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Two Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon fighting

Posted on: Thursday, 20 July 2006, 17:38 CDT

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)

Source: REUTERS

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