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Israeli strikes on Lebanon kill 41 people

Posted on: Monday, 17 July 2006, 12:10 CDT

By Lin Noueihed

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli air strikes killed 41 people across Lebanon on Monday, including 10 civilians hit on a southern bridge, on the sixth day of a bombardment that has wreaked the heaviest destruction in Lebanon for over 20 years.

Rescuers also pulled nine bodies from the wreckage of a building in the southern city of Tire that was bombed on Sunday, raising the death toll since Israel's offensive began above 200.

The fighting was triggered when Hizbollah, the guerrilla group which is backed by Syria and Iran and is part of Lebanon's government, seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on northern Israel on Wednesday.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking in Beirut after talks with the Lebanese government, called for an immediate truce on humanitarian grounds.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said his country would pursue its offensive until the two captured soldiers were returned and Lebanese army troops control all of south Lebanon.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Security Council members would start work on a detailed agreement on deploying a multinational security force to south Lebanon.

The United States gave only a guarded welcome to the proposal and Israel said it was premature. "We're at the stage where we want to be sure that Hizbollah is not deployed at our northern border," government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said.

An Israeli source said Israel may step up attacks in coming days, mindful that its chief ally, the United States, might not resist indefinitely international pressure for a ceasefire.

A U.N. team sent to Lebanon to seek a solution to the fighting said it had made a promising start but that more diplomacy was needed before there could be any optimism.

BLASTS ROCK BEIRUT

Israeli planes hit coastal targets in the north and south, struck Beirut and damaged homes in the east belonging to members of Hizbollah, which fired more rockets deep into Israel.

Blasts rocked Beirut through the day and smoke rose from a blazing fuel depot. Civilian installations, petrol stations and factories elsewhere were also hit, security sources said.

Three Israeli tanks briefly crossed a few hundred metres (yards) into Lebanese territory on Monday afternoon, a U.N. source said, following a similar incursion overnight in which Israel said Hizbollah positions were destroyed.

"I can't believe they are doing all this for two captives. This is just an excuse," said Ali Sharara, 21, who fled his home in south Beirut to sleep in a city park for the last two nights.

Israeli Army Radio, quoting a top officer, said the country would enforce a one-km (half-mile) "free-fire" zone to bar Hizbollah from the border, without keeping troops on the ground.

Israel's campaign has killed 203 people, all but 13 of them civilians. Lebanon's Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said it had also inflicted billions of dollars of damage. "What Israel has been doing is cutting the country to pieces," he told Reuters.

Twenty-four Israelis have been killed in the fighting, including 12 civilians hit in rocket attacks.

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said he feared a humanitarian crisis, citing the impact of power cuts and the bombing of water, sewage and health installations.

Beirut's stock market remained closed after falling 14 percent last week due to the violence, which has also affected world markets and helped push oil prices to new records.

The commander-in-chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, among Hizbollah's closest allies, said Israel could end the conflict by agreeing to a prisoner swap proposed by the Lebanese group.

Israel is demanding the disarming of Hizbollah in line with U.N. resolutions -- a task beyond the fragile Beirut government.

Hizbollah launched rocket attacks on Haifa on Sunday, killing eight people in its deadliest strike on Israel. The group said it fired dozens more rockets at Haifa on Monday. A three-storey building in the city collapsed, wounding two people, medics said. Israel closed Haifa's port.

France, the United States, Britain and a host of other nations scrambled to evacuate their citizens from Lebanon.

Israel's campaign in Lebanon followed the launch of its offensive in the Gaza Strip on June 28 to try to retrieve another captured soldier and halt Palestinian rocket fire.

Air strikes on Monday flattened the eight-storey Palestinian Foreign Ministry building in Gaza City and gutted the offices of a Hamas-led force in the northern Gaza Strip.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian gunmen ambushed a group of Israeli troops, killing one and wounding six others in the city of Nablus, witnesses and military sources said.

(Additional reporting by Jerusalem bureau, Nadim Ladki, Alaa Shahine and Laila Bassam)

Source: REUTERS

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