ISRAEL RENEWS ATTACK ON SOUTHERN LEBANON

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and STEVEN ERLANGER

Published: August 4, 2006

MAALOT-TARSHIHA, Israel, Aug. 3 — The Lebanese militia Hezbollah killed 12 Israelis — 8 civilians and 4 soldiers — on Thursday, making it Israel’s deadliest day in more than three weeks of conflict.

“If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity,” he said on Lebanese television. “We will bomb Tel Aviv.” But he also offered to halt Hezbollah’s missile barrage into Israel if it stopped bombing Lebanon.

[Israel pounded Hezbollah's southern Beirut strongholds with missiles early Friday, and in a sharp expansion of its bombing targeted bridges for the first time in the Christian heartland north of the capital, according to Associated Press reports.

Four civilians were killed and 10 wounded in the airstrikes on bridges, the Lebanese Red Cross said. A Lebanese soldier was killed and six people wounded in air raids near Beirut's airport and the southern suburbs of the capital overnight, security officials and witnesses said.]

The Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz, told the army to begin preparing to push to the Litani River, some 15 miles north of the border, according to the newspaper Haaretz, a move that could mean a further call-up of military reservists. That would expand the security zone Israel is trying to create. But it is not clear whether he will receive government approval to do so.

Hezbollah launched more than 100 rockets on northern Israel in less than an hour, with most of the damage on the western edge, in Maalot, its associated Arab Israeli village of Tarshiha and the town of Acre.

Five Israelis, including a man and his daughter, were killed in Acre and another three, young Arab Israeli men, were killed when a rocket exploded in Tarshiha. Thirteen people were seriously wounded. Lebanese security officials said an Israeli missile killed a family of three in the border village of Taibe.

In Gaza, Israeli forces killed five Palestinian militants and three civilians in fighting on the edges of the southern town of Rafah as Israeli troops searched for tunnels to Egypt.

Israeli airplanes struck again at Hezbollah strongholds in southern Beirut, in the Bekaa Valley and in Nabatiye, while four Israeli soldiers were killed and four wounded in intermittently fierce fighting. Three were hit by an antitank missile fired by Hezbollah fighters near the southern village of Rajmin, and one was killed by an antitank missile in Taibe, the Israeli military said. The Israelis said they moved to take over new positions along the border and now control some 20 villages.

The Israelis are trying to create a new defensive line about four to five miles north of the border, recreating a security zone Israel intends to occupy until a multinational force can take its place. The zone is similar to that held by Israel in an occupation that ended in 2000. The government is debating whether to extend that zone north to the Litani River.

Maj. Zvika Golan, a spokesman for the northern command, said the zone would be expanded. “We are looking to clear 15 kilometers into Lebanon within the next few days,” he said. “We’re going to need more brigades, probably two more, and that will depend on government authorization.”

Adding two brigades could bring the number of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon to more than 12,000.

But Israeli troops have run into stiff resistance from Hezbollah fighters. One Israeli military official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that it had taught Israeli forces a “lesson” about the resolve, skill and discipline of the guerrillas.

Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon said in a televised speech to an emergency meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, meeting in Malaysia, that 900 people had been killed, 3,000 wounded, and more than a million, a quarter of Lebanon’s population, displaced.

Mr. Siniora’s figures for deaths, like the Lebanese Health Ministry’s, appear to include those who are missing, and not just the 548 confirmed deaths, according to The Associated Press. The United Nations estimated last week that 500,000 Lebanese had been displaced.

At the United Nations, France and the United States stepped up negotiations on the text of a Security Council resolution calling for an end to hostilities and establishing a path for a political settlement. Diplomats said the talks centered on two issues, which would take some time to resolve.

One, according to Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the French ambassador, was how to characterize the halt in fighting. A French-drafted resolution calls for “an immediate cessation of hostilities” while the Americans are insisting on a broader measure.

The other is the nature of the force in southern Lebanon once a truce begins. The French resolution suggests that it could be made up of the existing United Nations force and the Lebanese Army. The Americans favor Israel’s proposal to leave its own military there, with some restrictions on its power to conduct offensive operations but the right to respond if attacked.

