WORLD / Middle East
Israel halts air attacks
(AP)
Updated: 2006-07-31 08:39
Israel agreed Sunday to halt air attacks on south Lebanon for 48 hours in
the face of widespread outrage over an airstrike that killed at least 56
Lebanese, mostly women and children, when it leveled a building where
they had taken shelter.
A rescue worker puts the body of a dead girl on a gurney after Israeli
air strikes on the southern Lebanese village of Qana. Israel agreed to
temporarily halt air strikes in south Lebanon a day after 52 people were
killed, many of them sleeping children, when Israeli warplanes bombarded
the Lebanese village of Qana, triggering global outrage and warnings of
retribution for alleged "war crimes".[AFP]
The announcement of the pause in overflights, made by State Department
spokesman Adam Ereli appeared to reflect American pressure on Israel.
Ereli, who was in Israel with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said
Israel reserved the right to hit targets if it learns that attacks are
being prepared against them.
An Israeli government official confirmed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
agreed to a 48-hour halt in airstrikes on Lebanon. The official was
speaking on condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to talk to
reporters,
The stunning bloodshed in Lebanon earlier on Sunday prompted Rice to cut
short her Mideast mission and intensified world demands on Washington to
back an immediate end to the fighting.
The attack in the village of Qana brought Lebanon's death toll to more
than 510 and pushed American peace efforts to a crucial juncture, as fury
at the United States flared in Lebanon. The Beirut government said it
would no longer negotiate over a U.S. peace package without an
unconditional cease-fire. U.N. chief Kofi Annan sharply criticized world
leaders, implicitly Washington for ignoring his previous calls for a stop.
In Qana, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls,
dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in out of the
mangled wreckage of the three-story building. Bodies were carried in
blankets.
Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered in the
house for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border
area when the 1 a.m. strike brought the building down.
"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything
was black," said 13-year-old Noor Hashem, who survived, although her five
siblings did not. She was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose
wife and five children also died.
Israel apologized for the deaths but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas, saying
they had fired rockets into northern Israel from near the building.
Before Ereli's announcement, Olmert said the campaign to crush Hezbollah
would continue, telling Rice it could last up to two weeks more.
"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this
morning," he told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a
participant. "If necessary, it will be broadened without hesitation."
The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting to debate a
resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, a step Washington has stood
nearly alone at the council in refusing until the disarmament of
Hezbollah is assured.
In a jab at the United States, Annan told the council in unusually frank
terms that he was "deeply dismayed" his previous calls for a halt were
ignored. "Action is needed now before many more children, women and men
become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control," he said.
After news of the deaths emerged, Rice telephoned Lebanese Prime Minister
Fuad Saniora and said she would stay in Jerusalem to continue work on a
peace package, rather than make a planned Sunday visit to Beirut. Saniora
said he told her not to come.
Rice decided to cut her Mideast trip short and return to Washington on
Monday morning.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who only days earlier gave his support
to the U.S. stance, struck a more urgent note Sunday, saying Washington
must work faster to put together the broader deal it seeks.
"We have to get this now. We have to speed this whole process up," Blair
said. "This has got to stop and stop on both sides."
But Saniora said talk of a larger peace package must wait until the
firing stops.
"We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of
innocent people," he told a gathering of foreign diplomats. But he
underlined that Lebanon stands by ideas for disarming Hezbollah that it
put forward earlier this week and that Rice praised.
He took a tough line and hinted that any Hezbollah response to the
airstrike at the village of Qana was justified.
"As long as the aggression continues there is response to be exercised,"
he said, praising Hezbollah's leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.
Hezbollah said on its Al-Manar television that it will retaliate.
"The massacre at Qana will not go unanswered," the group said.
The largest toll from a single Israeli strike in past weeks was around a
dozen and Sunday's dramatic deaths stunned Lebanese. Heightening the
anger were memories of a 1996 Israeli artillery bombardment that hit a
U.N. base in Qana, killing more than 100 Lebanese who had taken refuge
from fighting. That attack sparked an international outcry that forced a
halt to an Israeli offensive.
In Beirut, some 5,000 protesters gathered in downtown Beirut, at one
point attacking a U.N. building and burning American flags, shouting,
"Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv" and chanting for Hezbollah's ally
Syria to hit Israel. Another protest by about 50 people on a road leading
to the U.S. Embassy forced security forces to close the road there.
Images of children's bodies tangled in the building's ruins, being
carried away on blankets or wrapped in plastic sheeting were aired on
Arab news networks. The dead included at least 34 children and 12 women,
Lebanese security officials said.
In Qana, Khalil Shalhoub was helping pull out the dead until he saw his
brother's body taken out on a stretcher. "Why are they killing us? What
have we done?" he screamed.
Israel said Hezbollah had fired more than 40 rockets from Qana before the
airstrike, including several from near the building that was bombed.
Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir accused Hezbollah of "using their
own civilian population as human shields."
It said residents of the village had been warned to leave, but Shalhoub
and others in Qana said residents were too terrified to take the road out
of the village. The road to the nearest main city, Tyre, is lined with
charred wreckage and smashed buildings from repeated Israeli bombings.
More than 750,000 Lebanese have fled their homes in the fighting. But
many thousands more are still believed holed up in the south, taking
refuge in schools, hospitals or basements of apartment buildings amid the
fighting, many of them too afraid to flee on roads heavily hit by Israeli
strikes.
Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr disputed allegations that Hezbollah
was firing missiles from Qana.
"What do you expect Israel to say? Will it say that it killed 40 children
and women?" he told Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV station.
On Thursday, the Israeli military's Al-Mashriq radio that broadcasts into
southern Lebanon warned residents that their villages would be "totally
destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. Leaflets with similar
messages were dropped in some areas Saturday.
Israel on Sunday also launched its second significant ground incursion
into southern Lebanon. Before dawn, Israeli forces backed by heavy
artillery fire crossed the border and clashed with Hezbollah guerrillas
in the Taibeh Project area, about two miles inside Lebanon.
Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed and claimed eight Israeli
soldiers also died. The Israeli military said only that four soldiers
were wounded when guerrillas hit a tank with a missile.
Some 460 Lebanese, mostly civilians, had been killed in the campaign
through Saturday, according to the Health Ministry before the attacks on
Qana. Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died, and Hezbollah rocket
attacks on northern Israel have killed 18 civilians, Israeli authorities
said.
The U.N. World Food Program canceled an aid convoy's trip to the
embattled south after the Israeli military denied safe passage, the group
said in a statement. The six-truck convoy had been scheduled to bring
relief supplies to Marjayoun.
Many in the Arab world and Europe see the United States as holding the
key to the conflict, believing that Israel would have to stop its
offensive, sparked by Hezbollah's July 12 abduction of two Israeli
soldiers if its top ally Washington insisted it had to.
The United States has balked at doing so, saying any cease-fire must
ensure real and lasting peace.
Rice had come to the Mideast with a peace package that would call for the
disarming of Hezbollah, release of Israel's soldiers, deployment of a
U.N.-mandated force in south Lebanon and the establishment of a buffer
zone along the border.
Hopes had been raised earlier in the week when Hezbollah signed onto a
Lebanese government peace plan that contained some similar items though
it left disarmament and deployment of the international force for later
and dependent on conditions. Chief among those conditions was that Israel
release Lebanese in its jails and agree to resolve a dispute over a piece
of land it holds claimed by Lebanon.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud lashed out at the United States, saying
that if it was "serious, it can make Israel cease firing ... They
(Americans) are still giving the green light to Israel to continue its
aggression against Lebanon."
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