Hezbollah Plans Lawsuits Against Israel for Last Summer's War Damage

Who says that Arabs can't have chutzpah*? JTA reports that Hezbollah plans to initiate a series of lawsuits against Israel for damage caused during last summer's Lebanon War. The war began when Hezbollah guerillas crossed the border from Lebanon into Israel and attacked an Israeli army border patrol, killing several soldiers and kidnapping two others. The captured soldiers, if they are still alive, remain prisoners. Hezbollah had shielded the raid by diversionary rocket attacks on Northern Israeli towns. In the fighting that followed, Hezbollah maintained a constant barrage of rockets and mortars on Northern Israel.

Ibrahim Awada, a lawyer who heads Hezbollah's legal department, revealed the plan last week on Syrian television, Ha'aretz reported. Awada said Lebanese with dual citizenship would file the lawsuits in the country where they hold citizenship.

[*Chutzpah is an almost untranslatable Yiddish term. Perhaps the best functional definition I have found is: When a defendant is convicted of murdering his parents, and pleads to the sentencing judge for mercy because he is an orphan, that's chutzpah. Hezbollah has now trumped that example.]