Posted on 07/18/2006 11:01:22 AM PDT by charming_harmonica
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli warplanes battered Lebanon on Tuesday, killing 31 people, and more Hizbollah rockets hit northern Israel, killing one, with no sign that diplomacy would halt the week-old conflict any time soon.
Civilians on both sides were angry about the bombardment that has cost 235 lives in Lebanon and 13 in Israel, but Israeli and Hizbollah leaders showed no willingness to halt the fighting or heed proposals for a new U.N.-backed stabilisation force.
"I don't even know where our neighbourhood was," said a Lebanese Shi'ite, looking for where his home had been on the edge of a bomb-blasted Hizbollah compound in southern Beirut.
"They're still bombarding the area to grind it to dust. What kind of crime is this?" said the man, giving his name as Hassan.
Israelis, stunned by Hizbollah rocket attacks, said they wanted their army to smash the guerrilla group and most favoured killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a poll showed.
"We are killing those we need to kill," said Hanna Dehan, 60, speaking near the city of Haifa, where eight people were killed on Sunday when a Hizbollah rocket hit a train station.
A rocket attack on the northern Israeli town of Nahariya killed one person on Tuesday. Other Hizbollah rockets hit Haifa.
In Lebanon, nine family members, including children, were killed in an air strike on their house in Aitaroun village. Ten people were killed in strikes in the south and the Bekaa Valley.
Warplanes bombed a Lebanese army barracks east of Beirut, killing 11 soldiers, including four officers, and wounding 30.
A lorry carrying medical supplies donated by the United Arab Emirates was hit and its driver killed en route from Damascus.
Hizbollah said another of its fighters had been killed, only the fourth such death it has acknowledged in the past week.
While U.N. peace envoys held talks in Israel, the Israeli army was refusing to rule out a ground invasion, only six years after it ended a 22-year occupation of south Lebanon.
"At this stage we do not think we have to activate massive ground forces into Lebanon but if we have to do this, we will," Moshe Kaplinsky, Israel's deputy army chief, told Israel Radio.
He said the offensive, launched after Hizbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on July 12, would require weeks to complete its goals.
"PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE"
Hizbollah dismissed as psychological warfare an assertion by another Israeli general that the group's rocket attacks had eased off because of Israeli attacks on its weapons arsenal.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for a bigger, more robust international force to stabilise southern Lebanon and buy time for the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbollah guerrillas.
Israel, bent on driving Hizbollah from the south, says it is too early to discuss such a force. Washington has queried how it could restrain the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Islamist group.
"It is urgent that the international community acts to make a difference on the ground," Annan said in Brussels, suggesting a force that would operate differently from toothless U.N. peacekeepers who have patrolled south Lebanon since 1978.
Lebanese Sunni Muslim leader Saad Hariri told Al Jazeera TV an overall solution was needed, not just a new international force, and accused others of fighting proxy wars in his country.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana was due to head to Israel in another bid to calm Middle East violence.
Israel is also pursuing an offensive in the Gaza Strip after Palestinian militants captured another soldier on June 25.
The United States ordered five warships to head for Lebanon in its first major evacuation of Americans as thousands of foreigners packed their bags to flee Israeli air strikes.
A cruise ship commissioned by the United States, able to carry up to 1,000 people, left Cyprus earlier and headed to the Lebanese coast. Some of the 8,000 Americans registered as living in Lebanon were expected to board it later in the day.
Other European nations mustered boats and planes for their stranded nationals. Some 100,000 Lebanese have fled their homes.
U.N. agencies are pulling non-essential staff and family members from Lebanon, but relief workers are staying and more are going in, humanitarian aid chief Jan Egeland said.
Lebanon wants an immediate cease-fire, but world powers have said Hizbollah must first free the two soldiers and stop cross-border attacks. Israel also demands that Hizbollah disarm in line with U.N. Security Council resolutions.
The Beirut government is too weak and divided to force Hizbollah to yield to such demands. The Shi'ite group wants to swap the soldiers for Lebanese and Arabs in Israeli jails.
(Additional reporting by Nadim Ladki, Lin Noueihed, Alaa Shahine and Laila Bassam in Beirut, Jerusalem bureau, Madeline Chambers in London, Paul Taylor in Brussels and Heba Kandil in Dubai)
"diplomacy would halt the week-old conflict any time soon."
War starts when diplomacy fails.
Lebanon wants an immediate cease-fire, but world powers have said Hizbollah must first free the two soldiers and stop cross-border attacks. Israel also demands that Hizbollah disarm in line with U.N. Security Council resolutions.World powers said what? While still repeating their tired "proportionate response" formulas, the "world powers" seem surprisingly, and uncharacteristically, accomodating to Israel's concerns, wouldn't you say?
Emperor-of-Terrorists, Rapist and Murderers:
"Let them buy peace from ME.
I never cared when Islamic missiles murdered Israeli women and children. Who cares?
But now I have a chance to make more money.
Money for me from slavery, money for me from graft,
money for me from rape and all forms of corruption.
Without those things, I am nothing."
(see tagline)
"Famous Anus"
> A lorry carrying medical supplies donated by the United Arab Emirates was hit and its driver killed en route from Damascus.
Yes, and I'll bet it was half full of orphan puppies and kitties that were were being sent to Lebanese children, too.
He who lays down with Hizbollah...
Those who follow the doctrine of "proportionate response" are called "the defeated."
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