BEIRUT, Lebanon – Israel and Hezbollah fought bloody ground battles and exchanged fierce air and missile strikes Friday, including bombing raids that severed Lebanon’s last major supply link with Syria and the outside world, and the guerrillas’ deepest rocket attack inside Israel to date.
Loud explosions resounded in Beirut’s suburbs early today as Israeli warplanes renewed their onslaught, local media said. Israeli helicopters,
meanwhile, attacked suspected Hezbollah positions in the southern city of Tyre, though Hezbollah’s TV station claimed that fighters repelled helicopter-borne troops who tried to land, killing one soldier.
After days of desultory diplomacy, Washington said it was near agreement with France on a U.N. cease-fire resolution, possibly by early next week. But Israel and Hezbollah showed no signs of holding their fire.
Israeli aircraft on a mission Friday to destroy weapons caches hit a refrigerated warehouse where farm workers were loading fruit, killing at least 28 near the Lebanon-Syria border. And three Hezbollah rockets landed near Hadera, 50 miles south of the Israel-Lebanon border; 188 rockets rained on other towns, killing three Israeli Arabs.
Given the determination of both Hezbollah and Israel to look victorious when the conflict finally ends, the worst of the fighting may still lie ahead with the militant Shiite guerrilla fighters perhaps making good on their threat to rocket Tel Aviv and Israel launching an all-out ground offensive, pushing northward to the Litani River.
Israeli military officials said Friday they completed the first phase of the offensive, securing a 4-mile buffer zone in south Lebanon, though pockets of Hezbollah resistance remained.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz told top army officers to begin preparing for a push to the Litani, about 20 miles north of the border, a move that would require Cabinet approval. Peretz vowed his forces would complete “the whole mission” of driving guerrilla fighters out of missile range, a defiant response to the Hezbollah leader’s threat to launch missiles into Israel’s largest city.
Israeli airstrikes destroyed four key bridges after dawn, severing Beirut’s final major connection to Syria and raising the threat of severe shortages of food, gasoline and medicines within days. The attack in the Christian heartland just north of Beirut killed four civilians and a Lebanese soldier.
Israel said it targeted the bridges to stop the flow of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through Syria.
However, aid workers said the destroyed highway was a vital conduit for much-needed food and supplies, with Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Program calling it Lebanon’s “umbilical cord.”
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