Israel Responds To Hezbollah Strikes
Israeli warplanes attacked the Lebanese town of Qana on Sunday and destroyed the launchers that fired rockets on Haifa that killed three people, the army said.
Jetfighters also demolished a second launching site north of the Lebanese coastal city of Tyre, from which more missiles were launched toward Haifa, said army spokesman Jacob Dallal.
Both strikes came within three hours after the rockets slammed into Israel's third largest city, in a barrage that also wounded some 160 people.
The launcher used on Haifa "was targeted by the IDF tonight and totally destroyed," he said, referring to the Israeli Defense Forces.
Qana was the town Israel attacked on Aug. 3 that killed 28 civilians, many of them children, in an air strike that was widely denounced around the world.
Israel acknowledged that attack was a mistake but accused Hezbollah of shielding its launching sites behind civilians.
Dallal said more than 150 rocket attacks originated in Qana, which he described as a Hezbollah stronghold. Rockets have been hitting Israel at the rate of 200 a day, CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports.
Dallal said the rockets launched on Haifa were long-range Fajr missiles that carried 100 pounds of explosives and is packed with thousands of ball bearings to cause maximum injuries.
Earlier Sunday, 12 Israeli reservists were killed by a Hezbollah rocket that hit on a crowd at the entrance of the communal farm of Kfar Giladi in northern Israel. Half of the nearly 90 Israeli victims in the 26 days of fighting have been civilians killed by missiles, Pizzey reports.
Ten people were killed outright, and two died a few hours later from wounds, said David Ratner, spokesman for Rambam hospital. Five more people were wounded, one seriously, he said.
The Magen David Adom rescue service said all the victims were soldiers, and it was the worst toll from a rocket attack on Israel since the fighting began July 12.
In Other Developments:
The fierce fighting continued despite continuing negotiations over a draft U.N. cease-fire resolution.
Both sides appeared to be aiming to inflict maximum mutual damage in the few days before the resolution is expected to be voted on by the U.N. Security Council.
The U.S. and France agreed Saturday on a draft resolution calling for "a full cessation of hostilities." It marked a significant advance after weeks of stalled diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict.
But getting the two sides — particularly Hezbollah — to sign on will likely require a greater push. Israel has said it won't halt its offensive until Hezbollah rockets are silenced.
"If Israel were to stop its bombing campaign against Hezbollah in return for Hezbollah stopping its Katyusha rockets, it would mean a tie, and a tie in this sort of deadly game, a draw, is actually a victory for the underdog, for Hezbollah," Amir Oren, a Ha'aretz correspondent told CBS News.
For Hezbollah, the resolution would be a tough pill to swallow, particularly language calling for the "unconditional release" of two Israeli soldiers captured by the guerrillas in a cross-border raid July 12. The abduction prompted the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.
Hezbollah and its allies rejected the text, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan reported, saying its terms for a halt in fighting did not address Lebanon's demands. And Sunday, the speaker of Lebanon's Parliament was defiant and angry, outright rejecting the draft of a U.N. cease fire proposal, saying that as it was written, there was nothing in it for Lebanon, Cowan adds.
The plan envisions a second resolution in a week or two that would authorize an international military force for the Israel-Lebanon frontier and the creation of a large buffer zone in southern Lebanon, monitored by the Lebanese army and foreign peacekeepers.
The deployment of the international force is a cornerstone of the U.S.-led Western effort to bring a long-term peace.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stressed the resolution was aimed at stopping the large-scale violence to allow a focus on the underlying problems in the conflict.
"It's the first step, not the only step," she said at a news conference in Crawford, Texas.
"We're trying to deal with a problem that has been festering and brewing in Lebanon now for years and years and years," Rice said.
But, the Bush administration is not moving fast enough to please some leaders of Capitol Hill.
"This is the 26th day of this slaughter," Sen. Chuck Hagel, D-Neb., said on CBS's Face The Nation. "What it's doing – it's driving the hatred in the Middle East deeper and deeper into the fabric of that region. It's going to make it more and more difficult to find that middle ground to start unraveling this and doing the things we need to do to find a cease- fire."
"I've heard the president has not even had a conversation with Prime Minister Olmert, let alone some of the other heads of state in the region," Sen. Chris Dodd, R-Conn., told Bob Schieffer.
"This is almost unprecedented. I can't think of another American president in the last 25 or 30 years, at moments of crisis, that has not been engaged directly and personally with his peers, that is trying to move and cajole those leaders into some sort of a political cease-fire."
Lebanon's parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, who represents the Shiite Islamic militant group in negotiations, said the draft was unacceptable because it would leave Israeli troops in Lebanon and did not deal with Beirut's key demands — a release of prisoners held by Israel and moves to resolve a dispute over a piece of border territory.
"If Israel has not won the war but still gets all this, what would have happened had they won?" Berri said. "Lebanon, all of Lebanon, rejects any talks and any draft resolution" that do not address the Lebanese demands, he said.
The Lebanese government said Saturday that it objected to portions of the draft resolution and demanded some amendments, but an aide to Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said that did not mean a flat rejection.
Hezbollah's two key allies, Iran and Syria, also rejected the resolution — suggesting they backed a continued fight by the guerrillas.
"The United States, which has been supporting the Zionist regime until today, has no right to enter the crisis as a mediator," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a phone conversation with Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Assad said the presence of international troops with extensive power in Lebanon would cause anarchy in the country, according to a report on Ahmadinejad's official Web site.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, on his first visit to Lebanon since Damascus ended a 29-year military presence in its smaller neighbor last year, declared that the U.S.-French cease-fire plan was "a recipe for the continuation of the war" unless Israeli troops withdrew.