Israel continues Lebanon Strikes Despite Cease Fire for 48 hourse
Israeli Air Force Continues Lebanon Strikes
By Thomas Wagner and Kathy Gannon
The Associated Press
Monday 31 July 2006
Jerusalem - The Israeli air force carried out strikes Monday in southern Lebanon despite an agreement to halt raids for 48 hours after nearly 60 Lebanese civilians were killed in an Israeli bombing, the army said.
The airstrikes near the village of Taibe were meant to protect ground forces operating in the area and were not targeting anyone or anything specific, the army said.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah guerrillas attacked an Israeli tank in southern Lebanon, wounding three soldiers, the military said. The attack occurred near the villages of Kila and Taibe on border, where Israeli ground forces have been fighting Hezbollah guerrillas for nearly two weeks.
Israel Radio also reported that Hezbollah rockets hit the northern town of Kiryat Shemona. No casualties were reported in the rocket attacks, the radio said.
Hours before the fighting started up again, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the U.N. Security Council to arrange for a cease-fire agreement by week's end that would include the formation of an international force to help Lebanese forces control southern Lebanon.
But Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz made clear in a speech to parliament that Israel would not agree to an immediate cease-fire and had plans to expand its operation in Lebanon.
"It's forbidden to agree to an immediate cease-fire," Peretz told parliament, as several Arab legislators heckled him and demanded an immediate halt to the offensive. "Israel will expand and strengthen its activities against the Hezbollah."
Israel's top ministers were to discuss expanding the army's ground operation at a meeting later Monday, while thousands of reserve soldiers trained for the possibility that they will be sent into Lebanon to participate in the battle, now 20 days old.
It was unclear whether the senior ministers would approve a broader ground assault at their meeting, defense officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Israel had announced the suspension of airstrikes for 48 hours starting at 2 a.m. Monday. But Hezbollah legislator Hassan Fadlallah had questioned Israel's motivation, telling Lebanese television it was just "an attempt to absorb international indignation over the Qana massacre."
The bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana on Sunday led to demands around the world for an immediate cease-fire.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Rice over the weekend that Israel would need 10 to 14 more days to finish its offensive, and Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Army Radio on Monday that he did not think the fighting was over yet.
"I'm convinced that we won't finish this war until it's clear that Hezbollah has no more abilities to attack Israel from south Lebanon. This is what we are striving for," Ramon said.
The stunning bloodshed in Qana increased international pressure on Washington to back an immediate end to the fighting and prompted Rice to cut short her Mideast mission to return home Monday.
In a nationally televised speech before leaving Israel, Rice said she will seek international consensus for a cease-fire and a "lasting settlement" in the conflict between Lebanon and Israel through a U.N. Security Council resolution this week.
"I am convinced that only by achieving both will the Lebanese people be able to control their country and their future, and the people of Israel finally be able to live free of attack from terrorist groups in Lebanon," Rice said.
An Israeli army spokesman left open the possibility that Israel might still hit targets to stop imminent attacks on the country, despite the airstrike suspension. He also made clear the Israelis could end the suspension depending on "operational developments" in Lebanon.
The army said that the temporary cessation of aerial activity would allow the opening of corridors for Lebanese civilians who want to leave south Lebanon for the north and would maintain land, sea and air corridors for humanitarian assistance.
By early afternoon Monday, roads from villages into the port city of Tyre and heading north along the coast were packed with thousands of refugees in pick-up trucks and cars. With many of the main roads too shattered for use, cars took to dirt side roads, still waving white flags out their windows or covering the vehicles roofs with white sheets.
Lebanese Red Cross teams escorted by U.N. observers went to the village of Srifa to dig up more than 50 bodies believed still buried under rubble since Israeli strikes wiped out an entire neighborhood on July 19. The bodies have began decomposing, the Red Cross said.
The largest death toll from a single Israeli strike before Sunday was around a dozen, and the Qana attack, where at least 34 children and 12 women died, stunned Lebanese. Heightening the anger were memories of a 1996 Israeli artillery bombardment that hit a U.N. base in Qana, killing more than 100 Lebanese who had taken refuge there from fighting. That attack sparked an international outcry that forced a halt to an Israeli offensive.
Hezbollah vowed retaliation on its Al-Manar television, saying: "The massacre at Qana will not go unanswered." It hit northern Israel on Sunday with 157 rockets - the highest one-day total during the offensive - with one Israeli moderately wounded and 12 others lightly hurt, medics said.
