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BEIRUT, Aug 6: Hezbollah killed 12 Israeli soldiers and three civilians on Sunday in its deadliest rocket strike yet and Israeli bombs killed 19 Lebanese civilians as Lebanon rejected a draft UN resolution to end the 26-day-old war.
A rocket struck a group of Israeli reservists, called up for the Lebanon offensive, in the Israeli village of Kfar Giladi. Medics said dozens were wounded.
Soldiers near the scene held their heads and one wept as a military ambulance pulled away. Helicopters landed nearby to fly the badly wounded to hospitals further from the war front.
“I don’t recall so many dead ever. This is terrible,” said Ron Valensi, head of the upper Galilee municipal council and a resident of Kfar Giladi, speaking on Channel 2 Television.
Hezbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, has killed 57 Israeli soldiers and 33 civilians in the conflict, sparked when its men seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
The Israeli army said on Sunday it had captured one of the Hezbollah fighters who took part in the seizure of the soldiers.
LEBANESE CIVILIANS: At least 759 people have been killed in Lebanon during the war, including 16 overnight and on Sunday in the bombing of five southern villages.
Two civilians died when an Israeli air strike hit a pickup truck ahead of a UN aid convoy heading for the southern city of Tyre, UN sources said.
A Lebanese soldier was killed in an air raid near Tyre and another civilian inside it.
Hezbollah announced the deaths of three more of its fighters, bringing its declared toll of deaths to 52. Lebanese security sources estimate about 90 Hezbollah fighters have been killed.
Beirut was rattled by an air raid in the Shia-dominated southern suburbs, witnesses said. And the Bekaa Valley was hit by several air raids, one near a Lebanese army base.
UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon said a mortar round fired by Hezbollah wounded three Chinese members of the force.
The war coincides with an Israeli military offensive in the southern Gaza Strip to recover another captured soldier.
—Reuters
