By Edward Cody and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 20, 2006; A01
BEIRUT, July 19 -- Israeli warplanes continued their punishing airstrikes across Lebanon on Wednesday, including for the first time striking Beirut's main Christian enclave and later bombing a bunker believed to be sheltering Hezbollah leaders. Ground troops meanwhile launched their most significant incursion so far into southern Lebanon, joining attacks that killed more than 50 Lebanese on the deadliest day since hostilities erupted eight days ago.
Hezbollah in return fired more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, hitting Haifa and, for the first time, Nazareth, where two Israeli Arab boys were killed.
Israeli troops punched across the border about 20 miles inland from the Mediterranean and clashed with fighters from the militant Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah, which Israel says it wants to uproot from southern Lebanon and disarm. Israeli officials qualified the incursion as a short-term raid, similar to those carried out over the last several days, but both sides suffered casualties after an Israeli squad came under fire and an Israeli tank hit a land mine, according to reports in Israel and Lebanon.
About 9 p.m., the Israeli military attacked a bunker used by senior members of Hezbollah, a military spokesman said. An Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity said dozens of planes were involved, dropping about 23 tons of explosives on the bunker. Hezbollah told news services that none of its leaders or members were killed in the strike.
The tempo of air attacks, along with the new ground operation, eclipsed diplomatic efforts to halt the bloodshed and prompted an emotional appeal from Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora for international help in stopping the bombing on humanitarian grounds.
Israeli officials said they planned to pursue attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanese infrastructure for at least another week before making room for peacemaking. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to travel to Israel early next week to try to get a diplomatic solution started, U.S. officials said, but for the moment the armed conflict continued unabated.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and other international aid agencies cited growing concern over the number of Lebanese civilians being displaced by the Israeli air campaign, particularly in the hard-hit villages and towns of southern Lebanon. The number forced to leave their homes was estimated at 500,000 in a country with a population of 4 million.
Hezbollah missiles, which have been fired regularly into northern Israel since hostilities erupted, on Wednesday landed in the Israeli Arab town of Nazareth. Two brothers -- Rabia Taluzeh, 3, and Mahmoud, 8 -- were killed around 5 p.m. as they were walking to their uncle's house when two rockets landed in the center of a main street running through the Safrefeh neighborhood in Israel's largest Arab city.
Police officials said as many as eight others were wounded in the rocket strike, while scores more were treated in local hospitals for shock. A third rocket crashed into a nearby garage, police said, but no one was injured.
"When I came out, I started taking wounded into my apartment," said Hussam Saleh, 28, who owns a residential building along the street. "I saw the two kids lying in the street, dead on the spot. One had been hit in the head, the other in the body."
Nazareth, a city of 75,000 people, has no public bomb shelters or early-warning sirens commonplace in other Israeli cities across the north.
Another 10 missiles rained down on Haifa, hitting an apartment building. In all, more than 100 missiles and rockets were fired into northern Israel, causing dozens of light injuries in addition to the two deaths, Israeli officials reported.
The Israeli attack in Ashrafiyeh, the Lebanese capital's principal Maronite Christian neighborhood, targeted a pair of well-drilling trucks and was carried out with what appeared to be precision missiles carrying small explosive charges. The blasts caused no casualties and did little damage, even to the trucks sitting in a rocky vacant lot. But for the first time they brought Israel's air campaign against Hezbollah to that wealthy quarter of Beirut, populated by Christians who were Israel's allies during its 1982 invasion aimed at Palestinian guerrillas.
The attack took place a short distance from the main Beirut port, where U.S. citizens boarded a cruise ship chartered by the U.S. government for evacuation to the nearby island of Cyprus. Boarding operations were not endangered, however, and families filed aboard throughout the day until the Orient Queen steamed out to sea with 1,059 evacuees aboard, almost all of them Americans. [The ship and two others had docked in the Cypriot port of Larnaca by Thursday, according to the Reuters news agency, which also reported that about 40 U.S. Marines landed on a beach in Beirut at dawn to help with the evacuation.]
In the suburban hills south of Beirut, at Shwaifat, Israeli airstrikes hit a dozen dump trucks and container flatbeds parked in a freight marshaling yard, witnesses reported. Surrounding trees were stripped bare and several trucks were turned into twisted wrecks, they said, but there was no sign of military equipment.
The airstrikes in Shwaifat and Ashrafiyeh suggested Israeli military planners are seeking to paralyze truck traffic across Lebanon, depriving Hezbollah of a means of transporting munitions. In particular, Israeli officials have said, the air campaign is intended to prevent resupply of the missiles that Hezbollah has been firing into northern Israel.
