Israeli air strikes killed 17 people in Lebanon on Monday and Hezbollah announced more rocket attacks on Israel after world powers put the onus on the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Shi’ite guerrilla group to end the fighting.
Overnight raids destroyed two army posts on the northern Lebanese coast, killing nine Lebanese soldiers, and damaged the homes of Hezbollah officials in eastern Lebanon, killing five people in over 45 strikes on the sixth day of violence.
Three more people died in strikes south of Beirut. Several thunderous blasts echoed over the capital at dawn and black smoke rose from a blazing fuel storage depot in the Christian suburb of Dora. Civilian installations, petrol stations and factories elsewhere were also hit, security sources said.
Leaders of the G8 powers meeting in Russia said on Sunday Israel had a right to self-defence, telling Hezbollah to free two Israeli soldiers it captured on Wednesday and to end its cross-border attacks. They did not call for a ceasefire.
Israel is also demanding the disarming of Hezbollah in line with United Nations Security Council resolutions — a task that is beyond a fragile Lebanese government dependent on consensus among rival sectarian groups, of which Shi’ite Muslims form the largest.
Lebanon, just emerging from three decades of Syrian tutelage, fears that any attempt to tackle Hezbollah directly would re-ignite civil war and split its army.
Hezbollah wants to trade the Israeli soldiers for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel and paid no heed to pleas from UN and European Union envoys on Sunday to release its captives.
The same day it rocketed Haifa, killing eight people in its deadliest attack on Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Hezbollah’s attack would have far-reaching consequences for Lebanon.
Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the attack on Haifa, Israel’s third-biggest city, was retaliation for its killing of civilians and promised more ”surprises”.
”We are just at the beginning,” he said.
Israel’s army later said rockets fired by Hezbollah guerrillas struck a town 50km south of the border. Hezbollah said it had also fired Katyusha rockets at the towns of Nahariya and Acre in northern Israel.
Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, launched after Hezbollah captured the two Israeli soldiers and killed eight, has killed 162 people, all but 13 of them civilians.
Canada said seven of its nationals were killed in an Israeli strike on the southern village of Aitaroun. The Israeli army said that it had warned villagers to leave the area and that Hezbollah was responsible for any civilian deaths.
Foreigners flee
France, the United States, Britain and a host of other nations scrambled to evacuate their citizens from Lebanon. More than 1 000 Germans, mostly of Lebanese origin, gathered in Beirut’s Hamra district on Monday to await evacuation.
Thousands of foreigners have fled overland to Syria since Thursday, despite Israeli air strikes on main roads.
Israel’s aerial campaign, its most destructive assault on Lebanon since a 1982 invasion to expel Palestinian guerrillas, drew only a call for restraint from the Group of Eight industrialised nations at their St Petersburg summit.
G8 leaders blamed ”extremists” for the violence and urged Israel to be restrained in its response. Israel welcomed the G8 statement, which was in line with the stance taken by US President George Bush, a staunch ally of Israel.
A total of 24 Israelis have been killed in the fighting since Wednesday, including 12 civilians hit in rocket attacks.
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.
Israel bombed the Palestinian foreign ministry building in Gaza City in an air strike in the early hours of Monday as well as destroying the Gaza offices of a Hamas-led force.
Palestinian gunmen ambushed a group of Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank, causing casualties, a militant group said.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, said the soldiers were attacked while patrolling the old city of Nablus. Several were hurt.
Reuters Television footage showed a bloodied helmet, part of a boot, and abandoned bullet clips at the scene.
An Israeli military spokesperson had no immediate comment.
From Tehran, which in effect set up Hezbollah in the early 1980s, came an insistence that the group would not disarm. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said: ”The American president says Hezbollah should be disarmed. It is obvious that you [America] want that, and it is obvious that the Zionists [Israel] want that too. But it will not happen.”
It is believed the rocket that hit Haifa was an Iranian-made missile. A missile that struck an Israeli warship on Friday night, killing four sailors, is now thought to have also been an Iranian-made radar-guided missile.
”You will probably see ground forces into southern Lebanon for a brief time,” Gerald Steinberg, of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, told Reuters. ”With their [Hezbollah’s] weapons storehouses being hit, when will the cost to them become too great to continue?” – Reuters