Posted on 07/30/2006 12:11:46 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
QANA, Lebanon - Israeli missiles crushed several buildings where Lebanese villagers were sleeping Sunday, killing at least 56 people, more than half of them children, in the deadliest attack of the campaign against Hezbollah.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decided to return early to Washington with her diplomatic mission derailed after Lebanese leaders told her not to come.
Lebanon's prime minister said his country would not talk to the Americans about anything but an unconditional cease-fire. Rice, in Jerusalem for talks with Israeli officials, said she was "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life" but stopped short of calling for an immediate end to the hostilities, saying: "We want a cease-fire as soon as possible."
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed "great sorrow" for the airstrikes but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas for using the area to launch rockets at Israel. Before news of the strike emerged, Olmert told Rice that Israel likely would fight on for another 10-14 days.
Later, Olmert and Rice discussed the conditions for a cease-fire, including the proposed deployment of an international force there, an official said on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
The United States has resisted world pressure to call for a halt to the fighting, saying it wants first to ensure a deal is in place that will eliminate Hezbollah guerrillas from Israel's border and bring an international force to southern Lebanon.
The missiles struck just after 1 a.m., leveling a three-story building in Qana where two extended families, the Shalhoubs and Hashims, had taken refuge in the basement from heavy Israeli bombardment in the area. Throughout the day, rescue workers dug through the rubble, lifting out bodies dressed in colorful clothes of women and children. At one point they found a single room with 18 bodies, police said.
"Why are they killing us? What have we done?" screamed Khalil Shalhoub, who was helping pull out the dead until he saw his brother's body taken out on a stretcher. The dead included at least 34 children and 12 adult women, security officials said.
Israel said guerrillas had fired rockets from near the building into northern Israel.
In Beirut, some 5,000 protesters gathered in downtown Beirut, at one point attacking a U.N. building and burning American flags, shouting, "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv" and chanting for Hezbollah's ally Syria to hit Israel.
At an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he was "deeply disturbed" that his previous calls for cease-fire had gone unheeded. He pointed to the Beirut protests, saying, "People have noticed (the United Nations') failure to act firmly and quickly during this crisis."
Olmert said Israel "is not in a hurry to have a cease-fire" before it achieves its goals of decimating Hezbollah. He told Rice that Israel would need 10 to 14 more days to finish its offensive, according to a senior Israeli government official.
"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this morning," Olmert told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a participant. "We will continue the activity and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation."
The Lebanese government this week had put forward ideas on disarming Hezbollah and deploying an international force in the south. But after the strike, Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said any negotiations on a broader deal were off.
"We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of innocent people," he told a news conference, though he added that his government still supported the ideas it offered.
Saniora and Rice spoke by telephone after the strike, and Saniora said he told her not to make a planned trip Sunday to Beirut. Rice told reporters in Jerusalem she had called to notify him she wouldn't fly to Beirut, "because I felt very strongly that my work toward a cease-fire is really here, today."
A U.S. official later said she had decided to return home Monday morning to work on a U.N. Security Council resolution.
Israel said Hezbollah guerrillas had fired 40 rockets into northern Israel from Qana, wounding five Israelis, before the airstrike — including some rockets launched from near the leveled building.
"We deeply regret the loss of any civilian life and especially when you talk about children who are innocent," Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir told AP. But he accused Hezbollah of "using their own civilian population as human shields" and said the military had warned people to leave the area.
The attack drew immediate condemnation from the Arab world, with Jordan's King Abdullah II voicing his strongest criticism of his Israeli peace partner yet, calling it an "ugly crime." Israel promised an investigation.
In April 1996 more than 100 Lebanese civilians were killed in Qana in the hills east of the port city of Tyre, in an Israeli artillery shelling of a U.N. base. The civilians had sought refuge with the U.N. to escape Israeli bombardment and the attack sparked an international outcry that helped end an Israeli offensive.
Meanwhile, Israel launched its second ground incursion into southern Lebanon. Before dawn Sunday, Israeli forces backed by heavy artillery fire crossed the border and clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas in the Taibeh Project area, about two miles inside Lebanon.
Hezbollah said eight Israeli soldiers were killed, while the Israeli army said only that one of its soldiers had been moderately wounded.
Heavy artillery rained down on the nearby villages of Yuhmor and Arnoun as Israeli jets were seen in the skies overhead.
The incursion came after Israeli forces pulled back Saturday from Bint Jbail, the furthest point of their first major ground incursion across the border, launched a week ago. The incursion sparked heavy fighting with Hezbollah guerrillas, who put up a tougher resistance than expected and appeared to still be in the area after the pullback. Bint Jbail is further west along the border from Taibeh.
The United Nations World Food Program canceled an aid convoy's trip to the embattled south, after the Israeli military denied safe passage, the group said in a statement. The six-truck convoy had been scheduled to bring relief supplies to Marjayoun.
Israel launched its assault on Lebanon after Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid July 12 and killed eight others in fighting the same day.
Some 458 Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed in the campaign through Saturday — before the attacks on Qana. Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died, and Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel have killed 18 civilians, Israeli authorities said, correcting earlier reports of 19 civilian dead.
More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south, taking refuge in schools, hospitals or basements of apartment buildings amid the fighting — many of them too afraid to flee on roads heavily hit by Israeli strikes.
In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub and several other residents said people were simply too terrified to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked repeatedly by rockets and bombs. Charred wreckage and smashed buildings line the roughly seven-mile road from Qana to Tyre, where a small amount of humanitarian supplies had arrived. European ships had picked up foreign citizens from Tyre's port, but there were no evacuations of Lebanese.
On Thursday, the Israeli military's Al-Mashriq radio that broadcasts into southern Lebanon warned residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles are fired from them. Leaflets with similar messages were dropped in some areas Saturday.
A senior official in the Israeli air force said the village had been warned "several times" that it would be attacked because "hundreds of rockets have been fired from inside the village in the past two weeks, from the backyards, from the squares ... from as close as 50 to 60 (yards) from this building."
Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr disputed allegations that Hezbollah was firing missiles from Qana.
"What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children and women?" he told Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV.
Why is it in their best interest to go up against the U.N.? You're original post is idiotic in the extreme.
>....surely they don't keep US flags around just for such a PR opportunity?<
It is not beyond the realm of belief that this entire conflab is planned by the elite globalists, who supply the weaponry AND the US flags for such photo ops.
My post is idiotic in the extreme?
Oh, TJ, I'm afaid this is all far above your limited range of comprehension. The UN is made up largely of muslim nations. Muslims despise Jews, and many EU members are also very antisemitic. Nes Pas?
You need to do some serious research and comprehension. There are 192 United Nations members as of 2006. 48 of those are majority muslim nations. You do the math. Your claim that the "U.N. is made up largely of muslim nations" is ludicrous.
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