Civilian trucks carrying cargo of all kinds, including food, have been hit. Three trucks carrying rice and sugar were blasted Tuesday near the Christian village of Zahleh in the mountains separating Beirut from the Bekaa Valley. Wednesday's air attacks also clearly hit civilian infrastructure and vehicles: drills to dig water wells and trucks to haul dirt and containers.
Farther south, in the border hills near Israel, the continuing air attacks appeared more widely targeted, striking at cars and buildings and emptying roads and villages, according to reports from witnesses. One strike, at the village of Srifa, near the frontier, tore apart several houses, killing at least 17 Lebanese, including several children, Lebanese officials told local reporters.
More than 30 people were killed in other attacks across the southern border zone, Lebanese officials reported, raising the day's death toll above 50.
Aid officials in the southern city of Tyre said food stocks were dwindling and medicine was in short supply. For days, electricity and water have been cut. Many residents feared that roads leading out were too dangerous to travel. Others headed for Beirut, flying white flags from their car antennas or sunroofs.
"If you don't die of something from Israel, you're going to die of sickness, food or thirst," said Katya Taleb, 26.
Taleb gathered with hundreds of others at the beachfront Tyre Rest House, seeking shelter and hoping for evacuation. U.N. officials expressed hope that a ship might arrive Thursday but were reported having difficulty securing Israeli authorization for it to enter the port.
Siniora, in a televised appeal, said about 300 Lebanese had been killed by Israeli air raids over the past eight days. He called on foreign governments to come to Lebanon's aid, adding, "I hope you won't let us down."
Shortly after he spoke, Israeli jets attacked Beirut again and three blasts rang out in the downtown area of the capital, rattling glass and shaking the ground around the stately building overlooking Martyrs' Square that Siniora uses as government headquarters.
Chaim Biton, a farmer in the Israeli village of Avivim, just across the border about 22 miles east of the Mediterranean, said the ground fighting broke out when an Israeli tank and a bulldozer crossed into Lebanon to assist a patrol searching for Hezbollah bunkers. The tank hit a land mine, he said, but Israeli military officials said it was hit by mortar fire.
The attack set off exchanges of artillery, mortar and light-weapons fire throughout the day, Biton said. Bursts of machine-gun fire and the thump of outgoing artillery could be heard in Avivim.
Hezbollah's television station, al-Manar, said militia fighters destroyed three Israeli tanks and killed a half-dozen Israeli soldiers in that clash and several others along the border hills. One of its militiamen was killed, Hezbollah announced. Israeli military officials said two soldiers were killed and seven were injured.
On Israel's other front, soldiers reentered the central Gaza Strip near the Mughazi refugee camp, setting off intense clashes with Palestinian militants. Six Palestinians, including two civilians, were killed and 30 fighters and civilians were wounded, according to local hospital officials. Most of the dead and wounded were hit by a missile fired from an Israeli drone, they said.
Five Israeli soldiers were wounded in the clashes, a military spokeswoman said. In a statement, the military said its forces "carried out aerial attacks against three cells of armed gunmen and a cell carrying antitank missile launchers in the central Gaza Strip."
About 12 miles south, around the Sufa border crossing between Israel and Gaza, Israeli engineering units searched for tunnels into Israel, the spokeswoman reported. An Israeli soldier being held prisoner in Gaza was captured by Palestinian militants who had tunneled into Israel in a June 25 attack. Since then, according to a report Wednesday by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 100 Palestinians, including 16 children, have been killed and 300 have been injured in Israeli attacks. One Israeli soldier has been killed and 12 Israeli civilians have been injured in the same period, the report said.
Three Palestinians were killed and about 20 people were injured when the Israeli army moved into the West Bank city of Nablus on a mission to arrest Palestinian militants, according to Palestinian and Israeli officials. Palestinian security officials said about 150 Palestinian security officers were detained by Israeli forces during the operation.
The Israeli security cabinet, meanwhile, reiterated its demand for the unconditional release of two Israeli soldiers held by Hezbollah and the Israeli soldier held in Gaza by Palestinian militants, including some from the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas. The cabinet, in a statement, said there would be "no negotiations on a release of prisoners" held by Israel, as demanded by Hezbollah and Hamas in exchange for releasing the Israeli soldiers.
The cabinet said the "principles of a diplomatic solution" to the Lebanese crisis were its soldiers' release, a halt in Hezbollah rocket and missile fire into Israel, extension of Lebanese government authority into border zones controlled by Hezbollah, deployment of the Lebanese army along the border and disarmament of all militias in Lebanon.
"The intensive fighting against Hezbollah will continue, including strikes against its infrastructure and command centers, its operational capabilities, its war materiel and its leaders," with the aim of achieving these goals, the cabinet declared.
Anderson reported from Jerusalem. Correspondents Anthony Shadid in Tyre and Jonathan Finer in Nazareth and Avivim contributed to this report.