Israel Blockades, Bombs Lebanon While Hezbollah Rains Rocket Fire

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Conflict Escalates in the Middle East
The leader of Hezbollah promised an all-out war Friday after Israeli warplanes attacked his residence and Hezbollah's main headquarters in an apparent assassination attempt, and Israel vowed to press its offensive in Lebanon until the Shiite Muslim militant group was disarmed.

By early afternoon, traffic was passing to Beirut again, even as passengers worried about more airstrikes and traded stories of neighbors or relatives who were hurt or whose houses were damaged in the Israeli attacks.

"We're used to it," said Baram, crossing the dirt path in a battered Mercedes taxi. "The battle will eventually end, and the people will act like nothing ever happened. It will go back to the way it was before."

"People who are accustomed to this type of thing tend to forget," he added.

Across the border in Nahariya, rockets fell along Sderot HaGaaton and Herzl Street, two main boulevards of the coastal city that at this time of year counts on tourism. On this day, it was empty.

The first rocket arced over a six-story apartment building and fell into a courtyard where, in a shop that mixes coffee beans for sale to gourmet shops, Danny Skolnick had just arrived for work.

The missile dug deep into the pavement just off HaGaaton, the city's main strip, and blasted shrapnel into a real estate office, an accountant's suite and Skolnick's workplace. The building caught fire, and paramedics dashed inside to carry out a bloody, semi-conscious Skolnick, whose employer arrived soon after to wish war on those who had fired it.

"We are a country that is not like yours," said Amir Bokovza, 36, a burly father of four children, who said he had fought as a soldier in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. As he surveyed the damage to his real estate office, he said he hoped to be called up to do so again soon. "We know war," he said. "We are not afraid."

Not long after the first barrage, on the fifth floor of an apartment building whose plate-glass balconies carried the glamour of Miami, Monica Lehrer sat on her balcony with her breakfast. The rocket flashed through a sky crowded with thunderheads, landing at the foot of the small wooden chair where she sat. The blast knocked Lehrer, 50, off the balcony and onto the floor below, sending shrapnel into the building walls and destroying the solar panels in the roof above.

Lehrer, a curtain-maker, died of her injuries. Her husband spent much of the morning informing the couple's children in Argentina of their mother's sudden death on the balcony of Apartment 22.

"We tried to look for her when the firemen arrived, but we couldn't find her," said Moshe Arad, 44, the woman's visibly shaken neighbor, who had entered the apartment to find a Katyusha rocket in the living room. "She had flown from the balcony to the floor underneath."

Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington, Colum Lynch at the United Nations and special correspondent Alia Ibrahim in Beirut contributed to this report.