Air Attacks Intensify In Lebanon, Israel
More Than a Dozen Killed on Either Side

By Edward Cody and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 7, 2006

BEIRUT, Aug. 7 -- Israeli warplanes and artillery intensified their pounding of Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon on Sunday, killing a dozen civilians and several Lebanese soldiers. Hezbollah fighters fired more than 160 rockets into northern Israel, killing three civilians in Haifa and 12 army reservists just south of the border.

"It was a direct hit," said Maj. Svika Golan, a spokesman for the Israeli army's northern command, adding that the rocket that killed the reservists at Kfar Giladi was packed with ball bearings to inflict more carnage.

Officials in Haifa, a city about 18 miles south of the border, said an early evening barrage sent rockets crashing into a neighborhood, burying residents in the rubble. A woman was killed when a rocket smashed into her house, and two others died after being taken to a hospital. Dozens of people were wounded, the officials said.

The Israeli army later said it had attacked the Lebanese town of Qana, destroying the launchers that fired the six rockets into Haifa.

The cycle of attacks continued Monday, with Israeli jets striking Hezbollah targets in the southern suburbs of Beirut. A series of strong blasts reverberated across the city just as the sun rose. News agencies reported other Israeli air attacks around Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold in the eastern Bekaa Valley, and in southern Lebanon, where witnesses told Reuters six members of a family in the village of Ghazzanieyeh were killed.

The stepped-up air war Sunday was matched by repeated clashes on the ground, as Hezbollah guerrillas attacked Israeli invasion forces backed by battle tanks still moving to control the small villages that dot the hills along Lebanon's southern border. Hezbollah, a militant Shiite Muslim movement, announced it had damaged four tanks and caused an unknown number of Israeli casualties, while three of its own fighters were killed.

With casualties mounting on both sides -- the rocket strikes caused the highest Israeli death toll in a single day since the war began 26 days ago -- the rising spiral of attack and retaliation risked overtaking the still-unsettled diplomatic efforts to arrange a halt to the fighting.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, in an interview, said a draft U.N. Security Council resolution proposed Saturday by the United States and France is "impractical" because it would leave Israeli forces in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah fighters nearby until an international force can be organized and deployed. That, he said, sounds like a recipe for more bloodshed.

"So what is it in fact doing?" he asked. "It is putting flammable material next to the fire."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert convened his cabinet but declined to respond publicly to the proposed resolution. "We won't respond to the draft because the less said the better," he said, according to a senior government official who attended the meeting. "When the decision has been made by the Security Council, then the government will convene and decide if and how we should respond."

Siniora, who according to aides met twice Sunday with U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey D. Feltman, said he has proposed changes that would include the immediate dispatch of 15,000 Lebanese soldiers to the border area along with a 2,000-member international force under the aegis of the current United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL. Their arrival, to guarantee that no Hezbollah fighters would be allowed south of the Litani River, would be nearly simultaneous with a cease-fire and a withdrawal of all Israeli forces now north of the border, he said.

Siniora said he discussed his ideas in two telephone calls with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice late Saturday, a telephone conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and diplomatic exchanges Sunday via Feltman in Beirut. So far, however, there has been no response to his proposal, he said.

When the U.S.-France resolution reaches its final stage at the United Nations, Siniora explained, he will take it to his government, including its Hezbollah ministers, and seek their endorsement if the conditions are ripe. In the meantime, he said, Lebanon cannot embrace the resolution as it stands.

Nabih Berri, head of the Amal party and the main conduit for communication with Hezbollah, indicated why. "All Lebanon, all Lebanese, all the communities of Lebanon reject this draft resolution," he said at a news conference.

The cease-fire must be accompanied by a total Israeli withdrawal, a pledge to end Israeli occupation of the disputed Shebaa Farms area and a prisoner exchange between Israel and Lebanon, Berri said. Trying to impose a settlement without these elements, he added, "will either cause internal conflict in Lebanon or it will be impossible to implement."

