Violence Flares Across Israel-Lebanon Border

JERUSALEM, May 28 -- Israeli military aircraft, responding to rocket fire from Lebanon, struck targets there Sunday, and Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militiamen engaged in several hours of cross-border fighting, leaving at least two gunmen in Lebanon dead and one Israeli soldier seriously injured.

A U.N. peacekeeping unit in southern Lebanon intervened at the request of the Lebanese government and brokered a cease-fire between the two sides Sunday evening.

"It's quiet now, very tense, and we're observing the situation," Col. Boaz Cohen, the head of operations for Israel's Northern Command, said by telephone. "We'll see how it develops from here."

Early Sunday, Palestinian fighters in Lebanon fired several Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. The Israeli military said one soldier was slightly injured when one of the 120mm shells landed inside an Israeli military post.

Israeli fighter jets then struck what military officials described as two command posts in Lebanon, including a storage site for weapons and ammunition. The camps, one near the Syrian border in the Bekaa Valley, the other 12 miles south of Beirut, were run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical nationalist movement. One gunman was killed and five others were wounded in the strikes.

Hours later, skirmishes between Israeli soldiers and gunmen in Lebanon broke out along the border. Israeli military officials said the fighting began when a sniper from Hezbollah, a radical Shiite Muslim movement in Lebanon, shot an Israeli soldier on assignment in a kibbutz, or civilian commune, in the border community of Manara.

Hezbollah claims that Shebaa Farms, a nearby tract of land that Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war, is Lebanese territory. But the United Nations says the land is part of Syria.

The Israeli soldier was seriously wounded in the attack, Israeli military officials said. The military responded with artillery fire and airstrikes on Hezbollah positions, killing at least one Hezbollah gunman.

Israeli military officials said Hezbollah responded with rocket attacks aimed at several Israeli towns along the northern border. Although no injuries were reported, many Israelis in those border communities sought refuge in fortified cellars for much of the afternoon.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the Israeli response "a serious warning to Palestinian elements in Lebanon of what will happen if the shooting continues."

"Let there be no doubt that we will deal a very painful blow to whoever tries to disrupt life along our northern border," Olmert said.

Meanwhile, former prime minister Ariel Sharon was moved from a Jerusalem hospital to a long-term care facility in Tel Aviv. Sharon, 78, suffered a massive stroke Jan. 4. He has not regained consciousness.