Tensions on the border between Israel and Lebanon increased over the weekend as the Lebanese militia Hezbollah landed its biggest and deadliest missile strike yet inside Israel on Sunday, killing eight people in the port city of Haifa.
The attack, which included a missile strike at a train maintenance building that killed eight Israelis and wounded more than 20, came on the fifth day of a cross-border battle that became the leading topic of discussion at the G8 summit in Russia on Sunday. The Israeli military retaliated swiftly, according to The New York Times. Within an hour, Israeli warplanes fiercely attacked targets in southern Beirut and southern Lebanon, killing 45 people and wounding more than 100. The attacks also continued in northern Lebanon, near Tripoli, where Israeli rockets blew up a Lebanese army position, killing eight soldiers, while a sea-launched missile killed at least nine people in the southern Lebanese port of Tyre.
At press time, CNN reported that an Israeli F-16 had gone down in Lebanon and that Israeli ground troops had briefly moved into Lebanon to confront Hezbollah forces. It marked the first time Israeli ground forces have crossed over into Lebanon since Israel pulled out of the country in 2000 after an 18-year occupation of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.
Just after word of the Israeli ground raid broke, CNN reported that suspected Hezbollah rockets struck deep into Israel again Monday morning (July 17) in what reporter Anderson Cooper described as the most significant attack yet on Haifa, Israel's third largest city. There were no reports of casualties at press time.
Elsewhere, an Israeli attack on an army barracks in the city of Abdeh, 50 miles north of Beirut, killed six soldiers and wounded 28, while a strike early Monday in the Bekka Valley killed another seven and wounded 43.
The deadly back and forth — sparked last Wednesday by a raid by Hezbollah guerrillas inside Israel, in which they captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others — prompted United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday to call for an international stabilization force to go to the Mideast, according to CNN. The proposed international force would be the first step in what Annan and Blair said should be a series of actions aimed at ending the fighting.
"The only way we are going to get a cessation of hostilities is the deployment of an international force to stop the bombardment of Israel and get Israel to stop its attacks on Hezbollah," Blair said at a news conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the end of the G8 summit.
In a conversation caught during a G8 lunch meeting on Sunday, President Bush — who has supported Israel's right to defend itself — was remarkably candid in his assessment of what should happen in the region. Chewing on some bread and seemingly unaware the microphone in front of him was on, Bush told Blair, "See, the irony is what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh-- and it's over," referring to Syria's military and political influence over Hezbollah. Bush also seemed to express frustration with Annan and suggested that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be heading to the region soon to try and broker a cease-fire agreement.
Lebanese officials said the battles have so far killed a total of 142 people in Lebanon and wounded 382. Israel said 12 civilians and nine soldiers and sailors had been killed since Wednesday.
The constant bombardment has prompted several countries to try and evacuate their citizens from Lebanon, where airports have sustained serious damage from Israeli air strikes. U.S. military helicopters were scheduled to move a few dozen U.S. citizens from Beirut on Monday, with a State Department official speculating that around 15 percent of the approximately 25,000 Americans in Lebanon were expected to evacuate.
While a bus full of German tourists left a Beirut hotel on Monday in a dash for the Syrian border, CNN reported that Blair said two ships were on their way to Lebanon to evacuate British citizens and that France had sent a ferry from Cyprus on Sunday to help its citizens escape the violence.
Lebanese officials have called for a cease-fire, but Israel has rejected those pleas and said it will only stop the fighting when its kidnapped troops are freed and Hezbollah withdraws from southern Lebanon and stops firing rockets into Israel (see "Lebanon Appeals For Cease-Fire With Israel As Middle East Violence Escalates"). As the fierce battles rage in the north, Israel also continues to fight Palestinian militants further south in Gaza, a skirmish that was sparked by the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier three weeks ago. According to CNN, early on Monday an Israeli solder was killed and six were wounded in the West Bank city of Nablus in fighting with Palestinian Hamas forces.
The six days of bombardment have wreaked havoc on Beirut's southern suburbs, which house the headquarters of Hezbollah. The Times described the area as deserted and littered with broken glass and large chunks of shattered buildings, with heavy plumes of black smoke rising above the city as Israeli jets circled over the closed Beirut airport, hitting fuel storage tanks and an oil refinery.
