Air strikes target guerrilla hideout

ISRAELI air strikes reduced entire apartment buildings to rubble and plunged parts of the Lebanese capital of Beirut into darkness in a ferocious response to a Hezbollah attack.

After yesterday’s attack on Haifa, Israeli warplanes bombarded the guerrilla group’s headquarters in south Beirut again with a barrage of missiles, sending palls of smoke over the crowded residential area. More missiles shook the city in the afternoon, targeting the same area.

Casualties continued to mount. Police and residents said 41 people died in the past 24 hours, nearly all civilians, raising to 148 the five-day death toll in Lebanon. In Israel, 23 have died, including 15 civilians killed by rocket fire.

Beirut, a city of 1.5 million people, was emptying as residents fled to the relative safety of the mountains and the eastern Bekaa Valley — though in the past 24 hours Israel expanded its strikes to the entire country.

The damage in southern Beirut — a teeming Shi’ite district where Hezbollah’s main headquarters are located — was colossal after Israel unleashed its worst bombardment yet overnight, before the Haifa strike.

A series of 18 explosions rocked the city before sunrise.

Al-Manar television, Hezbollah’s main voice to the world, was knocked off the air for eight minutes by the pounding.

Press officer Ibrahim Farhat said two employees were very lightly injured and the building was “totally destroyed”. He refused to say how the station was coping and from where it was broadcasting, for security reasons.

The Jiyeh power plant, on Beirut’s southern outskirts, was in flames after being hit, cutting electricity to many areas in the capital and south Lebanon. Firefighters pleaded for help from residents after saying they didn’t have enough water to put out the blaze.

Around the Hezbollah compound in the southern district — known as Dahiyah — entire blocks were littered with heaps of rubble and twisted metal, and fires raged.

One building collapsed on its side like a sandwich, and other apartment buildings were reduced to rubble or had their upper floors collapsed.

Furniture pieces, blankets, mattresses, clothes and soft toys were scattered on the streets. A copy of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, lay in the street with its dusty pages fluttering until it was reverently lifted and kissed by a Hezbollah gunman.

Dahiyah was empty except for guerrillas and a few residents who returned to their homes to collect belongings before fleeing.

“We want to sleep on our own pillows in the shelter,” Mariam Shihabiyah, a 39-year-old mother of five said as she emerged from scrounging a few supplies from her apartment in a badly damaged building.

“I just want them and our clothes, that’s all ... can you believe what happened to Dahiyah?”

Hezbollah denied Israeli media reports that its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, had been wounded.

In south Lebanon, eight members of a Lebanese family, three relatives, their Sri Lankan maid and an Iraqi worker were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the village of Jibsheet, residents said.

Four other people were killed in the village of Zibedine, residents said.

The government appealed to residents not to hoard food, especially bread, assuring them that supplies in the country could last months. Throughout the capital, most stores were shut yesterday, and traffic was much lighter than usual even for a weekend morning.