JERUSALEM, - Israel threatened Friday to eliminate Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese Hezbollah leader who has long been a thorn in the side of the Jewish state, after the latest crisis over the seizure of two Israeli soldiers. “Nasrallah decided his own fate,” Interior Minister Roni Bar-On announced on public radio. “We will settle our accounts with him when the time comes.”The threat came as Israeli forces intensified attacks on Lebanon in pre-dawn raids, striking at the heart of Hezbollah’s command headquarters in Beirut’s suburbs, amid world concern that the escalation could spark a regional war.
Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite Muslim movement whose name means Party of God, has retaliated against what it has branded ”massacres” with a wave of rocket attacks against northern towns in Israel.