Israel would use "disproportionate" force to destroy Lebanese villages from which Hezbollah’s group fired rockets at its cities in any future war, an Israeli general said in remarks published on Friday.

"What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on," said Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army’s northern division.

Dahiya was a Hezbollah stronghold that Israel flattened in sustained air raids during a 34-day war with the Shiite group two years ago.

"We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases,"

Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

Some 1,200 Lebanese civilians and 159 Israel soldiers were killed during the war.

Eisenkot rejected accusations that Israel was violating a U.N.-brokered ceasefire by sending aircraft on reconnaissance flights over Lebanon, saying the aerial missions were necessary given that Iran and Syria continue to arm Hezbollah in breach of the U.N. truce.
 
Nuclear Plant

Meanwhile another Israeli paper reported Friday that Tel Aviv will install two massive radar antennae near the Dimona nuclear plant to bolster its defense measures against Iran.

The 400 meter-high (1,300 feet) antennae will be erected in the Negev desert near a top-secret military site where Israel is widely believed to have developed the only nuclear weapons cache in the Middle East, the paper said.

An Israeli army spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the report.

Maariv said work on the twin masts, which would be the largest in the region, would begin in two weeks and would be completed in three months, but did not provide details on what the system would be used for.

The newspaper said the antennae were part of a massive new radar system that the United States will deploy in Israel, a project announced by the Pentagon earlier this week.

The deployment comes amid heightened fears regarding Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, which the United States and Israel say is aimed at developing weapons that could threaten the Jewish state’s existence.

Iran insists its programme is entirely peaceful.

(Agencies via Alarabiya.net)