Hezbollah Uses Mass-Kill Rockets

Kenneth R. Timmerman, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, July 25, 2006

HAIFA, Israel -- The rockets Hezbollah is raining down on Haifa and much of northern Israel are distinctly different from the Soviet-built katyushas of earlier wars, Israeli officials say.

Instead of standard military fragmentation warheads – deadly enough – Hezbollah's rockets are packed with thousands of tiny ball-bearings, which burst out from the warhead in every direction like so many bullets.

"This kind of rocket gives no one a chance," Haifa police chief, Commander Nir Meriash, told NewsMax today.

At least 60 of the Hezbollah rockets have slammed into Haifa over the past two weeks. Most of them have been 220 mm Katyusha-type rockets, made in Syria. Each rocket carries 40,000 deadly ball bearings, packed into a warhead with 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of high explosives.

In addition, around a half-dozen of the larger FAJR-3 rockets have hit the Haifa area, including a deadly strike on July 16 that killed eight railway workers in a train maintenance depot.

The FAJR rockets, made in Iran, carry a 110 pound warhead. But what made the July 16 strike so deadly were the tiny ball bearings packed inside.

"Haifa has never been attacked like this," Meriash said. "These attacks are meant to kill civilians."

Although the rockets are relatively small, they have smashed through the tile roofs and the soft cinderblock walls of apartment houses and other dwellings, killing and wounding people on several floors.

When they explode out in the open, anyone within a fifty meter radius will be seriously wounded.

"I found a woman lying in the street with one of her legs beside her, detached from her body," Meriash said. That attack occurred last Friday, July 21.

North of here, closer to the Lebanese border, Hezbollah is using extended-range katyushas known as "Raed" rockets. These also are packed with the deadly ball bearings, and have killed and maimed civilians in dozens of Israeli towns and agricultural settlements along the Mediterranean and in the Galilee.

The Chinese-made Raed rockets were supplied to Hezbollah by Iran.

"You won't see this kind of weapon in the arsenal of any civilized country," the deputy head of the police bomb disposal unit told Newsmax. "Certainly not with Israel or the United States."

FULL STORY at

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/7/24/154609.shtml?s=al