BEIRUT, July 15: Israel killed at least 32 civilians on Saturday, including 15 children, in air strikes meant to punish Lebanon for letting Hezbollah guerillas target the Jewish state’s northern border.
Israel’s bombing of Lebanese roads, bridges, ports and airports, as well as Hezbollah targets, is its most destructive onslaught since its 1982 invasion to expel Palestinian forces.
With missiles also slamming into no-man’s land between Lebanon and Syria, Russia warned that there was a “real threat” of the conflict escalating into all-out regional war.
“There is a real threat of the involvement of other states in this conflict,” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said ahead of a G8 summit of world leaders in Saint Petersburg likely to be dominated by crisis.
An Israeli missile incinerated a van in south Lebanon, killing 20 people, among them 15 children, in the deadliest single attack of the four-day-old campaign launched by Israel after Hezbollah captured two of its soldiers and killed eight.
Police said the van was carrying two families fleeing the village of Marwaheen after Israeli loudspeaker warnings to leave their homes.
Raids on roads and petrol stations in north, east and south Lebanon killed 12 people and wounded 32, security sources said, bringing the death toll in four days of Israeli attacks to 99. All but three of the dead have been civilians.
Hezbollah rockets, meanwhile, struck deeper into Israel than ever before on Saturday, wounding eight people and damaging two buildings in the Sea of Galilee town of Tiberias, police said.
Altogether 10 Israelis were wounded throughout northern Israel as about 80 rockets rained down from Lebanon. A military spokesman said Israel had deployed Patriot missile batteries in the northern city of Haifa to intercept Hezbollah rockets.
Rocket attacks have killed four civilians, including a child, in northern Israel this week.
BUSH, PUTIN: President George W. Bush, who has declined to urge Israel to curb its military operations, said Syria should tell Hezbollah, which is also backed by Iran, to stop cross-border attacks.
In strikes on Beirut, Israeli warplanes flattened Hezbollah’s nine-storey headquarters and destroyed the office of a Hamas leader, Mohammed Nazzal. An official of the ruling Palestinian Islamist group said Nazzal had survived the attack.
For the first time, Israel bombarded the ports of Beirut and Tripoli in the north, security sources and witnesses said.
Shortly after, Israeli warships bombarded Beirut’s lighthouse and two ports in Christian areas north of the capital, a Lebanese security source said.
SYRIAN-LEBANESE BORDER: Israel’s campaign in Lebanon coincided with an offensive it launched in the Gaza Strip on June 28 to try to retrieve another captured soldier, halt Palestinian rocket fire and destroy institutions of the Hamas-led government.
Israeli planes fired rockets near a Lebanese-Syrian border crossing, heightening fears that it could extend its campaign to Syria, which along with Iran is Hezbollah’s main ally.
Israel said it had attacked targets only in Lebanon. A Syrian official also said Israel had not attacked Syria.
The Israeli army said it had struck about 150 targets in Lebanon so far, fewer than a dozen of them linked directly to Hezbollah. Most have hit civilian installations.
The assault has choked Lebanon’s economy. Israel aims not just to force Hezbollah to free the soldiers, which the Shi’ite group wants to trade for prisoners in Israel, but to destroy its ability to launch rocket attacks on northern Israel.
“The best way to stop the violence is for Hezbollah to lay down its arms and to stop attacking. And therefore I call upon Syria to exert influence over Hezbollah,” Bush told a joint news conference with President Vladimir Putin at a summit in Russia.
The European Union, in a statement at the G8 summit, said Israel’s assault on Lebanon was disproportionate.
Israeli army chief Dan Halutz said on Friday more targets would be bombed as part of the effort to remove Hezbollah from the border and replace it with a force answering to the Lebanese government.
LACKS UNITY: The Beirut government, led by an anti-Syrian coalition, lacks the unity and firepower to disarm Hezbollah, the only Lebanese faction to keep its guns after the 1975-90 civil war.
After Israel quit Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah confined its attacks mainly to a disputed border area, but Wednesday’s bold raid shattered tacit rules that had limited frontier violence.
The Israeli military said it had recovered the body of one of four sailors missing from a warship struck by Hezbollah off Beirut on Friday evening. A military source said Hezbollah had fired an Iranian-made missile at the vessel.
Hezbollah announced one of its fighters had been killed, only the second such death it has announced this week.
In Gaza, Israeli aircraft attacked the Palestinian Econ-omy Ministry and a house where a Hamas militant was killed and eight people were wounded. Israel has killed about 85 Palestinians, around half of them militants since the offensive was launched.—Reuters/AFP
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