The Raid
Lebanese sources reported that the IDF commando forces arrived in helicopters around 1:00 a.m. and landed in an orange grove near the city's northern environs. The troops cut through a fence and opened fire on a second floor apartment of an apartment building, which was the apparent target of the raid. The apartment was hit by fire, and eyewitnesses reported its occupants were wounded.
The raid failed to achieve its target, the kidnapping or killing of senior Hezbollah officers. IDF nevertheless claimed victory and stated that it had stopped a long-range rocket Hezbollah unit. Hezbollah claimed it had thwarted the attack. Hezbollah however resumed rocket launching from the site within hours of the raid.
When withdrawing from the building exchanges of fire between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah gunmen erupted, with Israeli Air Force helicopter gunships providing the soldiers on the ground with fire-support. The clashes were described by Hezbollah spokesman as an "ambush".
At least one Hezbollah fighter was killed in the raid. The apartment building was bombed into rubble by an Israeli jet later in the afternoon. According to Lebanon sources one Lebanese army soldier and at least four civilians were killed in the raid. According to the IDF "at least six", seven or ten Hezbollah fighters were killed in the clashes while 10 IDF soldiers were wounded, two of them seriously.
Read more about this topic: Tyre Raid
Famous quotes containing the word raid:
“Each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)