Top News

Israel sends 8,000 troops to Lebanon

(AP)
Updated: 2006-08-03 07:31

Israel pressed the first full day of a massive new ground attack, sending 8,000 troops into southern Lebanon on Wednesday and seizing five people it said were Hezbollah fighters in a dramatic airborne raid on a northeastern town. Hezbollah retaliated with its deepest strikes yet into Israel, firing a record number of more than 160 rockets.

An Israeli soldier holds a rifle he said was captured from Hezbollah guerrillas, as troops return from southern Lebanon in northern Israel Tuesday Aug. 1, 2006. In a major expansion of its ground offensive, Israel has decided to send troops deeper into Lebanon to clear out Hezbollah fighters and secure the territory until a multinational force is deployed there, senior officials said Tuesday. [AP]

Diplomatic efforts faltered, with France saying it will not participate in a Thursday U.N. meeting that could send troops to help monitor a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. France, which may join or even lead such a force, said it does not want to talk about sending peacekeepers until fighting halts and the U.N. Security Council agrees to a wider framework for lasting peace.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a new appeal for peace in the Middle East. He urged "the international community and those who are more directly involved in this tragedy to lay down conditions as soon as possible for a definitive political solution to the crisis."

Israeli military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said their troops were going from village to village in south Lebanon to clear them of Hezbollah guerrillas.

Hezbollah was putting up resistance, but the officials said they were confident that would not change their objective of reaching four miles into Lebanon by Thursday. They said they could easily dash inland to the Litani River — their final objective about 18 miles from the border — but that they were moving methodically so as not to leave behind pockets of resistance.

Israeli commandos flew in by helicopter before dawn into the northern town of Baalbek, on the border with Syria, capturing five Hezbollah guerrillas and killing at least 10, said Israel's army chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz.

Witnesses said Israeli forces partially destroyed the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek, where chief Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Rahal said fierce fighting raged for more than one hour.

Israel has not yet released the identity of those captured. When asked by The Associated Press whether any were "big fish," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "They are tasty fishes."

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements to the media, said that Israeli troops captured "four or five" people, but not at the hospital.

He denied they were Hezbollah fighters, saying one was a 60-year-old grocery store owner and two relatives who work in construction.

The hospital, which residents said is financed by an Iranian charity that is close to Hezbollah, was empty of patients at the time of the raid, the guerrilla group said.

Olmert said that, although the scene of the fighting is called a hospital, "there are no patients there and there is no hospital, this is a base of the Hezbollah in disguise."

Hezbollah fought the commandos with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, while Israeli jets fired missiles at the surrounding guerrilla force, Rahal said.

One of a series of air raids struck the village of Al Jamaliyeh near the hospital. A missile hit the house of the village's mayor, Hussein Jamaleddin, instantly killing his son, brother, and five other relatives.

"Where is the press? Where is the media to see this massacre? Count our dead. Count our body parts," Jamaleddin told The Associated Press on the telephone, minutes after the missile strike.

A family of seven — a mother, father and their five children — were killed in another air raid on an area near Al Jamaliyeh, witnesses said. A van driver was killed when another missile struck nearby.

Fighting ended at about 4 a.m., residents said.

Hezbollah guerrillas hit back, firing at least 160 rockets at towns across northern Israel, wounding at least 17 people and killing a 52-year-old Israeli-American at the entrance to his home in Kibbutz Sa'ar near the town of Naharia, Israeli police said.

The man, who was not immediately identified, had been riding his bike home after a warning siren went off, said Yehuda Shavit, a local government official. Neighbors said he was originally from the Boston area and had been living in Israel for the last 20 years. The man's wife and two daughters had fled to southern Israel when the rocket attacks started, Shavit said, adding that more than half of the kibbutz residents also had left.

At the scene, police removed the remains of the rocket from the crater it blasted, as an orange bulldozer was clearing away the rubble.

An Associated Press reporter standing on a hilltop overlooking the Lebanese border town of Kfar Kila, about a mile from Israel, saw dozens of outgoing rockets fly overhead and across the Israeli border. Israeli artillery was returning fire, with a shell falling about every two minutes.

Israel medics said one of the rockets hit near the town of Beit Shean, about 42 miles inside Israel, the deepest rocket strike into Israel so far. Witnesses reported that a stray Hezbollah rocket hit the West Bank for the first time, striking between the villages of Fakua and Jalboun, near Beit Shean.

Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have staged daily support marches for Hezbollah, cheering the group's fight against the Israelis.

"We know that they did not intend to strike Palestinian territory. They intended to strike Israel," said Fahmi Zarer, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party.

Israeli jets fired at least one missile at a Lebanese army base in the village of Sarba, in the Iqlim al Tuffah province, a highland region where Hezbollah is believed to have offices and bases. One soldier was killed, bringing to 26 the number of Lebanese soldiers killed since the start of the Israeli offensive against Lebanon on July 12, when Hezbollah guerrillas seized two soldiers and killed three.

The Lebanese military has largely stayed out of the three-week-old conflict, though has said it will fight if Israel launches a wide-scale invasion, and Israeli warplanes have repeatedly attacked soldiers. It was not clear what prompted the airstrike on the army base.

In an incident denied by the Israeli military, Hezbollah said in a statement that it had attacked an Israeli army armored unit that crossed into Lebanon on Wednesday morning, destroying two tanks and killing or wounding their crews.

Israel wants to push Hezbollah away from the border, so Israeli patrols and civilians there are not in danger of attack. The army hopes to drive Hezbollah far enough north so that most of the guerrillas' rockets cannot reach the Jewish state.

Israeli officials have said their soldiers were to go as far as the Litani, about 18 miles from the border, and hold the ground until an international peacekeeping force comes ashore.

In Geneva, the U.N.'s World Food Program said Israel had agreed to permit two oil tankers to sail into Lebanon to ease a growing fuel crisis in the country.

At least 540 Lebanese have been killed, including 468 civilians and 26 Lebanese soldiers and at least 46 Hezbollah guerrillas. The health minister says the toll could be as high as 750, including those still buried in rubble or missing. Fifty-five Israelis have died — 36 soldiers and 19 civilians killed in Hezbollah rocket attacks.

The United Nations warned that the longer a spill of 110,000 barrels of oil is not cleaned up from Lebanon's coast, the more severe the environmental impact will be. The oil spilled two weeks ago after Israeli warplanes hit a coastal power plant.