Israel continues to pound south Lebanon

Smoke rises from Jarjoua village during Israeli air strikes in south Lebanon. Picture / Reuters

BEIRUT - Israel pummelled south Lebanon with air and artillery strikes overnight, but opted against launching a major invasion in pursuit of Hizbollah guerrillas.

Hizbollah fired 48 rockets into northern Israel on Thursday, wounding four people, an Israeli police spokesman said.

In Lebanon, bodies lay in the streets in some isolated border villages, where the fighting has trapped terrified civilians, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's security cabinet decided to stick with a strategy of air strikes and limited ground incursions rather than mounting a full-scale invasion.

It convened a day after nine Israeli soldiers were killed in Lebanon, the army's heaviest one-day loss in the 16-day-old war.

Israeli forces have been trying to push Hizbollah back from the border and end rocket attacks since the Shi'ite group captured two soldiers in a raid on July 12, but the army is wary of getting bogged down by guerrilla warfare in south Lebanon.

The United States has given Israel a green light to pursue its assault on Lebanon by refusing to call for an immediate cease-fire or to let the UN Security Council do so.

France said it was disappointed an international conference in Rome had failed to call for an immediate end to hostilities and urged UN Security Council foreign ministers to meet early next week to work on a cease-fire resolution.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who visited Beirut and Jerusalem this week, said she would return to the Middle East if she thought she could clinch a lasting peace in Lebanon.

Her comments, made on arrival in Malaysia for a regional security conference, underlined Washington's intention not to press Israel to stop fighting until Hizbollah guerrillas backed by Iran and Syria have been brought under control.

"I am willing and ready to go back to the Middle East at any time that I think we can move towards a sustainable cease-fire that can end the violence," Rice told a news conference.

With anger among Arabs and Muslims mounting over Israel's offensives in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, al Qaeda declared it would not stand by, but did not say how it would respond.

"How can we remain silent while watching bombs raining on our people?" asked al Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri in a videotape on Al Jazeera television. He urged Muslims to fight.

At least 434 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Lebanon, where a humanitarian crisis has exploded. Fifty-one Israelis, including 18 civilians, have been killed.

An ICRC report said villagers were running short of water, food and medicine, displaced people were huddled in schools and patients stranded in hospitals.

"Dead bodies had not been removed from the streets and others were still buried in rubble," the ICRC said.

Israeli planes destroyed radio masts north of Beirut and hit three trucks carrying relief goods in east Lebanon, killing two drivers, security sources said. Warplanes and artillery blasted targets in the mainly Shi'ite south, killing a motorcyclist.

Israeli media said Hizbollah rockets landed in the border town of Kiryat Shmona as well as Safed, Rosh Pina, Nahariya and the border town of Shlomi.

Hizbollah has fired more than 1400 rockets into northern Israel since the conflict erupted following a cross-border raid into Israel by the Shi'ite militia on July 12, in which two soldiers were abducted.

Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to take the war deeper into Israel, suggesting there could be strikes south of the city of Haifa. Such use of longer-range missiles would likely trigger massive Israeli retaliation.

- REUTERS