Shimshon 9

Lebanese citizens on Thursday reported receiving recorded phone messages asking for information about missing Israeli soldiers. The message asks people to view an Israeli Web site or call a phone number in the United Kingdom if they have any information on the whereabouts of the missing troops. The Web site, www.10million.org, belongs to a foundation set up by the Israeli government, according to the Associated Press. The site pictures five missing Israeli soldiers, including Ron Arad, whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986. The Web site, in English, Arabic and Farsi, offers a $10 million reward for information on any of the missing troops.

One editor for The Daily Star and three Associated Press staffers were among those who received the calls on their mobile telephones Thursday. A foundation spokeswoman refused to say if it was behind the calls.
Last month, similar messages in Lebanon criticized Hizbullah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and prompted Lebanese outrage over what some officials said was the Jewish state’s tampering with Lebanon’s telecommunications system. Telecommunications Minister Jebran Bassil said last month that he wrote a letter of protest to United Nations chief Ban Ki Moon protesting over the messages, calling them a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the summer 2006 war with Israel.
Israel’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on those claims. But an Israeli official told AFP that Israel uses “all sorts of methods to weaken Hizbullah” and that it was engaged in “intelligence and electronic warfare” against the group.
Many Lebanese had received similar phone messages urging them not to support Hizbullah during the course of the 2006 war, a conflict which killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today said:

“The era of the Zionists has come to its end, and I recommend that the leaders of Europe and the U.S. not submit to the Zionists. If they help them, they will be harmed. Also among the leaders of Europe and the U.S. there is serious doubt regarding the existence of Zionism, and soon we will witness the disappearance of this corrupt germ from the region.”

Ahmadinejad made the remarks at the sixth World Mosque Week conference in Tehran.

He said that Zionism was the most complex political and social plot ever.

He noted that writers in the West accept that supporting the Holocaust is tantamount to backing the identity of the Zionists, and added that the Zionists who administer affairs are not numerous but have adopted a very complicated method in the world. He said that Zionists are the most isolated group in the world but through media propaganda they try to indicate that it is others that are isolated.

He stated that the Zionists had lost their reason for existence because they dreamed of seizing the region from the Nile to the Euphrates but had instead been forced to build a wall around themselves.

Source: IRNA, Iran, August 20, 2008

Panel poll of Israelis (including Israeli Arabs) carried out for the Knesset Channel (99) as reported in the 22 August edition of Makor Rishon

Was the disengagement from the Gaza Strip a success or failure? Failure 67% Partial success 25% Complete success 4%

Do you support an additional disengagement in Judea and Samaria? Support 29% Oppose 66%