Report: Israel Strikes Syrian Weapons Facility

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu removes his glasses during a Likud party meeting at the Knesset (Israel's parliament) in Jerusalem on March 12, 2012. Israeli warplanes pounded the Gaza Strip for a fourth day, killing four more Palestinians, as a teenager died in a mystery blast, raising the death toll so far to 23. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Israeli warplanes struck a Syrian weapons facility on Friday night, a U.S. official told Fox News. Is is unclear what kind of planes were used.

While it's unclear whether the warplanes entered Syrian airspace or the missiles were fired from across the Syrian border, an unidentified source said U.S. forces were not involved in the strike.

"When Israeli planes fired on a weapons convoy inside Syria in January, they remained outside Syrian airspace. The convoy was believed to be carrying Russian SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles," the report adds.

An official from the Israeli Embassy in Washington said that "Israel is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons or other game-changing weaponry by the Syrian regime to terrorists, [especially] to Hizbullah in Lebanon."

Pentagon spokesman George Little did not comment on the claims.

Catholic bishops condemn Irish abortion bill

DUBLIN (AP) — Ireland's Roman Catholic leaders appealed to the public Friday to lobby their lawmakers to reject a bill that would permit abortions deemed necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman, a measure long ordered by Irish and European courts.

In a joint statement, Ireland's bishops, archbishops and lone cardinal described the bill, unveiled this week after decades of debate, as "a dramatic and morally unacceptable change to Irish law."

They argued it would be most grievously wrong to give any woman an abortion to assuage her threats to commit suicide, as the bill allows.

"It is a tragic moment for Irish society when we regard the deliberate destruction of a completely innocent person as an acceptable response to the threat of the preventable death of another person," the bishops wrote.

Cardinal Sean Brady, leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, said in an interview that the bill made the right to life of the fetus subservient to the rights of the woman. "There are two lives involved here," he said.

The intervention of Ireland's dominant church in the abortion debate raises the political temperature at a moment when the 2-year-old government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny is already fraying over the merits of the bill. The government has been under international pressure to clarify the rights of doctors to perform life-saving abortions since October, when a miscarrying Indian woman died from blood poisoning in an Irish hospital after being denied a termination.

The smaller left-wing party in the coalition, Labour, supports the bill but Catholic conservatives in Kenny's own Fine Gael party are vowing to weaken or block it, chiefly over its suicide section. The bill faces weeks of parliamentary debate and likely amendments before reaching a vote expected in July.

If passed, the bill would permit a single doctor to authorize an abortion if the woman's life was in immediate danger from continued pregnancy; two doctors if the pregnancy posed a potentially lethal risk, such as by triggering the return of cancer in remission; and three doctors if the woman was threatening to kill herself.

Kenny, who has previously clashed with Brady and other Catholic leaders over their admitted involvement in child abuse cover-ups, declined to respond. But Deputy Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore, the Labour leader, said the bishops had no influence on government policy.

"They're entitled to express their point of view. This is a democratic country. But the laws of this country are made by those of us who are elected by the people and are charged with that responsibility," Gilmore said. "And for 21 years now, legislators have failed to legislate for a Supreme Court decision which set down what was lawful and what wasn't lawful in circumstances where a pregnant woman's life is at risk. It is time that that legislation is dealt with."

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that an abortion in Ireland should be lawful only if doctors determined one was necessary to preserve the woman's life. Crucially, the judges found that this rule should apply to women making credible threats to kill themselves if denied a termination.

In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland's failure to back the Supreme Court judgment with laws and medical regulations meant Irish doctors were left in legal limbo and women were endangered in the process.

The Strasbourg, France-based court found that doctors sometimes told pregnant patients who needed abortions, particularly to keep their cancer in remission, to travel to England for the procedures. The court ordered Ireland to remedy the situation.

But the government still took no action until the death of Savita Halappanavar. She was 17 weeks pregnant when hospitalized in severe pain at the start of a protracted miscarriage.

Doctors refused her requests to terminate the pregnancy, arguing that the fetal heartbeat must stop first. During a three-day delay, a coroner's inquest found, Halappanavar contracted blood poisoning from ruptured uterine membranes and died of massive organ failure after the fetus' own death.

