Hezbollah guerrillas battled up to 6 000 Israeli troops on five fronts in south Lebanon on Wednesday, escalating a conflict that Israel’s prime minister vowed to pursue until a strong international force arrived.
Israeli commandos snatched suspected Hezbollah members from Lebanon’s ancient city of Baalbek in a helicopter-borne night raid backed by air strikes that killed 19 people, including four children.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Reuters in an interview the army would keep fighting Hezbollah in south Lebanon until peacekeepers arrived.
Olmert said he wanted the international force to be mandated to enforce a United Nations resolution calling for Hezbollah to be disarmed, adding that Israel had already destroyed much of the Shi’ite Islamist group’s military capacity.
”If indeed, as we hope, the international force will be an effective force made of combat units, then we will be able to stop fire when the international force will be on the ground in the south part of Lebanon,” Olmert said.
Asked if that meant Israel would carry on fighting until then, he said: ”Yes.”
Israel is seeking to damage Hezbollah as much as it can before diplomacy ends the war. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a ceasefire could be reached within days.
But the UN Security Council has yet to agree on a mandate for any international force and a French diplomatic source said France would not attend a meeting of potential troop contributors at the United Nations in New York on Thursday.
France has been touted to lead the force, but it wants a truce and an agreement on a framework for a permanent ceasefire before any troops deploy. That is at odds with the US-Israeli view that the ceasefire can wait until the force moves in.
Mixed signals
Israel has sent mixed signals on the duration and scale of its offensive in Lebanon, but it already has sent thousands of troops across the border to tackle Hezbollah guerrillas.
Lebanese security sources reported fierce battles on five fronts in the south on Wednesday. Israeli artillery fire pounded frontier villages as tank-led forces pushed in. Guerrillas were firing back mortars, anti-tank rockets and machineguns.
Hezbollah said it had destroyed four tanks and a military bulldozer. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.
Three Lebanese army soldiers were also killed in a separate Israeli air strike in south Lebanon, security sources said.
The latest violence shattered a partial lull in Israeli bombing and erupted despite international diplomacy aimed at halting the three-week-old war in which at least 646 people in Lebanon and 54 Israelis have been killed.
More than 70 Hezbollah rockets rained on northern Israel, slightly wounding one person. The barrage marked a sharp increase in attacks after a two-day lull.
Fighting raged for four hours around Baalbek in eastern Lebanon after the Israelis landed near a previously evacuated Hezbollah-run hospital, supported by helicopters firing missiles and heavy machineguns.
The Israeli army said commandos seized five suspected Hezbollah militants before returning safely to base. Hezbollah denied any of its militants were taken.
Helicopter-borne assault
It was the first helicopter-borne assault deep inside Lebanon in the conflict that flared after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
At least 13 civilians were killed when Israeli warplanes hit Jammaliyeh, a village near Baalbek, where five family members were found in the rubble of their house, security sources said. Another family of five died in a strike on the village of Saath.
One motorist was killed by a strike in Hermel to the north.
After the Israeli commandos left, air strikes destroyed the three-storey al-Hikmah hospital.
The raid on Baalbek, 100km inside Lebanon, followed the expiry of a 48-hour bombing pause agreed by Israel under US pressure after an air strike killed 54 civilians, including 37 children, in the southern village of Qana.
Israeli aircraft also wrecked at least three bridges in the northern tip of the Bekaa and in northern Lebanon.
Israel’s deputy chief of army staff, Major-General Moshe Kaplinsky, told The Jerusalem Post the army was now working to a plan in which troops would push to the Litani river, about 20km from the border with Israel, but could go beyond it.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, was due in Beirut on Wednesday with humanitarian aid, diplomats said. He also plans to travel to Damascus. The foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt also arrived in Beirut. – Reuters