Israel pounded Lebanon from the air on Friday in its bloody 10-day-old assault against Hezbollah, but the guerrilla group insisted it would only free two Israeli soldiers it is holding as part of a prisoner swap.
As the evacuation of thousands of foreigners from Beirut proceeded unhindered, four Israeli troops were killed in fierce battles with Hezbollah guerrillas inside Lebanon on Thursday, the Israeli army said.
Israel said two of its helicopters collided near the Lebanese border, killing a pilot and injuring three crewmen.
Hezbollah said it lost two of its fighters in the clashes, which occurred just inside Lebanon near where Hezbollah killed two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday.
Elite Israeli troops have been launching small-scale raids in Lebanon to try to stop Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel.
Israel, which is also waging a three-week-old military campaign in Gaza, began its assault after Hezbollah captured two soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on July 12.
Its campaign has killed at least 312 people in Lebanon, the vast majority civilians, and displaced half a million. Thirty-four Israeli troops and civilians have been killed.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the war against Hezbollah would continue ”until we reach a point where the marginal usefulness that is building to continue the military operation will not be worth the price”.
Israeli jets bombed Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the eastern Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon, around sunrise on Friday. There was no immediate word on casualties.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered a series of proposals to the Security Council on Thursday but the United States, which is key to any plan, rejected a ceasefire even before the UN leader met Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a private dinner in New York.
Rice will be briefed on Friday by a three-man mission Annan sent to the Middle East and on which he based his ideas for an end to fighting and a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. She is expected to travel to the region next week.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said no amount of international pressure would deflect the guerrilla group from its demand that the Jewish state agree to a prisoner swap.
”If the entire universe came [to pressure Hizbollah] it will not bring back the Israeli soldiers unless through indirect negotiations and a prisoner swap,” Nasrallah told al-Jazeera television in an interview.
Nasrallah, whose whereabouts are unknown, said Israeli military assertions that half of Hezbollah’s capabilities had been destroyed so far as ”wrong and nonsense”.
Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz has raised the possibility of a bigger ground offensive into Lebanon. So far the campaign has been mainly in the form of air strikes and limited, temporary incursions.
Nasrallah warned against such an escalation and said Hezbollah’s rockets could still reach Israel even if its fighters were pushed back from the border.
”A land invasion will be a disaster for the Israeli army, a disaster for their tanks, officers and soldiers,” he said.
A 40-strong US marine force landed in Lebanon on Thursday to evacuate to Cyprus about 1 200 stranded Americans.
It was the US military’s first return to Lebanon since it withdrew in 1984, months after a Shi’ite Muslim suicide bomber destroyed a Marine barracks killing 241 US service personnel.
Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has coincided with a major push into the Gaza Strip to retrieve another soldier, seized by Palestinian gunmen on June 25, and stop cross-border rocket fire.
Israeli shelling against a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip killed a Hamas militant and four relatives, including two children, sources in the governing Islamist group and medics said.
Israel’s Gaza offensive, launched on June 28, has killed about 115 Palestinians, half of them militants. – Reuters