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 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.
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Israeli spokesman just on Fox, residents in Qana area had been warned for days to leave area, Hezbullah has launched dozens of rockets from this area, blame the Israelis all you want but it was Hezbullah operating immediately next to residential buildings occupied by people who knew the danger of staying were they were.
I just saw the Israeli footage on the Qana attack.
This is just the latest example of "courageous" jihadis shooting up the world from behind the skirts and shorts of women and children, and when someone shoots back they blame everyone else for the consequences.
I'm sick of this tactic and the bleeding heart response of the rest of the world.
Golda Meir was right when she said there would be no peace until Muslims loved their families more than they hated Jews. We're a long, long road from that, and for the present it's much better to kill the jihadis.
where
My fury is aimed at Hezbollah. This is exactly why they do their dirty work amid civilians.. So Israelis will garner loads of bad press if they defend themselves.
And to answer that guys question, "What have we done?"; You've allowed a terrorist organization to operate uninhibited within your midst. You're now feeling the result of that action.
I just saw that video as well.
absolutely...
"Why are they killing us? What have we done?"
Shut up and die, terrorist swine.
"What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." -- Ghengis Khan
IDF: Qana building fell hours after strike
An IDF investigation has found that the building in Qana struck by the Air Force fell around eight hours after being hit by the IDF.
"The attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear," Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the incidents at Qana.
Eshel and the head of the IDF's Operational Branch, Major General Gadi Eisnkot said the structure was not being attacked when it collapsed, at around 8:00 in the morning.
The IDF believes that Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse.
Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed. "It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.
"I'm saying this very carefully, because at this time I don't have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap," he added.
Meanwhile in Lebanon it is being reported that the number of those killed in the collapse of the structure climbed to 60.
All targets struck accurately
Eshel said that an additional attack took place at 7:30 in the morning, but added that other buildings were targeted. "This was an attack on three buildings 460 meters away from the structure we are talking about. Four bombs were dropped and all of them are documented by the planes' cameras. They all struck their targets. In addition, we carried out a filming sortie that photographed the village during the afternoon showing that the three targeted buildings we struck. We have verification of strikes on the building and that the bombs reached their targets," Eshel said.
"An attack that took place at two in the morning struck two targets, both of them 400 meters away from the building (that collapsed). They were also destroyed. The attack between 12 and 1 a.m. struck the area of the affected house, and there were accurate strikes on the target. We are asking the question – what happened between 1 in the morning and 8 in the morning… we understand this building was attacked between 12 and 1 in the morning, seven hours before it was seriously damaged," he said.
Brigadier General Eshel explained that "since the start of fighting in Lebanon 150 rockets from a very high number of rocket launchers have been fired from the village and its surrounding areas, at a number of sites in the State of Israel. Within the village itself we have located a diverse range of activities connected to firing of rockets, beginning from forces commanding this operation – because such an operation needs ongoing command to direct it – and logistical sites that serve this end."
"From this village rockets are fired almost every day across Israel. The operation carried out overnight is an extension of operations that didn't start last night but before, and during this night we struck a number of targets in the village. All of the targets are being meticulously sifted," Eshel added.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3283816,00.html
IDF: 150 rockets fired from Qana at Israeli cities
What should spark fury is that Hezbollah is using civilians as living sandbags to fortify their fire bases.
Israel has been providing corridors for folks to do just that , evacuate and also to allow aid and ambulances and such access. something that doesn't get reported much , if at all.
Love how utterly gulliable our oh so wise, all knowing Junk media is proving to be. Here are the people who posture as the smartest toughest most all knowing people so superior to us "hicks" in fly over country falling lock stock and barrel for crude propaganda put together by a bunch of third world "hicks". Guess the butt clowns in the media are not nearly as smart as they think they are.
I won't mention the guy's name, but there was a TV 'personality' whose sign-off is good advice for Isreal here....
Courage.
Perhaps because you support Hizbullah? Khalil Shalhoub apprently doesn't understand that his people are responsible for the actions of the organizations they support.
At this point, I just can't muster up a whole lot of sympathy for the Shiites in South Lebanon. Hizbullah is their political party. Hizbullah is the organization they support. As long as the Shiite population in Lebanon support a terrorist organization such as Hizbullah, they are going to risk being killed in conflict.
"When you sleep with missiles sometimes you don't wake up in the morning."
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