of their money is shrinking quickly.  Iran is trying to placate international concerns over their nuclear program which has brought about restrictions on Iran and is starting to hurt them.  They say they have converted more than 1/3 of their most enriched uranium into a powder for a medical research reactor.  They say that this stuff would be hard to reprocess to make atomic weapons.  The goal for them now is to restart nuclear talks with the world powers and soften demands by the US and others to stop their top-level uranium enrichment.

The USA and allies want them to stop the 20% production and ship the rest outside the country.  Iran is adamant that they will never give up the capacity for this enrichment program.  Sanctions need to continue and the Iranians need to keep being vocal about their situation in order to change Tehran's leadership to finally make a deal.

Iran has almost 419 pounds of 20% enriched uranium produced.  They have made U308-uranium oxide from 157 pounds of it.  Experts say that it's not good material for making weapons.  Just how much of it do they need for medical research?  We're talking about the remainder of the 262 pounds they have ready to go into death dealing atomic weaponry.

Resource: Oregonian Sunday paper 10/7/2012 page A 11: Israeli jets down drone that had entered airspace, AP
page A12 Iran makes move to ease fears over nuke program by Ali Akbar Dareini, AP