Hezbollah rocket barrage kills nine in Israeli city

Lebanese guerrillas fired a relentless barrage of rockets into the northern Israeli city of Haifa today, killing nine people and wounding dozens of others, police in Israel said.

A subsequent attack hit a major street in the city, causing further casualties, they added.

The attack was the worst strike on Israel since violence broke out along the border with Lebanon last week after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert quickly warned there would be “far-reaching consequences” for the attack.

“Nothing will deter us,” he said at the beginning of his government’s weekly Cabinet meeting. “There will be far-reaching consequences in our relations on the northern border and in the area in general.”

Hezbollah guerrillas said they hit the city with Raad-2 and Raad-3 rockets, which have a longer range than the hundreds of Katyusha rockets they had been firing into Israel in recent days.

The group said it intentionally avoided hitting petrochemical installations in Haifa, which houses Israel’s major oil refinery, according to a statement read on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station.

“But the next time, it (Hezbollah) will not spare anything in Haifa and its surroundings,” the statement said.

Footage shown on Israel’s Channel 10 showed smoke rising over Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, and air raid sirens could be heard wailing.

The attacks came after Israeli warplanes bombed a major power station south of Beirut.

Hezbollah said in a statement read on it Al-Manar television station that it fired dozens of rockets at Haifa at 9am local time. Rockets continued to pound the city after the initial attack, landing in major urban areas.

“After the enemy continued all night their destructive shelling of (Beirut’s) southern suburb and other areas … the resistance movement fired dozens of rockets on Haifa,” the Hezbollah statement said.

Some of the rockets landed near the oil refinery, gas storage tanks and the train station, Israeli police and emergency officials said.

The dead were all at a train station in Haifa, where a rocket hit a storage room, police said.

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said at least nine people were killed in the attacks.

Rockets fired by Lebanese militants also hit Acco and Nahariya and several other northern towns, and residents of the region were told to head to bomb shelters.

The rocket attacks came after a relatively quiet night along Israel’s northern border, which had been pounded by hundreds of rockets fired from Lebanon in recent days.

Israel deployed a Patriot missile battery in Haifa on Saturday to protect the city against surface-to-surface missiles. But the defence system is useless to stop the rocket fire.

Hezbollah guerillas hit Haifa with a rocket for the first time ever Thursday. Israel responded by stepping up its air strikes in Lebanon, which it began last week after militants captured. The attack on Haifa raised Israel’s death toll from the fighting to at least 24, 11 soldiers and 13 civilians.

During his response to the Haifa attack, Olmert said that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon was not intended to harm civilians.

Since the fighting began five days ago, 106 Lebanese were killed in Israeli air strikes, most of them civilians.

“We want to live our lives in peace and in good neighbourly relations,” he said. “Unfortunately, there are those who misinterpret our wishes for peace in the wrong way. We have to no intention of bending in the face of these threats.”

“Our enemies are trying to disrupt the lifestyle in Israel. They will fail,” he sais.