Two Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon fighting

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Two Israeli soldiers were killed in
fierce battles with Hizbollah guerrillas inside Lebanon on
Thursday and five people were injured when two Israeli
helicopters collided on the ninth day of the conflict.

Hizbollah said it lost two of its fighters in the clashes
and that it had killed four Israeli commandos. Israel said only
two of its soldiers were killed. It gave no details on how the
Apache combat helicopters came to collide.

The clashes occurred just inside Lebanon near an area where
Hizbollah killed two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday. Elite
Israeli troops have launched small raids inside Lebanon to try
to stop Hizbollah firing rockets into Israel.

Israel, which is also waging a three-week-old military
campaign in Gaza, launched its offensive in Lebanon after
Hizbollah captured two soldiers and killed eight in a
cross-border raid on July 12.

Its bombardment has killed at least 312 people in Lebanon,
mainly civilians, and displaced hundreds of thousands. At least
29 Israeli soldiers and civilians have been killed.

The United States, which has exerted no public pressure on
Israel for a ceasefire, said U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice may travel to the Middle East next week to
press for a political solution.

A tiny U.S. Marine force landed in Lebanon to evacuate
about 1,000 Americans stranded with thousands of other
foreigners.

Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said no amount of
international pressure would deflect the guerrilla group from
its repeated demand that Israel agree to a prisoner swap if it
wants to secure the release of the two soldiers.

“If the entire universe came (to pressure Hizbollah) it
will not bring back the Israeli soldiers unless through
indirect negotiations and a prisoner swap,” Nasrallah told Al
Jazeera television in an interview.

Israel told Germany it would welcome any help Berlin could
give in trying to free the two soldiers, but also reiterated
its rejection of Hizbollah’s proposal for a prisoner swap
similar to one mediated by Germany in 2004.

HIZBOLLAH DEFIANT

Nasrallah, whose whereabouts are unknown, said Israel’s
attacks had not damaged the group’s leadership structure.

“All this Israeli talk that they hit 50 percent of our
rocket capabilities and warehouses … is wrong and nonsense,”
he said.

Hizbollah said it had destroyed two Israeli tanks in
house-to-house fighting in the village of Maroun al-Ras. The
group’s al-Manar TV showed captured Israeli equipment,
including a rifle, night-vision binoculars, grenades and a
video camera.

The border clashes have shown the guerrilla group is still
operating relatively freely near the hilly frontier despite a
week of heavy artillery barrages from the Jewish state.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz raised the possibility
of a bigger ground offensive into Lebanon, something senior
generals have also repeatedly said they do not rule out. So far
the offensive has been mainly in the form of air strikes.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for an immediate
end to hostilities, but said a team he had sent to the region
believed a sustainable ceasefire would take time to arrange.

He told the Security Council a quick end to the fighting
would allow aid workers to reach those in need and would “give
diplomacy the chance to work out a practical package of actions
that would provide a lasting solution to the current crisis.”

The landing of the Marines to help evacuate U.S. citizens
was the U.S. military’s first return to Lebanon since it
withdrew in 1984, months after a Shi’ite Muslim suicide bomber
destroyed a Marine barracks killing 241 U.S. service personnel.

About 40 Marines arrived on a beach in a Christian area
north of Beirut at dawn to ferry about 1,200 Americans to
Cyprus as part of efforts to extract U.S. citizens caught in a
war zone like thousands of other foreigners, many of Lebanese
origin.

“We are thankful to leave but our hearts and prayers are
with Lebanon and its people,” said evacuee Mireille Ayoub, 47,
from Los Angeles. “It’s very bad there, unsafe and uncertain.”

France arranged for some 550 French and other European
nationals to embark from the battered southern port of Tire.

Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has coincided with a major
push into the Gaza Strip to retrieve another soldier, seized by
Palestinian gunmen on June 25 and stop cross-border rocket
fire.

Israeli troops killed four Palestinians and wounded 12 in
clashes in a central Gaza refugee camp on Thursday, witnesses
said. An air strike in the same area also killed a Palestinian
militant.

Israel’s Gaza offensive, launched on June 28, has killed
about 110 Palestinians, half of them militants.

(Additional reporting by Alaa Shahine, Lin Noueihed, Nadim
Ladki and Dominic Evans in Beirut, Jerusalem bureau and Yara
Bayoumy in Dubai)