Israel apologized for the deaths and promised an investigation, but said Hezbollah had fired more than 40 rockets from Qana before the airstrike, including several from near the building that was bombed. Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields."
More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south - many of them too afraid to flee on roads heavily hit by Israeli strikes.
The attack on Qana brought Lebanon's death toll to more than 510 and pushed American peace efforts to a crucial juncture, as fury at the United States flared in Lebanon. The Beirut government said it would no longer negotiate over a U.S. peace package without an unconditional cease-fire.
At the United Nations, the Security Council approved a statement expressing "extreme shock and distress" at the bloodshed and calling for an end to violence, stopping short of a demand for an immediate cease-fire.
In a jab at the United States, U.N. chief Kofi Annan told the council in unusually frank terms that he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a halt were ignored. "Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," he said.
After news of the deaths emerged, Rice telephoned Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and said she would stay in Jerusalem to continue work on a peace package, rather than make a planned Sunday visit to Beirut. Saniora said he told her not to come.
--------
Kathy Gannon contributed to this story from Qana, Lebanon.
Go to Original
A Night of Death and Terror for Lebanese Villagers
By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
Monday 31 July 2006
Qana, Lebanon - The dead lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with dirt. Faces were puffy. A man's arm was extended straight out from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their skin like wax.
In the all-day scramble to retrieve the bodies from the remains of this one house - backhoes dug for hours at the site after an early-morning airstrike - tallies of the dead varied, from as many as 60 to 27, many of them children.
This was the single most lethal episode in the course of this sudden war. The survivors will remember it as the day their children died. For the village, it is a fresh pain in a wound cut more than 10 years ago, when an Israeli attack here killed more than 100 civilians. Many of them were children, too.
The Israeli government apologized for that airstrike, as it did for the one here on Sunday. It said that residents had been warned to leave and should have already been gone.
But leaving southern Lebanon now is dangerous. The two extended families staying in the house that the Israeli missile struck - the Shalhoubs and the Hashims - had discussed leaving several times over the past two weeks. But they were poor - most worked in tobacco or construction - and the families were big and many of their members weak, with a 95-year-old, two relatives in wheelchairs and dozens of children. A taxi north, around $1,000, was unaffordable.
And then there was the risk of the road itself.
Dozens, including 21 refugees in the back of a pickup truck on July 15, have been killed by Israeli strikes while trying to evacuate. Missiles hit two Red Cross ambulances last weekend, wounding six people and punching a circle in the center of the cross on one's roof. A rocket hit the ambulance convoy that responded in Qana on Sunday.
"We heard on the news they were bombing the Red Cross," said Zaineb Shalhoub, a 22-year-old who survived the bombing. She was lying quietly in a hospital bed in Tyre.
"What can we do with all of our kids?" she asked. "There was just no way to go."
They had moved to the house on the edge of a high ridge, which was dug into the earth. They thought it would be safer. The position helped muffle the sound of the bombs.
But its most valuable asset was water. The town, mostly abandoned, had not had power or running water in many days. A neighbor rigged a pumping system, and the Shalhoubs and Hashims ran a pipe from that house to theirs.
Life had taken on a strange, stunted quality. In a crawl-space basement area near the crushed house, five mattresses were on the floor. A Koran was open to a prayer. A school notebook was on a pillow. Each morning, the women made breakfast for the children. Ms. Shalhoub gave lessons. And they all hoped for rescue.
The first missile struck around 1 a.m., throwing Mohamed Shalhoub, one of the relatives who uses a wheelchair, into an open doorway. His five children, ages 12 to 2, were still inside the house, as was his wife, his mother and a 10-year-old nephew. He tried to get to them, but minutes later another missile hit. By morning, when the rescue workers arrived, all eight of his relatives were dead.
"I felt like I was turning around, and the earth was going up and I was going into the earth," said Mr. Shalhoub, 38, staring blankly ahead in a hospital bed in Tyre.
Israeli military officials said the building did not collapse until the early morning, and that "munitions" stored in the house might have brought it down. But the house appeared to have been hit from above, and residents said the walls and ceiling came down around them immediately after the first bomb.
"My mouth was full of sand," Ms. Shalhoub said. She said doctors had told her family that those who died had been suffocated and crushed to death.