Ireland has the most severe restrictions on abortion in Europe. An 1861 law makes it a crime punishable by life in prison to procure or perform an abortion. The bill would reduce that maximum prison penalty to 14 years. Dozens of women in Irish maternity wards annually do receive abortions, but only for the most clear-cut medical emergencies.

Malta, the only other European Union member to outlaw abortions except for life-saving purposes, sets the maximum prison sentence at three years. And Poland, which outlaws abortion except in cases involving medical emergencies, incest, rape or serious genetic abnormalities, has no such criminal penalties.

The other 24 EU states all offer wider access to abortion, most notably neighboring Britain, the favored destination for Irish abortion-seekers since England legalized the practice in 1967.

More than 4,000 Irish women receive abortions there annually, while an increasing number induce their own miscarriages at home by using drugs ordered from foreign suppliers via the Internet.

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Online:

Syrian Sunnis flee coastal town after night of killing

By Erika Solomon

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Hundreds of Sunni Muslim families fled the Syrian coastal town of Banias on Saturday after fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed at least 62 people overnight and left bloodied and burned corpses piled in the streets, activists said.

A pro-opposition monitoring group posted a video online showing the mutilated bodies of 10 people it said were killed in a southern district of Banias, half of them children.

Some lay in pools of blood and one toddler was covered in burns, her clothes singed and her legs charred.

Pictures posted separately on social media by other activists showed piles of bodies of men, women and children dumped in stone alleyways.

The reports and images from Banias, a Mediterranean coastal town lying beneath green hills, could not be independently verified as the Syrian government restricts access to independent media.

The killings took place two days after state forces and pro-Assad militias killed at least 50 Sunnis in the nearby village of Baida. Activists said the Baida death toll was likely to rise to over 100 and possibly 200.

The U.S. government said on Saturday it was horrified by the report of the Baida massacre and said the Syrian government was stepping up violence against civilians.

The two-year-old uprising against four decades of Assad family rule has been led by Syria's Sunni Muslim majority, and sectarian clashes and alleged massacres have become increasingly common in a conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people.

Minorities such as the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam, have largely stood behind Assad, an Alawite. They argue that they are protecting Syria from Islamist militants.

Others say they begrudgingly support the regime out of fear they would become victims of a Sunni backlash after more than 40 years of rule by Alawite-dominated elites.

Banias is a Sunni pocket in the midst of a large Alawite enclave on Syria's Mediterranean coast, and activists in the area accuse militias loyal to Assad of ethnic cleansing.

Hundreds of panicked Sunni families fled Ras al-Nabaa in the south of Banias early on Saturday after the night of violence, said Rami Abdelrahman, head of the monitoring group, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"But now the army is turning people back at the checkpoints outside the town, telling them to go back to Banias, that nothing is wrong. There are also announcements going out on mosque loudspeakers telling people to return home."

A video posted online by other activists showed a pile of nearly 20 bodies in Banias that they said were all from the same family. Several women and nine children were among the dead.

ARMY "RESERVES" BLAMED

The Britain-based Observatory, which collects its information from a network of activists across Syria and residents, said the Banias attack was the work of the National Defense Forces (NDF), a new paramilitary group made up mostly of fighters from minorities that back Assad.

Trained and often directed by the military, the NDF describes itself as a reserve for the army. It has taken over the previously informal back-up role played by Alawite militias known as shabbiha, accused of previous massacres of Sunnis.

The Observatory said it had documented the names of 50 people killed on Thursday in Baida, just outside Banias. It said several women and children were among the dead.

In a statement, the U.S. State Department said it would "not lose sight of the men, women, and children whose lives are being so brutally cut short... We call on all responsible actors in Syria to speak out against the perpetration of unlawful killings against any group, regardless of faith or ethnicity."

Banias and Baida were the scene of some of the first sectarian clashes in Syria in 2011, when shabbiha fighters attacked peaceful Sunni street protesters in the first few months of the uprising, killing several people.

The Sunni Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham published a video on Saturday of its fighters launching rockets they said were aimed at the village of Qurdaha. Qurdaha is the birthplace and burial site of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled for over 30 years until his death, when his son Bashar al-Assad took power.

Ahrar al-Sham said the attack was a response to the killings in Baida and Banias. It was not possible to determine where the rockets hit as Qurdaha is controlled by Assad's forces.

There have been no reports on the killings or rocket attacks in Syria's official state media.

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