JUST IN: ISRAEL HITS MINIBUS FULL OF CIVILIANS
Airstrike hits minibus fleeing border town; rockets kill 2 in Haifa
MSNBC News Services
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Updated: 5:17 a.m. MT July 23, 2006
ON THE ISRAEL-LEBANON BORDER - Israeli warplanes Sunday hit a minibus carrying Lebanese fleeing border villages, killing three and wounding 13, Lebanese security forces said. Hezbollah guerillas fired rockets into northern Israel, killing at least two people.
Elsewhere, an Israeli airstrike killed a Lebanese woman photographer, witnesses said.
They said Layal Najib was killed near Qana, a village east of the Lebanese port city of Tyre. Colleagues said she had supplied photographs to several international agencies.
A U.N. spokesman said a U.N. observer was seriously wounded by Hezbollah fire in south Lebanon.
Israeli troops continued to hold a Lebanese border village that they battled their way into on Saturday, but did not appear to be advancing, Lebanese security officials said. Warplanes and artillery were heavily battering areas across the south.
After a lull in Hezbollah rocket attacks, at least a dozen explosions shook the northern Israeli city of Haifa early Sunday, killing at least two people and injuring 15, Israeli police said.
Rockets hit at least two apartments, a house, an industrial zone and vehicles. One man was killed while driving his car while the second person was in a building.
Medics said people had been wounded in other towns but they had no details.
Israeli soldiers battled militants throughout the day Saturday and raided the large village of Maroun al-Ras in several waves before finally taking control, military officials said. Tens of thousands of Lebanese fleeing north packed into the port of Sidon to escape the fighting as the United Nations warned of a growing humanitarian “disaster.”
Early Sunday, large explosions shook Beirut as Israeli warplanes again pounded guerrilla targets in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital.
After sunrise, Israeli bombs hit a textile factory in the border town of al-Manara, killing one person and injuring two, mayor Ali Rahal told The Associated Press. The death brought the civilian toll in Lebanon to 373.
Missiles also leveled an agricultural compound belonging to Hezbollah in Baalbek, while strikes in hills around the town wounded at least two people, witnesses and media said.
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz told the Cabinet that the current offensive is not an invasion of Lebanon, but rather a series of limited raids into the area.
Peretz also said that Israel would accept a temporary international force, preferably headed by NATO, deployed along the Lebanese border to keep Hezbollah guerrillas away from Israel, according to officials in Peretz’s office.
‘A violation of humanitarian law’
Israeli bombing of a Beirut neighborhood where Hezbollah had its headquarters has breached humanitarian law, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday.
“It is horrific. I did not know it was block after block of houses,” Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, told reporters as he toured the shattered Haret Hreik district. “It makes it a violation of humanitarian law.”
“It’s bigger, it’s more extensive than I even could imagine,” he said, surveying a pile of rubble.
Israeli warplanes have pounded the area nearly every night since its war with Hezbollah began on July 12.
It was last hit early on Sunday, said the few residents not to have fled the usually packed area.
Egeland said between half a million and a million people were in need of international assistance in Lebanon, but delivering aid required safe access. “So far Israel is not giving us access,” he said.
As part of an effort to avert a larger crisis, Israel has eased its blockade of Lebanon’s ports to allow the first shiploads of aid to arrive. It remained unclear how that aid would get to the isolated towns and villages where the fighting has been centered.
Egeland plans to travel to Israel on Tuesday to negotiate safe corridors by land, sea and air. He has estimated that $100 million is urgently needed to help avert a humanitarian crisis.
“There is definitely a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Lebanon,” he said.
Ramping up ground attacks
Israel hit inside the southern city of Sidon Sunday for the first time in its campaign, destroying a religious complex linked to Hezbollah and wounding four people. More than 35,000 people streaming north from the heart of the war zone had swamped this southern port city.
The growing use of ground forces, 11 days into the fighting, signaled Israeli recognition that airstrikes alone were not enough to force Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But a ground offensive carries greater risks to Israel, which already has lost 18 soldiers in the recent fighting. It also threatens to exacerbate already trying conditions for Lebanese civilians in the area.
Israeli military officials have said they want to push Hezbollah beyond the Litani River, about 20 miles north of the border, with the Lebanese army deploying in the border zone. An Israeli radio station that broadcasts to southern Lebanon warned residents of 13 villages to flee north by Saturday afternoon. The villages form a corridor about 4 miles wide and 11 miles deep.
With Lebanese fearing an escalation in the battle, international officials worked to end the conflict.
Rice prepares for visit
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was set to arrive in the Middle East on Monday, though she ruled out a quick cease-fire as a “false promise.”
President Bush said his administration’s diplomatic efforts would focus on finding a strategy for confronting Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers.
“Secretary Rice will make it clear that resolving the crisis demands confronting the terrorist group that launched the attacks and the nations that support it,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
Italy, which has been trying to mediate an end to the fighting, said it would hold a conference Wednesday to work out the basis for a truce agreement. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proposed a beefed-up U.N. force along the Lebanese border, but Israel has called for the Lebanese army to take control of the area.