"They died because of the sand and the bricks, that's what they told us," she said.
At least eight people in the house survived, and told of a long, terrifying night. Some remained buried until morning. Others crawled free. Ms. Shalhoub sat under a tree with Mohamed Shalhoub, without his wheelchair, and three others, listening to the planes flying overhead in the dark.
"You couldn't see your finger in front of your face," said Ghazi Aidibi, a neighbor.
Ms. Shalhoub said she tried to help a woman who was sobbing from under the wreckage, asking for her baby, but she could not find the child. A neighbor, Haidar Tafleh, said he heard screaming when he approached the debris, but that bombing kept him away.
"We tried to take them out, but the bombs wouldn't let us," Mr. Tafleh said.
The area took several more hits. A house very close to the Shalhoubs' was crushed. A giant crater was gouged next to it. Residents said as many as eight buildings had been destroyed over two weeks.
Collapsed buildings have been a serious problem in southern Lebanon. Dozens of bodies are still stuck under the rubble. The mayor of Tyre, Abed al-Husseini, estimated that about 75 bodies were still buried under rubble in Slifa, a village on the border.
A grocer, Hassan Faraj, stood outside his shop, near a monument to those killed in the 1996 attack. He said that Hezbollah fighters had not come to Qana, but that residents supported them strongly. There was little evidence of fighters on Sunday, but Hezbollah flags and posters of Shiite leaders trimmed the streets. "They like the resistance here," he said.
He cautioned people not to stand in the street in front of his shop, because that was where the ambulance convoy was hit in the morning.
At the Hakoumi Hospital in Tyre, Mr. Shalhoub sat in bed. His face was slack, stunned. His relatives poured him spicy coffee, and the room filled with its scent. The survivors spoke of their faith as a salve. The children, Mr. Shalhoub said, were in paradise now.
But 24-year-old Hala Shalhoub, whose two daughters, ages 1 and 5, were killed, was moaning and rocking slightly in her hospital bed.
"I want to see them," she said slowly. "I want to hold them."
A relative said, "Let her cry."
Zaineb Shalhoub, in the next bed, rested quietly.
"There's nobody left in our village," she said. "Not a human or a stone."
-------
By Thomas Wagner and Kathy Gannon
The Associated Press
Monday 31 July 2006
Jerusalem - The Israeli air force carried out strikes Monday in southern Lebanon despite an agreement to halt raids for 48 hours after nearly 60 Lebanese civilians were killed in an Israeli bombing, the army said.
The airstrikes near the village of Taibe were meant to protect ground forces operating in the area and were not targeting anyone or anything specific, the army said.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah guerrillas attacked an Israeli tank in southern Lebanon, wounding three soldiers, the military said. The attack occurred near the villages of Kila and Taibe on border, where Israeli ground forces have been fighting Hezbollah guerrillas for nearly two weeks.
Israel Radio also reported that Hezbollah rockets hit the northern town of Kiryat Shemona. No casualties were reported in the rocket attacks, the radio said.
Hours before the fighting started up again, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the U.N. Security Council to arrange for a cease-fire agreement by week's end that would include the formation of an international force to help Lebanese forces control southern Lebanon.
But Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz made clear in a speech to parliament that Israel would not agree to an immediate cease-fire and had plans to expand its operation in Lebanon.
"It's forbidden to agree to an immediate cease-fire," Peretz told parliament, as several Arab legislators heckled him and demanded an immediate halt to the offensive. "Israel will expand and strengthen its activities against the Hezbollah."
Israel's top ministers were to discuss expanding the army's ground operation at a meeting later Monday, while thousands of reserve soldiers trained for the possibility that they will be sent into Lebanon to participate in the battle, now 20 days old.
It was unclear whether the senior ministers would approve a broader ground assault at their meeting, defense officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Israel had announced the suspension of airstrikes for 48 hours starting at 2 a.m. Monday. But Hezbollah legislator Hassan Fadlallah had questioned Israel's motivation, telling Lebanese television it was just "an attempt to absorb international indignation over the Qana massacre."
The bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana on Sunday led to demands around the world for an immediate cease-fire.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Rice over the weekend that Israel would need 10 to 14 more days to finish its offensive, and Justice Minister Haim Ramon told Army Radio on Monday that he did not think the fighting was over yet.
