By Scott Wilson and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 17, 2006; A01
HAIFA, Israel, July 17 -- Israel battered targets across Lebanon Sunday and early Monday after a rocket fired by the radical Shiite group Hezbollah struck a railroad yard here and killed eight workers as other rockets rained deep into the Galilee region in northern Israel. The Israeli assault killed at least 28 people in south Lebanon, including seven Lebanese holding Canadian citizenship.
Early Monday, Israeli warplanes struck Beirut again, sparking a large fire at its port, and broadened the assault into northern and eastern Lebanon. Airstrikes killed 17 Lebanese people, including nine soldiers who died in assaults on two Army bases on the northern coast, news services reported. Strikes also damaged homes of Hezbollah officials in the east.
The Sunday morning rocket attack by Hezbollah effectively shut down Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, and sent thousands of northern Israel residents fleeing for safety along southbound highways.
The Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, declared a 48-hour state of emergency in the north, and security officials warned residents as far south as Tel Aviv that they may be vulnerable to Hezbollah's new, longer-range rockets, two of which hit the cities of Nazareth and Afula, which is 25 miles from the Lebanese border. It was the deepest strike yet inside Israel; no injuries were reported.
Israeli warplanes, meanwhile, hammered south Beirut and other targets across south Lebanon for a fifth day while the Bush administration made preparations to evacuate some of the 25,000 U.S. citizens from a country now virtually cut off from the outside world. Two helicopters arrived in Beirut and began shuttling embassy staff out of the country.
Israel also expanded the second front of its military operation against radical Islamic groups operating along its northern and southern borders by pushing tanks and troops into the Gaza Strip on Sunday, setting off fighting that killed at least five Palestinian gunmen.
"Nothing will deter us, whatever far-reaching ramifications regarding our relations on the northern border and in the region there may be," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said before his weekly cabinet meeting. "We have no intention to give in to these threats. We know that many tests yet await us. Our enemies are trying to disrupt life in Israel -- they will fail. The public is strong and united in this struggle."
The rocket attack in Haifa and the intensifying airstrikes in Lebanon marked an escalation of a conflict that began last week when a Hezbollah cross-border raid resulted in the deaths of eight Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others. Israel implicated Syria and Iran in Sunday's rocket attack in Haifa that military officials said demonstrated the new reach and potency of Hezbollah's arsenal.
Olmert holds the Lebanese government responsible for the actions of Hezbollah, an Islamic movement with a military wing that rose to prominence fighting the 18-year Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that ended in May 2000. The U.N. Security Council has also demanded that Hezbollah give up its arms, a resolution whose terms Israel is demanding be fulfilled before it stops its airstrikes and artillery fire into Lebanon.
Israeli officials reiterated Sunday that the fighting would not end until Israel believes it has permanently improved its security along the northern border. Miri Eisin, an Israeli government spokeswoman, said at the scene of the attack in Haifa that "we are determined that at the end of this war we will be in a different strategic situation on our border."
Israeli forces operating in Gaza, where the military wing of Hamas helped capture an Israeli soldier in a June 25 cross-border raid, are seeking also to win the soldier's release, stop rocket fire into southern Israel and weaken the radical Islamic movement's hold on the Palestinian government.
Israel has said its actions are in self-defense, but the growing number of civilian casualties in Lebanon could soon prompt calls from other countries, including allies, for it to suspend the operations. The Bush administration has called on Israel to show restraint, and U.N. officials in Beirut Sunday called for an immediate cease-fire. "Our message to Israel is defend yourself but be mindful of the consequences, so we are urging restraint," President Bush said at the Group of Eight summit in Russia.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said about 150 Lebanese, nearly all of them civilians, have been killed since the fighting began Wednesday, while more than 400 have been wounded. Four Israeli civilians had been killed by Hezbollah rocket fire before Sunday's attack, which killed eight government employees of Israel Railways and wounded more than two dozen others.
"When the Zionists behave like there are no rules and no limits to the confrontation, it is our right to behave in the same way," Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, said in a Sunday address televised on the movement's al-Manar satellite channel.
Nasrallah said five days of Israeli attacks had not diminished Hezbollah's capability and promised that Israel would face more "surprises" if it kept up the airstrikes, noting that Hezbollah so far has not hit the petrochemical plant on Haifa's eastern edge. He said the group was faced with "no choice" in carrying out the attack against Haifa, population 270,000, located about 22 miles south of the Lebanese border. He also called for backing from Arab and Muslim leaders, most of whom he said have failed to express sufficient support.