Israelis flee rocket attacks
The fighting has also taken a toll on Israelis living near the border.
Officials estimate that between one third to a half of all residents in the country’s north have fled to escape Hezbollah rocket attacks, the Haaretz newspaper reported on Sunday.
“For a week people have been sitting in shelters and security rooms, so they prefer to leave,” said Adi Eldar, mayor of the town of Carmiel in a report on the newspaper’s Web site.
He estimated that a third of all residents in the north had left since the war with Hizbollah erupted and the group began to fire barrages of rockets from Lebanon.
Haim Barbibai, mayor of Kiryat Shmona, not far from the Lebanese border, said half his town’s residents had left. Officials in Nahariya, which has been hit repeatedly by rockets, also said half the town’s residents were gone.
Many roads are largely empty of traffic. Those who have remained stay in bomb shelters or basements as rockets keep raining down despite waves of Israeli airstrikes and now limited ground operations inside Lebanon.
Pitched battles
A force of about 2,000 troops entered southern Lebanon on Saturday trying to root out Hezbollah bunkers and destroy hidden rocket launchers.
The troops, backed by tanks and armored vehicles, raced past a U.N. outpost and headed into Maroun al-Ras. Gunfire could be heard coming from the village, and artillery batteries in Israel also fired into the area.
“The forces have completed, more or less, their control of the area of the village, Maroun al-Ras, and made lots of hits against terrorists,” said Maj. Gen. Benny Gantz, chief of Israel’s ground forces. “It was a difficult fight that continued for not a short time.”
Dozens of Hezbollah fighters were injured or killed in the battle, Gantz said. Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed Saturday, bringing the total number of acknowledged Hezbollah fighters killed to eight. Israel accuses the group of vastly underreporting its casualties.
The village was strategically important because it overlooked an area where Hezbollah had command posts, Gantz said. The forces seized a cache of weapons and rockets in a village mosque, he added. The village is believed to be a launching point for the rocket attacks on northern Israel.
At one point, a half-ton bomb was dropped on a Hezbollah outpost, about 500 yards from the border and near the village. Other positions were bombarded by Israeli gunboats off the coast.
Thousands of villagers flee
About 32 residents took refuge at the U.N. observers post. Nearly the entire remaining population of the village — which numbered about 2,300 before the crisis broke out — were believed to have fled, Lebanese security officials said.
Some of the invading forces returned to Israel during the day. U.N. peacekeepers and witnesses said Israel also briefly held the nearby village of Marwaheen before pulling back.
The Israeli military said early Sunday that the body of a fifth soldier killed in a battle in south Lebanon has been recovered. Five soldiers died Thursday and four of their bodies were recovered shortly after the battle. The fifth was left behind because of heavy gunfire.
About 35,000 fleeing Lebanese filled Sidon as they searched for a place to stay or a way to get farther north.
“I’m afraid a disaster is going to happen with all these refugees. There’s no aid, not from other nations, not from Lebanon,” Mayor Abdul-Rahman al-Bizri said.
Refugees pour into Syria
More than 200,000 Lebanese fled to Syria, according to the Syrian Red Crescent.
A steady stream of foreign nationals boarded ships and planes Saturday to take them away. U.S. officials said more than 7,500 Americans had been evacuated from Lebanon by Saturday night.
“Everybody’s crying and kissing and wishing you well, and you have to turn and leave. We have the chance to get out, but they don’t,” said Susan Abu Hamdan, 44, of Northville, Mich., who was visiting her siblings in Beirut.
The Israeli army said it wanted to completely destroy all Hezbollah infrastructure in an area between a half-mile and two miles from the border, but it had no intention of going deeper into Lebanon.
“We really want to knock out Hezbollah in this area,” said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman. “We want to wipe them out, and we don’t intend for them to ever be there again.”
Israel: No designs on occupation
A senior Israeli military official confirmed that Israel did not plan to reoccupy southern Lebanon as it did in 1982-2000 to create a buffer zone to protect northern Israel.
Israel’s current offensive began July 12 when Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others in a cross-border raid.
Israeli airstrikes on Saturday blasted communications and television transmission towers in the central and northern Lebanese mountains, knocking the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. off the air and killing one person at the station.
Over the past 11 days, Hezbollah has launched nearly 1,000 rockets into Israel, killing 15 civilians and sending hundreds of thousands of others fleeing into bunkers. At least 132 rockets landed in Israel on Saturday, wounding 20 people, three seriously, rescue officials said.
A total of 19 Israeli troops have been killed in the fighting so far.
Hezbollah also fired at the army base of Nurit in Israel, wounding one soldier, the army said.
Israel’s call for Lebanese to leave much of the area south of the Litani River caused many to fear that a far deeper Israeli ground incursion was being planned, an offensive that would almost certainly lead to far higher casualties.
More than 400,000 people live south of the Litani. Though tens of thousands have left, many are believed still there, trapped by the damaged roads or by fear of being caught in an airstrike.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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