"I'm convinced that we won't finish this war until it's clear that Hezbollah has no more abilities to attack Israel from south Lebanon. This is what we are striving for," Ramon said.
The stunning bloodshed in Qana increased international pressure on Washington to back an immediate end to the fighting and prompted Rice to cut short her Mideast mission to return home Monday.
In a nationally televised speech before leaving Israel, Rice said she will seek international consensus for a cease-fire and a "lasting settlement" in the conflict between Lebanon and Israel through a U.N. Security Council resolution this week.
"I am convinced that only by achieving both will the Lebanese people be able to control their country and their future, and the people of Israel finally be able to live free of attack from terrorist groups in Lebanon," Rice said.
An Israeli army spokesman left open the possibility that Israel might still hit targets to stop imminent attacks on the country, despite the airstrike suspension. He also made clear the Israelis could end the suspension depending on "operational developments" in Lebanon.
The army said that the temporary cessation of aerial activity would allow the opening of corridors for Lebanese civilians who want to leave south Lebanon for the north and would maintain land, sea and air corridors for humanitarian assistance.
By early afternoon Monday, roads from villages into the port city of Tyre and heading north along the coast were packed with thousands of refugees in pick-up trucks and cars. With many of the main roads too shattered for use, cars took to dirt side roads, still waving white flags out their windows or covering the vehicles roofs with white sheets.
Lebanese Red Cross teams escorted by U.N. observers went to the village of Srifa to dig up more than 50 bodies believed still buried under rubble since Israeli strikes wiped out an entire neighborhood on July 19. The bodies have began decomposing, the Red Cross said.
The largest death toll from a single Israeli strike before Sunday was around a dozen, and the Qana attack, where at least 34 children and 12 women died, stunned Lebanese. Heightening the anger were memories of a 1996 Israeli artillery bombardment that hit a U.N. base in Qana, killing more than 100 Lebanese who had taken refuge there from fighting. That attack sparked an international outcry that forced a halt to an Israeli offensive.
Hezbollah vowed retaliation on its Al-Manar television, saying: "The massacre at Qana will not go unanswered." It hit northern Israel on Sunday with 157 rockets - the highest one-day total during the offensive - with one Israeli moderately wounded and 12 others lightly hurt, medics said.
Israel apologized for the deaths and promised an investigation, but said Hezbollah had fired more than 40 rockets from Qana before the airstrike, including several from near the building that was bombed. Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields."
More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south - many of them too afraid to flee on roads heavily hit by Israeli strikes.
The attack on Qana brought Lebanon's death toll to more than 510 and pushed American peace efforts to a crucial juncture, as fury at the United States flared in Lebanon. The Beirut government said it would no longer negotiate over a U.S. peace package without an unconditional cease-fire.
At the United Nations, the Security Council approved a statement expressing "extreme shock and distress" at the bloodshed and calling for an end to violence, stopping short of a demand for an immediate cease-fire.
In a jab at the United States, U.N. chief Kofi Annan told the council in unusually frank terms that he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a halt were ignored. "Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," he said.
After news of the deaths emerged, Rice telephoned Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and said she would stay in Jerusalem to continue work on a peace package, rather than make a planned Sunday visit to Beirut. Saniora said he told her not to come.
--------
Kathy Gannon contributed to this story from Qana, Lebanon.
Go to Original
A Night of Death and Terror for Lebanese Villagers
By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
Monday 31 July 2006
Qana, Lebanon - The dead lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with dirt. Faces were puffy. A man's arm was extended straight out from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their skin like wax.
In the all-day scramble to retrieve the bodies from the remains of this one house - backhoes dug for hours at the site after an early-morning airstrike - tallies of the dead varied, from as many as 60 to 27, many of them children.
This was the single most lethal episode in the course of this sudden war. The survivors will remember it as the day their children died. For the village, it is a fresh pain in a wound cut more than 10 years ago, when an Israeli attack here killed more than 100 civilians. Many of them were children, too.
The Israeli government apologized for that airstrike, as it did for the one here on Sunday. It said that residents had been warned to leave and should have already been gone.
But leaving southern Lebanon now is dangerous. The two extended families staying in the house that the Israeli missile struck - the Shalhoubs and the Hashims - had discussed leaving several times over the past two weeks. But they were poor - most worked in tobacco or construction - and the families were big and many of their members weak, with a 95-year-old, two relatives in wheelchairs and dozens of children. A taxi north, around $1,000, was unaffordable.
