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BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 2 — Hezbollah guerrillas fired more than 200 rockets into Israel on Wednesday, a record number, even as Israel poured thousands of troops backed by tanks and armored bulldozers into fierce fighting along the border.
As the battles raged in a half-dozen pockets just over the border, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed that Israel would fight on until an international force moved into southern Lebanon — an uncertain prospect that could take weeks or more.
Mr. Olmert declared in a series of interviews in Jerusalem during the day that Hezbollah’s infrastructure had been “entirely destroyed†and asserted that some 770 command and control centers has been struck and taken out of action.
But even as he spoke, shadowy Hezbollah fighters, flitting between shattered villages and underground bunkers, were showering Israel with the biggest barrage of rockets in the 22-day-old war.
Even though Israeli artillery has been pounding the Lebanese village of Kfar Kila, separated from the Israeli town of Metulla by metal fence, there was a sudden swoosh overhead at midmorning as more than a dozen missiles flew in from somewhere in the stony hills northwest of Marjyoun toward Israel.
By 6:45 p.m. local time, the Israeli Army announced that 213 rockets had fallen on the northern part of the country. Minutes later, alarm sirens were again wailing in Haifa.
While the last few days have been relatively quiet — apparently in reaction to the announced lull in Israeli airstrikes — the previous record of 156 rockets was set only last Sunday.
In the most aggressive fighting thus far, helicopter-borne Israeli commandoes raided some 60 miles into Lebanon in the middle of the night, striking a hospital financed by Iranian money in the Hezbollah stronghold of Baalbek, in the Bekaa valley near the Syrian border.
Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, told reporters at a briefing at a small northern army base that the raid was intended to show that Israel could strike anywhere in Lebanon.
But as is so often the case, there were sharply different Israeli and Lebanese accounts of what happened. Both agreed, however that there had been an hours-long gunfight.
General Halutz said the commandos had targeted a “remote logistics base†operated by Hezbollah where “some of their leaders†were meeting. He said the Israeli troops captured five Hezbollah members and killed more than 10.
He said the mission was to retrieve unspecified useful intelligence, adding, “I have no doubt that more advantages from this operation will be discovered.
In Lebanon, there was speculation that the raid was aimed at capturing a very prominent local Hezbollah leader, Mohammed Yazbek, who is the personal representative of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a member of the party’s Shura Council. Locals said his entourage had passed through before the raid.
The hospital was pockmarked with bullets Wednesday afternoon, and burned-out cars and the remnants of grenades and brass shell casings testified to the wild firefight.
But in Baalbek, villagers said at least 15 civilians were killed during Israeli airstrikes providing cover to the commandos. The dead included seven members of one family caught in their backyard. A front-loader’s scoop was used to carry away the dead, and mourners in a funeral procession carried pictures of the Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrullah.
Much of southern Lebanon was a landscape of destruction on Wednesday, with smoke rising from shelled villages, roads cratered and littered with ruined cars. Israeli soldiers, including paratroopers, clawed their way less than four miles into Lebanon, meeting stiff resistance from guerillas setting ambushes and firing from hidden positions.
Even the Lebanese Army, which has stood apart from the battles, was taking casualties. An Israeli airstrike at a base near Sidon killed three Lebanese soldiers on Wednesday, making a total of 24 soldiers killed during the conflict.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.c...artner=homepage
QUOTE
By 6:45 p.m. local time, the Israeli Army announced that 213 rockets had fallen on the northern part of the country. Minutes later, alarm sirens were again wailing in Haifa.
While the last few days have been relatively quiet — apparently in reaction to the announced lull in Israeli airstrikes — the previous record of 156 rockets was set only last Sunday.
While the last few days have been relatively quiet — apparently in reaction to the announced lull in Israeli airstrikes — the previous record of 156 rockets was set only last Sunday.