Hezbollah ministers, repeating earlier statements from the movement's leaders, said the group's militia in southern Lebanon would not lay down its arms or stop firing until all Israeli soldiers are out of Lebanon. Only then, and only when the Shebaa Farms and prisoner exchange demands have been addressed, will the movement enter into discussions about disarmament and restoration of government authority in the embattled border area, they insisted.

Five of the Lebanese civilian deaths occurred within the same extended family when Israeli rockets slammed into two neighboring houses in the village of Ansar, near the market town of Nabatiyeh about eight miles north of the border, according to Lebanese media, citing local police. Three Lebanese were killed near Naqoura, on the border as it reaches the Mediterranean Sea, they said, and three others were killed in bombing raids in the village of al-Jibbain.

Hezbollah statements said the Israeli tanks were hit at Wadi Honeen, Ras al-Biyada and Adassieh, to the northeast near the town of Taibe, where combat has raged off and on almost since the fighting began July 12. Israeli military officers have said most of their casualties have been caused by Hezbollah's laser-guided tank missiles fired against Israeli armored personnel carriers and the Markava main battle tank.

Roads in the coastal city of Tyre and its hinterland were paralyzed after Israeli aircraft killed a Lebanese soldier standing on a road, fired near a motorcycle and struck a car close to a U.N. convoy, witnesses and U.N. officials said. Several more soldiers were killed in other airstrikes, the military reported.

The reason for airstrikes against Lebanese soldiers was unclear. The Lebanese army, with about 75,000 members, has largely stood aside as Hezbollah battles the Israeli military, although Israeli officials have charged that some soldiers were cooperating with the militia.

U.N. officials said the Israeli rocket landed within 40 yards of a U.N. convoy of 15 trucks and two jeeps carrying humanitarian supplies to southern Lebanon from Beirut. It struck a white van headed the other way at 12:20 p.m., apparently killing the driver, said Khaled Mansour, a U.N. spokesman in Lebanon. Other reports said a passenger was also killed.

No one was hurt in the convoy, which arrived in Tyre.

The snarled wreckage was still in the street at dusk, packages of bread spread behind it along the main road north out of Tyre. Mansour said Israeli forces had been alerted about the convoy's time of departure, expected arrival and route. "You're expected to be safe," he said.

Two rockets were fired at the Lebanese soldier, whose right arm was almost cut off, doctors said, and he died after reaching the hospital. Another rocket was fired as journalists arrived at the scene, slightly wounding a photographer for the New York Times magazine and his Lebanese driver, witnesses said.

Warplanes also blasted Beirut's southern suburbs. The explosions rattled windows in the city center and sent up a column of smoke from the already battered neighborhood, which is inhabited principally by Shiite Muslims and controlled by Hezbollah.

Three Chinese peacekeepers on the border were injured by a Hezbollah rocket, according to the official New China News Agency, citing a Chinese officer. The Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, had called U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan only a few hours earlier to urge stronger measures to protect U.N. observers. A Chinese military observer was among the four victims of an Israeli missile attack on an observer post last month.

The Israeli air force carried out 170 aerial attacks across Lebanon during a 24-hour period ending Sunday morning -- more than twice the number of the previous day, according to Israeli military officials.

The Israeli military intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, told the Israeli cabinet that the air force had hit 4,400 targets in Lebanon since the war began, according to the senior government official. He said the air force was having difficulty hitting Hezbollah's smaller rocket launchers, however, because they do not leave a trace that can be detected.

The Israeli military said the rocket attacks Sunday brought to 94 the number of Israelis killed in the war -- 58 soldiers and 36 civilians. According to authorities in Beirut, more than 500 Lebanese civilians have been killed, in addition to about 35 soldiers and an unknown number of Hezbollah fighters.

Yadlin also told the cabinet that Israeli military forces are interrogating a Hezbollah fighter taken prisoner who intelligence officials believe was involved in the capture of two Israeli soldiers during a raid on July 12 that set off the conflict.

Moore reported from Jerusalem. Correspondent Nora Boustany and special correspondents Ian Dietch in Jerusalem and Aliya Ibrahim in Beirut contributed to this report.