The IOF "is still nearly 20 miles from the Litani and even after reaching the river there will still be concentrations of Hezbollah units in and around the Palestinian refugee camps of Tyre. Here Israel will encircle the city, lay siege to it, instead of a frontal assault and use artillery and air attacks to eliminate any enemy rocket fire," reports Willard Payne for News Blaze, quoting the pro-Likudite DEBKAfile. Translation: in standard Zionist fashion, the IOF will engage in a medieval siege of the ancient Phoenician city with a history going back to 2700 BC, according to the Ionian traveler and storyteller Herodotus. Its 117,100 inhabitants will be ethnically cleansed and those who remain will be exterminated, a now well established Israeli modus operandi.

DEBKAfile predicts: "Even if one of the three [IOF] forces reaches the Litani, Hizballah concentrations will remain behind, the largest around the Mediterranean town of Tyre and its satellite Palestinian refugee camps. It is hard to imagine Israeli forces going in for a large-scale clean-out of this densely population enclave. Israeli commanders will prefer encirclement and siege. A decision will also have to be taken about the small town of Tebnine and the entire Jebel Amel mountain region of central Lebanon. Here too, Israeli tacticians may settle for artillery and aerial control over Hizballah’s ability to fire rockets from this stronghold."

Note the connections here: Tyre will be attacked because it is supposedly rife with Hezbollah; the Palestinians, forced into squalid refugee camps due to earlier Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns (including wanton mass murder, rape, theft, torture), are little more than Hezbollah satellites; the predictable excuse for all this impending murder and ethnic cleansing once again is attributed to Hezbollah rockets, as the ongoing brutality in Gaza and the West Bank are routinely attributed to Palestinian suicide bombing and more recently to ineffectual and primitive home-made Qassam rockets.

As DEBKAfile is essentially a Zionist propaganda tool (although a darling of the corporate media, having won the Forbes Best of The Web award), it is on track with the Zionist-neocon plan to decimate the Arab and Muslim world, as long planned. "It is no coincidence that yesterday Iran Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made quick visits to both Damascus and Beirut, which were most likely meant to give the word from Tehran that it is time for Hezbollah to use the rest of its rockets, of all ranges, and that Damascus should be ready to enter the war. After the visit Syria President Bashar Assad ordered Syria’s military to be on its highest alert," News Blaze continues. In other words, we are expected to believe that Syria not only takes its marching orders from Tehran, but Assad and his tiny and ill-trained military are delusional with suicidal fever dreams. "The enormous publicity resulting from such a move will send spiritual shockwaves throughout the entire Islamic world setting the stage for Iran’s glorious-imperial entry as its symbolic support for Palestinian and Lebanese people."

In fact, both Syria and Iran understand well the Israelis and their neocon partners intend to invade—or rather shock and awe—their countries in turn and they are scrambling to defend themselves, as should be expected. Of course, if two warring parties were going at it over our border here in the United States, chances are pretty damn good we’d declare a high alert, especially if one of the warring parties had not only made repeated threats against our country but also buzzed Camp David with a fighter jet (as Israel buzzed Assad at his retreat on June 28).

But never mind. Israel is not only the master of double standards but also relies on the corporate media spin machine, sworn to secrecy, or at least omission, and will never mention Israel’s long and sordid history of warmongering, ethnic cleansing (beginning with 800,000 Palestinians), false flag terrorism, and religiously sanctioned kleptomania, the latter not only including land but water as well.

"The Litani, located entirely within Lebanon, derives its hydro-political importance from the fact that it runs within easy tunneling distance to the present Israeli-Lebanese border," notes the MEDEA Institute.

It runs actually less than 10 kilometers from the Israeli controlled upper reaches of the Jordan. Israel had hoped to connect the Litani with the Jordan, thus enabling it to pump those waters into Israel proper. The plan to seize the Litani has a long history. It had been articulated for the first time in the 1920s by one of the Zionist organizations but the objective became more serious following the 1967 war, as Israel wanted more water than had been garnered from the war. The timing for the capture of the Litani in 1978 was logical: if South Lebanon were secured at the time, the waters of the Litani would be available for Israeli use by some point in the mid-1980s, when Israel anticipated that the waters captured in the 1967 war would be fully used up and more water needed. However, as things stand now, the coveted waters of the Litani remain undeveloped for Lebanon and in limbo for Israel.

However, the Israelis banished this troublesome limbo, thanks to Hezbollah and its ancient technology of Katyusha rockets, first developed in the late 1930s.

If there is a constant in the current situation, it is that we can expect Israel to steal both land and natural resources, especially water, from its neighbors—and invent absurd excuses (and lies) to do so, and thus kill thousands of Arabs.

However, this time around, Hezbollah presents formidable resistance to this brazen homicide and thievery. Israel may employ its U.S. provided weaponry to push beyond the Litani, and may even besiege Tyre, reducing it to ruin. But by no means, this time around, will they be allowed to keep the territory they have repeatedly attempted to ethnically cleanse and steal.

Indeed, Hezbollah will resist and nothing short of turning southern (and apparently parts of northern) Lebanon into a Stalingradesque wasteland will slow down the tenacious and well-trained resistance group, now arguably one of the more effective in the world.

Of course, it should be remembered, the people of Stalingrad, although decimated, eventually won out against the Nazis, as Hezbollah will eventually win out against Israel’s once vaunted IOF.