Israeli forces mass on Lebanese border

Israeli troops and tanks massed on Lebanon’s border today and officials said the army was preparing for a limited incursion in Lebanon in the near future.

Israel’s 10-day offensive in Lebanon has mostly been fought by air and naval forces, but Israeli soldiers have conducted several limited operations near the border to target Hezbollah guerrillas and their outposts.

As sunset approached, long lines of tanks, troops, armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers lined up on stretches of a two-lane highway in northern Israel.

Israel pushed ahead with airstrikes and warned people in southern Lebanon to flee as it prepared for a likely ground invasion to set up a deep buffer zone, while thousands of protesters took to the streets across the Muslim world to denounce the bombardment.

Facing warnings of a humanitarian crisis, Israel agreed to allow supplies into Lebanon, which is facing an air and sea blockade. Israel’s UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman said he expected a humanitarian corridor for food, medicine and other supplies to be opened later today or tomorrow.

In a 10th day of conflict, Israeli warplanes battered south Lebanon, particularly a border region where Israeli soldiers and guerrillas fought pitched battles the evening before, followed by smaller clashes today.

A house in the nearby village of Aitaroun was flattened, with 10 people believed inside, but rescue workers could not reach it because of artillery shelling, security officials said.

A UN observation post just inside Israel also was struck in the crossfire between Israeli and Hezbollah forces, but nobody was injured as the Ghanian troops manning the post were inside bomb shelters at the time.

Israel also called up reserve troops today as it appears to have decided that a large-scale incursion is the only way to push Hezbollah back after 10 days of the heaviest bombardment of Lebanon in 24 years.

But mounting civilian casualties and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese could limit the time Israel has to achieve its goals, as international tolerance for the bloodshed and destruction runs out.

An Israeli military radio station warned residents of 12 border villages in southern Lebanon to leave before 2pm today.

It was the latest warning from the Al-Mashriq station, which has said Israeli forces would “act immediately” to halt Hezbollah rocket fire.

At least 335 people have been killed in Lebanon in the Israeli campaign, according to the Lebanese health minister.

Thirty-four Israelis also have been killed, including 19 soldiers.

Lebanese army troops buried 72 people killed in recent bombardments in a mass grave just outside a barracks in the southern city of Tyre. Volunteers put the bodies, many of them children, in wooden coffins with the names of the dead spray-painted on the lids.

The United States has resisted calls to press its ally Israel to halt the fighting, but an administration official said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to depart on Sunday for the Mideast with US plans for a diplomatic solution to the fighting.

It will be first U.S. diplomatic effort on the ground since the Israeli onslaught against Lebanon began.

Thousands of demonstrators across the Muslim world, meanwhile, used today’s Islamic day of prayer to protest Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, urging Sunni-Shiite unity.

Waving giant posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah, thousands gathered after the main weekly religious service at Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Egypt, the most prominent Sunni Muslim institution in the Arab world.

“Sunnis or Shiites (there is) no difference; all together to resist the enemy,” Sameh Ashour, head of the Arab Lawyers’ Union, told the crowd. “Resistance is the solution.”

Two Apache attack helicopters collided in northern Israel near the Lebanon border, killing one air force officer and injuring three others, two seriously, Israeli officials said. Israel’s air force began an investigation.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, meanwhile, said his country was sending urgent aid to Lebanon by air and sea and he called for safe passage.

His comments came a day after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned of a humanitarian crisis in Lebanon and called for an immediate cease-fire, even as he admitted “serious obstacles” stand in the way of even easing the violence.

Annan also denounced Israel for “excessive use of force” and Hezbollah for holding “an entire nation hostage” with its rocket attacks and capturing the Israeli soldiers.

Top Israeli officials met last night to decide how big a force to send in, according to senior military officials. They said Israel won’t stop its offensive until Hezbollah is forced behind the Litani River, 20 miles north of the border – creating a new buffer zone in a region that saw 18 years of Israeli presence since 1982.

Israel has stepped up its small forays over the border in recent days, seeking Hezbollah positions, rocket stores and bunkers. Each time it has faced tough resistance.

Israeli warplanes fired missiles that partially collapsed a suspension bridge linking two steep mountain peaks, part of the Beirut-Damascus highway in central Lebanon. The bridge has been hit several times since the fighting began.

The bombing also set ablaze three buses that had just dropped off passengers in Syria, but the drivers escaped, police said.

Renewed attacks struck the ancient city of Baalbek, a major Hezbollah stronghold, and security officials said two people were killed and 19 wounded. They also attacked Hezbollah strongholds in south Beirut and elsewhere overnight.

Strikes in south Beirut killed one person, and missiles that hit a village near the border with Israel, Aita al-Shaab, killed three, officials said.

Air raid sirens wailed in Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, and at least 11 rockets struck in two barrages. Five people were wounded, with 23 treated for shock.

More rockets were fired elsewhere into northern Israel, the army said, with strikes reported in Rosh Pina, Safed and in several communities near the Sea of Galilee.

Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets from the Lebanese border since fighting began, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis into underground shelters. Eight people in Haifa were killed July 16.

Hezbollah said three of its fighters had been killed in the latest fighting with Israeli troops, bringing to six the number of guerrillas killed since Israel launched the massive military campaign against Lebanon after the militant Shiite Muslim group captured two of its soldiers on July 12.

A UN official said an artillery shell fired by the Israeli military made “a direct hit on the UN position overlooking Zarit.”

An Israeli military spokesman said the rockets were fired by Hezbollah guerrillas at northern Israel. The differing accounts could not immediately be reconciled.

During an Israeli offensive against Lebanon in 1996, artillery blasted a UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 civilians who had taken refuge with the peacekeepers.

The UN mission, which has nearly 2,000 military personnel and more than 300 civilians, is to patrol the border line, known as the Blue Line, drawn by the UN after Israel withdrew troops from south Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation.

Neither side showed any sign of backing down.

The Israeli army issued a call-up of reserves. The exact number of troops was not disclosed, but a military official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the information, said it would be several thousand.

Hezbollah’s leader shrugged off concerns of a stepped-up Israeli onslaught, saying the captive soldiers held by his guerrillas would be freed only as part of a prisoner exchange brokered through indirect negotiations.

Nasrallah spoke in an interview taped yesterday with Al-Jazeera to show he had survived an airstrike in south Beirut that Israel said targeted a Hezbollah leadership bunker.

The guerrillas said the strike only hit a mosque under construction and no one was hurt.

Lebanese streamed north into Beirut and other regions, crowding into schools, relatives’ homes or hotels. Taxi drivers in the south were charging up to £200 per person for rides to Beirut – more than 40 times the usual price. In remote villages of the south, cut off by strikes, residents made their way out over the mountains by foot.

The price of food, medical supplies and petrol rose as much as 500% in parts of Lebanon as the bombardment cut supply routes.

The World Food Programme said estimates of basic food supplies ranged from one to three months.

The UN estimated that a half-million people have been displaced, with 130,000 fleeing to Syria and 45,000 believed to be in need of assistance.

More than 400,000 people – perhaps as many as a half-million – are believed to live south of the Litani, according to Timur Goskel, a former top UN adviser in the south. The river has twice been the border of Israeli buffer zones.

In 1978, Israel invaded up to the Litani to drive back Palestinian guerrillas, withdrawing from most of the south months later.

Israel invaded Lebanon again in a much bigger operation in 1982 when its forces seized parts of Beirut.

It eventually carved out a buffer zone that stopped at the Litani.

That zone was reduced gradually but the Israeli presence lasted for 18 years until 2000, when it withdrew its troops completely.