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Israel continues bombardment of Lebanon

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 July 2006, 17:47 CDT

By Alistair Lyon, Middle East Correspondent

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli warplanes battered Lebanon on Tuesday, killing 31 people, and more Hizbollah rockets hit northern Israel, killing one, with little sign that diplomacy would halt the week-old conflict any time soon.

Civilians on both sides were angry about the bombardment but Israel and Hizbollah showed no willingness to end the fighting, which has killed 235 people in Lebanon and 25 Israelis, or heed proposals for a new U.N.-backed stabilization force.

"I sent my family to the mountains and came back to find my house destroyed. There is no sign of it," said Hassan Ghamloush, searching in vain for his family home in the rubble of a south Beirut district reduced to wasteland by Israeli bombardment.

Israelis, stunned by Hizbollah rocket attacks, said they wanted their army to smash the guerrilla group and most favored killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a poll showed.

"We are killing those we need to kill," said Hanna Dehan, 60, speaking near the city of Haifa, where eight people were killed on Sunday when a Hizbollah rocket hit a train station.

A rocket attack on the northern Israeli town of Nahariya killed one person on Tuesday. Other Hizbollah rockets hit Haifa.

In Lebanon, nine family members, including children, were killed in an air strike on their house in Aitaroun village. Ten people were killed in strikes in the south and the Bekaa Valley.

Warplanes bombed a Lebanese army barracks east of Beirut, killing 11 soldiers, including four officers, and wounding 30.

A truck carrying medical supplies donated by the United Arab Emirates was hit and its driver killed en route from Damascus.

The Israeli army said Hizbollah was smuggling weapons from Syria, but added it did not regard Syria as a target.

President Bush described Hizbollah as the root cause of the conflict and said it seemed that Syria, which along with Iran has supported Hizbollah, was trying to "get back into Lebanon" a year after ending its 28-year military presence.

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would go to the region on Friday, but an aide to Rice said she would not go abroad on Friday and there was no final decision on any foreign travel.

While U.N. peace envoys held talks in Israel, the Israeli army was refusing to rule out a ground invasion, only six years after it ended a 22-year occupation of south Lebanon.

"At this stage we do not think we have to activate massive ground forces into Lebanon but if we have to do this, we will," said Moshe Kaplinsky, Israel's deputy army chief.

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Hizbollah, which seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on July 12, had coordinated the abduction with Iran, enabling Tehran to divert attention from its nuclear program.

Olmert said there was no time limit to Israel's offensive, and said there would be no negotiations with Hizbollah.

NO PEACE PROPOSALS

Lebanon's government, which wants an immediate ceasefire, said it had yet to receive any clear proposals to bring Israel's seven-day offensive to an end.

World powers have said Hizbollah must first free the two soldiers and stop cross-border attacks. Israel also demands that Hizbollah disarm in line with U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The Beirut government is too weak and divided to impose its authority on Hizbollah, which wants to swap the soldiers for Lebanese and Arabs in Israeli jails.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a bigger, more robust international force to stabilize southern Lebanon and buy time for the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbollah guerrillas.

Israel, bent on driving Hizbollah from the south, says it is too early to discuss such a force. Washington has queried how it could restrain the Islamist group.

"It is urgent that the international community acts to make a difference on the ground," Annan said in Brussels, suggesting a force that would operate differently from toothless U.N. peacekeepers who have patrolled south Lebanon since 1978.

Israel is also pursuing an offensive in the Gaza Strip after Palestinian militants captured another soldier on June 25.

The United States sent nine Navy ships to rescue up to 8,000 Americans from Lebanon and other nations mustered boats and planes for their stranded nationals. Some 100,000 Lebanese have fled their homes.

U.N. agencies are pulling non-essential staff and family members from Lebanon, but relief workers are staying and more are going in, humanitarian aid chief Jan Egeland said.

(Additional reporting by Nadim Ladki, Lin Noueihed, Alaa Shahine and Laila Bassam in Beirut, Jerusalem bureau, Madeline Chambers in London, Paul Taylor in Brussels and Heba Kandil in Dubai)

Source: REUTERS

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