Hezbollah guerrillas attack Israeli positions

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- The largely dormant Lebanese-Israeli front erupted in fighting Monday, with Hezbollah guerrillas shelling Israeli positions in a disputed area and Israel retaliating with airstrikes.\nThe escalation, the first since January, came amid outrage in the Arab world after Israeli missiles killed Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Islamic militant group Hamas, earlier Monday.\nLebanese officials said Hezbollah guerrillas fired rockets and mortar shells at Israeli military outposts inside the disputed Chebaa Farms area near the borders of Lebanon, Syria and Israel.\nHezbollah's Al-Manar television reported Hezbollah fighters attacked "the Zionist occupation positions in the occupied Lebanese Chebaa Farms."\nIn a statement to The Associated Press, Hezbollah linked the attack to Yassin's assassination, saying it attacked "all Zionist enemy positions in the Chebaa Farms, using direct weapons and rockets and scoring direct hits."\nIt said the targeted positions were Roueissat el-Alam, al-Samaka, Zibeddin, Roueissat al-Karn, al-Radar and Ramtha.\nThe Israeli army said its fighter jets were responding and troops also used artillery fire against suspected guerrilla hideouts near the Chebaa Farms. The army said Hezbollah fired anti-tank missiles.\nLebanese officials said Israeli warplanes fired two missiles into valleys and mountainous areas near the villages of Kfar Chouba and Hilta, they said. There was no immediate word on casualties.\nMonday's was the first attack on the Chebaa Farms in five months.\nOct. 27, 2003, Hezbollah guerrillas shelled Israeli positions in the Chebaa Farms, wounding an Israeli soldier and triggering Israeli airstrikes.\nIn the most recent fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli warplanes struck Hezbollah guerrilla bases in southern Lebanon after an Israeli soldier was killed and another wounded when Hezbollah guerrillas fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli military bulldozer that crossed into Lebanon.\nThe Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which led a guerrilla war against Israel's 18-year occupation of a border zone in southern Lebanon that ended in 2000, occasionally attacks Israeli troops in the Chebaa Farms.\nThe Chebaa Farms is uninhabited farmland on the foothills of Mount Hermon that Lebanon, backed by Syria, claims as its own. Israel captured the territory when its forces seized Syria's Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. The United Nations says the region is Syrian and that Syria and Israel should negotiate its fate.\nIsrael and the United States regard Hezbollah as a terrorist group, but Lebanon regards it as a legitimate resistance movement against Israeli occupation of Arab lands.