"Hezbollah is not fighting a battle for Hezbollah or even for Lebanon," Nasrallah said. "We are now fighting a battle for the Islamic nation. Where does the nation stand on this battle?"
Israeli officials said the rocket that smashed through the corrugated-steel roof of a railroad maintenance shed here was a prototype of a Fajr-3 missile, made by Iran. Blood pooled in the sunken rails, and debris and lights that once hung from the torn roof lay in piles. Military officials are still examining shrapnel from the rocket to determine whether it was Iranian-made or a Syrian version of the same model, an M220. Israel has focused diplomatic efforts since the Hezbollah raid on highlighting Iran's and Syria's financial and logistical support for the group.
Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman, said the rocket that hit here has a range of 27 miles and carried a 90-pound warhead, more than twice the size of the explosives that tip the Katyushas that Hezbollah has used previously.
In Lebanon's southern port of Tyre, an Israeli airstrike killed 20 people and wounded more than 50 in an attack on the civil defense building, Lebanese Health Ministry officials confirmed. Seven other Lebanese civilians, all of whom held Canadian citizenship, died when their home in the border town of Aitaroun was hit in an Israeli strike, Canadian officials confirmed.
Television footage from the Tyre strike showed rubble spilling into the streets, cars wrecked and ambulances loaded with bloodied bodies. A veneer of ash settled over the bomb site as stretchers carried other wounded. As one wounded man was loaded into an ambulance, he shouted: "God is great! Hezbollah will prove victorious."
Ali Saffadin, a Tyre resident who worked for the civil defense agency for nine years, said his year-old daughter was killed in the strike, which also sent his wife to the hospital in critical condition. He said two buildings were hit by at least three rockets, and he denied that members of Hezbollah or the Lebanese military were nearby.
Israeli raids intensified on the southern suburbs of Beirut, known as the Dahiya, a Shiite Muslim region that gives Hezbollah its greatest support. Explosions sounded through the night and picked up in intensity after the Haifa attack.
Entire buildings around Hezbollah's compound were reduced to rubble, spilling concrete and tangled wire into the street. Black smoke billowed over the poor, densely populated neighborhood, and acrid fumes lent a haze to already overcast skies. Al-Manar TV was knocked off the air for several minutes.
"Nobody knows what the end will be, nobody knows," said Abbas Miski, one of the few residents out in the neighborhood, standing before his plastics factory and nearby apartment. "But I'm still here, and I'll stay here as long as I live."
Israel's military said it struck 80 targets in Lebanon on Sunday, while ordering the residents of seven southern villages to evacuate their homes for their own safety.
Israeli forces attacked Beirut's main electricity plant, cutting off power to parts of the city and southern Lebanon. In other parts of the country, they dropped pink leaflets warning residents to stay away from missile sites, ammunition depots, Hezbollah offices in south Beirut and southern Lebanon, and the southern suburbs of Beirut, which it called "the center of terrorism."
"Know that the continuance of terrorism against the state of Israel prevents you from living a better future," the leaflet read.
Lebanese officials said 5,000 people had arrived so far in the capital, fleeing the fighting in largely Shiite southern Lebanon, another Hezbollah stronghold.
The United States began preparations to evacuate some of the estimated 25,000 U.S. citizens in the country. Many are permanent residents, and any evacuation presumably would involve only a fraction of that number. Helicopters streaming to and from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on Sunday carried away the first 18 workers and relatives who wanted to leave. A 20-member Pentagon team arrived to map contingency plans for a wholesale withdrawal.
In eastern Beirut, several buses arrived in a parking lot to escort dozens of Swedish nationals to Syria, then home. In the background, bombs thundered on the horizon, setting off car alarms. Suitcases were piled on the pavement, next to strollers and crying children.
"There's no one who's not scared, in their heart at least, but you have to adhere to your faith," Mohammed Jaber said as he helped his sister and two children aboard.
Nearby stood Radwan Asaad and his wife, Nadine Anouti. The 22-year-old Anouti had spent 17 years in Sweden, returning to Lebanon to get married. As a bomb went off, she broke down crying and embraced her husband. "She's scared," he said. "She's not used to this."
She looked up. "I want to get out of here by any way possible," she sobbed.
Shadid reported from Beirut. Staff writers John Ward Anderson in Gaza and Peter Baker in Russia contributed to this report.