Israel unleashed more air strikes on Lebanon and Hezbollah fired rockets at Haifa on Sunday as a senior United Nations official demanded a halt to the violence to allow aid to reach desperate civilians.
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, leaving for the Middle East later in the day, has said she will pursue a lasting solution, not an immediate ceasefire. Washington blames Hezbollah and its allies, Syria and Iran, for the conflict.
The Israeli army said it had yet to decide whether to launch a major ground incursion into Lebanon, while Defence Minister Amir Peretz said Israel could accept a new Nato-led peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon to keep Hezbollah guerrillas at bay.
Civilians took the brunt of renewed bombardments in a war that has cost at least 361 lives in Lebanon and 37 in Israel.
”The scenes were horrific. There were wounded people on the road and there was a wounded person in the building too. There was terrible destruction,” said factory worker Keren Hagigi at an industrial zone in Haifa hit by Hezbollah rockets.
Israeli warplanes bombed targets in Beirut and east and south Lebanon, killing at least five civilians and wounding about 80, many of them in the southern port of Tyre.
Half a dozen blasts echoed across the Lebanese capital as jets roared over the Shi’ite southern suburbs in the early hours. Air strikes also destroyed a Shi’ite religious centre in the southern port city of Sidon, wounding four people.
A dozen Israeli air raids on the eastern Bekaa Valley destroyed three factories, a house and several bridges, killing at least one civilian and wounding seven. Two other civilians died in a raid on a southern village, security sources said.
Two people were killed and 15 wounded when Hezbollah rockets slammed into apartments and vehicles in Haifa, Israel’s third largest city, which lies 35km south of the border.
Hezbollah said it had hit Haifa with Raad (Thunder) 2 rockets, which are short-range Iranian-made missiles.
UN says $100-million needed
UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said the violence must stop to enable major aid efforts to get under way.
”The rockets going into Israel have to stop,” he said. ”The enormous bombardment that we have seen here with one block after another being levelled has to stop,” he said as he toured Beirut’s shattered Haret Hreik area, a Hizbollah stronghold.
He said Israeli bombing of the once-crowded Shi’ite district had breached humanitarian law. ”It is horrific. I did not know it was block after block of houses,” he told reporters.
Egeland, who has estimated that $100-million is urgently needed to tackle an unfolding humanitarian crisis in Lebanon, plans to travel to Israel on Tuesday to negotiate safe corridors by land, sea and air for international aid.
The war in Lebanon has displaced half a million people. Others are trapped by fighting, especially in border villages.
More than 1 000 Hezbollah rockets have killed 17 Israeli civilians, prompting between a third to a half of all residents in northern Israel to escape the bombardment, officials said.
Twenty Israeli soldiers have also been killed in the conflict, launched when Hezbollah guerrillas seized two soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on July 12.
Israel’s Army Radio said more troops were expected to move into southern Lebanon on Sunday to widen the army’s ground operations against Hezbollah close to the frontier.
But the army said military chief Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz has yet to decide to launch a major ground invasion.
Israel has called up thousands of reserve soldiers and has assembled troops and tanks on its northern border for days, heightening speculation a land invasion is imminent to halt rocket attacks and drive Hezbollah away from the border.
Peretz said Israel would back the deployment of a temporary international peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, an idea earlier described as premature by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
”Due to the weakness of the Lebanese army, we support the deployment in the south of a multinational force with broad authority,” Peretz told German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Peretz gave no time-frame for deploying the force, but suggested it would be led by Nato. Israel views the existing UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon as a failure.
Cyprus prepared to take in nearly 10 000 more foreigners evacuated from Lebanon. About 14 crowded vessels were expected at the Cypriot ports of Larnaca and Limassol over the next day or so, part of an evacuation involving dozens of countries. – Reuters