Under this plan, Israeli troops would leave only when a new international force arrives. The international force would be authorized by a subsequent resolution that would also create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, set up a way to disarm the Hezbollah militia, establish Lebanon’s borders and extend the Lebanese Army’s authority throughout the south.

One difficulty will be to persuade Hezbollah to accept any United Nations resolution. Its chief spokesman, Hussein Rahal, said Hezbollah would not agree to a cease-fire until all Israeli troops left Lebanon, a condition unacceptable to Israel.

“Declaring a cease-fire is not the concern of the people of Lebanon as long as there is one Israeli soldier on Lebanese soil,” he told Al Jazeera television.

Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets over parts of southern Beirut on Thursday warning residents to leave immediately, signaling attacks on the battered southern suburbs.

“Do it!” the leaflet warned.

[Israeli warplanes bombed the southern suburbs of Beirut early Friday. The Israeli Army said it had aimed at offices of Hezbollah, the house of a Hezbollah official and a building used by the Palestinian group Hamas, Reuters reported.

[Hours later, Israeli aircraft struck several bridges linking Beirut to the north of the country, Reuters and Agence France-Presse reported, based on security sources and witnesses. Previously, Israel had focused on Lebanon’s east and south and Beirut’s southern suburbs.]

In a television appearance, Sheik Nasrallah spoke in a measured tone, occasionally peering at notes before him, flanked by a Lebanese flag on one side and a signature yellow Hezbollah flag on the other.

“You are victims, like the Lebanese and Palestinian people, of a personality complex in your Prime Minister Olmert,” he said, addressing the Israeli public directly. “The only choice before you is to stop your aggression and turn to negotiations to end this folly,” he said.

Sheik Nasrallah also taunted Arab leaders, calling on them to “be men for just one day” and work for an end to hostilities.

And he accused the United States of complicity in Israel’s attacks, saying, “the blood of children and women and civilians smear the faces of Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld. This is the U.S. administration, which is supposed to be the friend of Lebanon and which wanted to make Lebanon an exemplary democratic country.”

The eight Israeli civilian fatalities represented the highest number of Israeli dead in a rocket attack since eight people were killed in the port city of Haifa on July 16.

The barrage of Hezbollah rockets — 120 for the day — displayed the continued ability of the militia to keep northern Israel paralyzed. Cars screeched to a halt as motorists ran for cover at the sound of explosions. Smoke rose over Maalot-Tarshiha and a nearby forest.

Tarshiha is a village of 4,000 Israeli Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, legally attached to the Jewish city of Maalot, which contains roughly 20,000 people, half of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The three young men, Muslim Arabs, were killed when a rocket struck next to the rock where they had taken cover.

“They had just parked to go to work,” said Capt. Gabby Elyahu of the Israeli border police, as he stood near the foot-deep crater left by the rocket. “They left their car and went to go hide behind the rock, and they were killed.”

In Milya, a Christian Arab village nearby, at least 10 people suffered slight wounds when rockets fell Thursday afternoon, said the mayor, Fathi Assaf. In Acre, five people died as they went out from a shelter to look around after an initial wave of rockets. The dead included Shimon Zaribi, 44, and Mazal, his 16-year-old daughter. One body lay on the front lawn by a small stone fence topped with a white-picket extension, covered with a blanket.

“People have been holed up in shelters,” said Mayor Shimon Lancry of Acre to Israeli television. “It’s difficult, but people understand that soldiers are still fighting in Lebanon, and we will get through this period.”

The area of southern Beirut that Israel attacked is the center of Hezbollah’s presence in the city. Much of the area is deserted, a ruin of crushed buildings and burned-out cars and trucks. Some of the rubble was still smoking at midday. Most of the residents have fled.

The Israeli Army also released the conclusions of its inquiry into the bombing on Sunday in Qana that resulted in the deaths of 29 civilians sheltering in a basement. The Israelis, in a brief announcement, said that more than 150 rockets had been launched since July 12 “from within the village of Qana itself and the immediate surrounding area” and repeated that “the residents of Qana and the villages surrounding it were warned several times, through various media, to evacuate.” The report did not assert that rockets had been launched before the bombing.

The report said that the army did not know there were civilians in the building. “Had the information indicated that civilians were present in the building, the attack would not have been carried out.” The army said it regretted the loss of life.