A rocket fired from Lebanon smashed into a three-storey residential building in the northern Israeli city of Haifa on Monday, wounding at least two people, but it appeared no one was trapped under debris, medics said.
The rocket tore the front off the building, crushing cars underneath, television pictures showed. Medics said two people were being treated at the scene. They said an initial inspection indicated no one was trapped under debris.
Israel bombarded Lebanon for a sixth day on Monday and dismissed as premature a proposal for an international stability force to help end the worst fighting across the Israeli-Lebanese border in more than 20 years.
Israeli warplanes hit coastal targets in the north and south, struck Beirut and damaged homes in the east belonging to members of the Hezbollah guerrilla group, which fired more rockets deep into the Jewish state.
An Israeli army spokesperson also said some soldiers had crossed the border overnight to destroy Hezbollah positions but denied Israel had ground troops inside southern Lebanon.
”There are no Israeli ground forces in Lebanon,” he said. ”There was a very small incursion overnight to destroy a few Hezbollah positions … That has been done.”
An Israeli security source denied Lebanese television reports that an Israeli plane had been shot down in Lebanon.
The fighting, the worst since Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, was triggered when Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran and is part of the Lebanese government, seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on northern Israel last week.
Security force
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said Security Council members will start hammering out a detailed agreement on deploying a multilateral security force to south Lebanon.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the force will be essential to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks and give Israel a reason to halt strikes that have ruined much of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.
But Israel said it is too soon to talk of sending the force. ”We’re at the stage where we want to be sure that Hezbollah is not deployed at our northern border,” government spokesperson Miri Eisin said.
Army Radio quoted Israel’s chief of staff as saying Israel plans to enforce a 1km ”security zone” to keep Hezbollah away from the border.
Hezbollah is seeking the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It has not commented on international efforts to halt the fighting.
Echoing a muted call from the Group of Eight (G8) powers on Sunday, the European Union urged all sides on Monday to rein in violence, but stopped short of demanding an immediate ceasefire.
French President Jacques Chirac called Israeli actions in Lebanon ”aberrant”.
Israel’s campaign has killed 179 people, all but 13 of them civilians, and wounded more than 500. Twenty-four Israelis have been killed in the fighting, including 12 civilians hit in rocket attacks.
Israel strikes back
Israeli raids on Monday destroyed two army posts on the northern Lebanese coast, killing at least six Lebanese soldiers, and damaged the homes of Hezbollah officials in eastern Lebanon, killing 11 people in more than 60 strikes.
Seven more people died in strikes south of Beirut, including one on a coastal road linking it to the port city of Sidon.
Several thunderous blasts echoed over the capital 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.
Beirut’s stock market remained closed after falling 14% last week.
Israel is demanding the disarming of Hezbollah in line with Security Council resolutions — a task that is beyond a fragile Lebanese government.
Lebanon, just emerging from three decades of Syrian tutelage, fears that any attempt to tackle Hezbollah directly would reignite civil war and split its army.
Hizbollah rocketed Haifa on Sunday, killing eight people in its deadliest attack on Israel and prompting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to warn of far-reaching consequences for Lebanon.
More than 100 rockets had crashed across the border in 24 hours, the Israeli army said.
France, the United States, Britain and a host of other nations scrambled to evacuate their citizens from Lebanon. Thousands of foreigners have fled overland to Syria since Thursday, despite Israeli air strikes on main roads.
Palestinian foreign ministry in ruins
Israel bombed the foreign ministry in Gaza on Monday for the second time in a week, demolishing the building, and a civilian was killed by tank fire in Beit Hanun.
Israeli troops have been operating for the past two days in the northern town, where three gunmen were wounded in attacks on Monday and others managed to fire six rockets into southern Israel in retaliation.
Israel confirmed the overnight attack on the foreign ministry, accusing Minister Mahmud al-Zahar, a leading member of Hamas, whose armed wing was jointly responsible for Shalit’s abduction, of planning ”terrorist attacks”.
An F16 jet dropped a missile on the building, which had already been badly damaged in a raid on Thursday, pancaking the five-storey ministry and causing extensive damage to the neighbouring planning and finance ministries.
”It was headed by Mahmud al-Zahar, a senior member of Hamas involved in the planning of terror attacks and general activity of the Hamas terror organisation,” an Israeli spokesperson said.
The Palestinian foreign ministry denounced attacks on civilian ministries as a ”violation of human rights” and a ”war crime” that would ”only lead to more death and destruction”.
Three local residents living in nearby houses were also wounded in the aerial attack, medical and security sources said. Israel has already bombed the Gaza offices of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, the head of the Hamas-led government, and those of his Interior Minister, Siad Siam, this month.
Ground troops have also rounded up a third of the Hamas Cabinet in the occupied West Bank, although one of the ministers has since been released.
Other overnight air strikes targeted a security post used by a special Hamas paramilitary force in the refugee camp of Jabaliya and wounded two gunmen in an attack on a group of militants in Beit Hanun, security sources said.
A 20-year-old local resident was killed and a Palestinian gunman from an armed group that fired on the Israelis was left seriously wounded when an Israeli tank opened fire in Beit Hanun early on Monday, a medical source said.
Tanks, armoured vehicles and bulldozers rolled into Beit Hanun early on Sunday, in the deepest Israeli incursion into the area since Israel began its punishing offensive on June 28, three days after Shalit was seized.
”The Israeli army controls nearly 80% of the town,” said Sofian Hamed, director general of the Hamas-run Beit Hanun municipality, adding that tanks and bulldozers were downtown and snipers positioned on roofs.
Hamed said infrastructure, orchards, the electricity network, water and sewage systems had been damaged in the incursion.
”The situation at the hospital is critical. We don’t have electricity and our fuel reserves to make the generators work have been used up,” said the director of Beit Hanun hospital, Mohammed al-Bassuni.
Aid groups have expressed concern about the difficulties of providing assistance to 1,4-million people living in Gaza following months of financial crisis and the suspension of direct Western aid to the Hamas-led government.
Shalit’s abduction sparked the worst Israeli-Palestinian crisis since the Hamas-led government was elected in January polls and some of the deadliest fighting in the Palestinian territories for years.
Israel has refused any negotiations with Hamas, a movement that formally advocates the destruction of the Jewish state, vowing the assault will continue ”in places, in time, in measures” of its choosing. – AFP, Reuters