And then there was the risk of the road itself.
Dozens, including 21 refugees in the back of a pickup truck on July 15, have been killed by Israeli strikes while trying to evacuate. Missiles hit two Red Cross ambulances last weekend, wounding six people and punching a circle in the center of the cross on one's roof. A rocket hit the ambulance convoy that responded in Qana on Sunday.
"We heard on the news they were bombing the Red Cross," said Zaineb Shalhoub, a 22-year-old who survived the bombing. She was lying quietly in a hospital bed in Tyre.
"What can we do with all of our kids?" she asked. "There was just no way to go."
They had moved to the house on the edge of a high ridge, which was dug into the earth. They thought it would be safer. The position helped muffle the sound of the bombs.
But its most valuable asset was water. The town, mostly abandoned, had not had power or running water in many days. A neighbor rigged a pumping system, and the Shalhoubs and Hashims ran a pipe from that house to theirs.
Life had taken on a strange, stunted quality. In a crawl-space basement area near the crushed house, five mattresses were on the floor. A Koran was open to a prayer. A school notebook was on a pillow. Each morning, the women made breakfast for the children. Ms. Shalhoub gave lessons. And they all hoped for rescue.
The first missile struck around 1 a.m., throwing Mohamed Shalhoub, one of the relatives who uses a wheelchair, into an open doorway. His five children, ages 12 to 2, were still inside the house, as was his wife, his mother and a 10-year-old nephew. He tried to get to them, but minutes later another missile hit. By morning, when the rescue workers arrived, all eight of his relatives were dead.
"I felt like I was turning around, and the earth was going up and I was going into the earth," said Mr. Shalhoub, 38, staring blankly ahead in a hospital bed in Tyre.
Israeli military officials said the building did not collapse until the early morning, and that "munitions" stored in the house might have brought it down. But the house appeared to have been hit from above, and residents said the walls and ceiling came down around them immediately after the first bomb.
"My mouth was full of sand," Ms. Shalhoub said. She said doctors had told her family that those who died had been suffocated and crushed to death.
"They died because of the sand and the bricks, that's what they told us," she said.
At least eight people in the house survived, and told of a long, terrifying night. Some remained buried until morning. Others crawled free. Ms. Shalhoub sat under a tree with Mohamed Shalhoub, without his wheelchair, and three others, listening to the planes flying overhead in the dark.
"You couldn't see your finger in front of your face," said Ghazi Aidibi, a neighbor.
Ms. Shalhoub said she tried to help a woman who was sobbing from under the wreckage, asking for her baby, but she could not find the child. A neighbor, Haidar Tafleh, said he heard screaming when he approached the debris, but that bombing kept him away.
"We tried to take them out, but the bombs wouldn't let us," Mr. Tafleh said.
The area took several more hits. A house very close to the Shalhoubs' was crushed. A giant crater was gouged next to it. Residents said as many as eight buildings had been destroyed over two weeks.
Collapsed buildings have been a serious problem in southern Lebanon. Dozens of bodies are still stuck under the rubble. The mayor of Tyre, Abed al-Husseini, estimated that about 75 bodies were still buried under rubble in Slifa, a village on the border.
A grocer, Hassan Faraj, stood outside his shop, near a monument to those killed in the 1996 attack. He said that Hezbollah fighters had not come to Qana, but that residents supported them strongly. There was little evidence of fighters on Sunday, but Hezbollah flags and posters of Shiite leaders trimmed the streets. "They like the resistance here," he said.
He cautioned people not to stand in the street in front of his shop, because that was where the ambulance convoy was hit in the morning.
At the Hakoumi Hospital in Tyre, Mr. Shalhoub sat in bed. His face was slack, stunned. His relatives poured him spicy coffee, and the room filled with its scent. The survivors spoke of their faith as a salve. The children, Mr. Shalhoub said, were in paradise now.
But 24-year-old Hala Shalhoub, whose two daughters, ages 1 and 5, were killed, was moaning and rocking slightly in her hospital bed.
"I want to see them," she said slowly. "I want to hold them."
A relative said, "Let her cry."
Zaineb Shalhoub, in the next bed, rested quietly.
"There's nobody left in our village," she said. "Not a human or a stone."
-------
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