Israel pounds Lebanon as casualties mount

By Lin Noueihed

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Israel pounded Lebanon from the air on
Friday in its bloody 10-day-old assault against Hizbollah, but
the guerrilla group insisted it would only free two Israeli
soldiers it is holding as part of a prisoner swap.

As the evacuation of thousands of foreigners from Beirut
proceeded unhindered, four Israeli troops were killed in fierce
battles with Hizbollah guerrillas inside Lebanon on Thursday,
the Israeli army said.

Israel said two of its helicopters collided near the
Lebanese border, killing a pilot and injuring three crewmen.

Hizbollah said it lost two of its fighters in the clashes,
which occurred just inside Lebanon near where Hizbollah killed
two Israeli soldiers on Wednesday.

Elite Israeli troops have been launching small-scale raids
in Lebanon to try to stop Hizbollah firing rockets into Israel.

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

Its campaign has killed at least 312 people in Lebanon, the
vast majority civilians, and displaced half a million.
Thirty-four Israeli troops and civilians have been killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the war against
Hizbollah would continue “until we reach a point where the
marginal usefulness that is building to continue the military
operation will not be worth the price.”

Israeli jets bombed Hizbollah strongholds in Beirut’s
southern suburbs, the eastern Bekaa Valley and southern
Lebanon, around sunrise on Friday. There was no immediate word
on casualties.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan delivered a series of
proposals to the Security Council on Thursday but the United
States, which is key to any plan, rejected a ceasefire even
before the U.N. leader met Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
at a private dinner in New York.

Rice will be briefed on Friday by a three-man mission Annan
sent to the Middle East and on which he based his ideas for an
end to fighting and a peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.
She is expected to travel to the region next week.

DEFIANT HIZBOLLAH

Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said no amount of
international pressure would deflect the guerrilla group from
its demand that the Jewish state agree to a prisoner swap.

“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.

Nasrallah, whose whereabouts are unknown, said Israeli
military assertions that half of Hizbollah’s capabilities had
been destroyed so far as “wrong and nonsense.”

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz has raised the
possibility of a bigger ground offensive into Lebanon. So far
the campaign has been mainly in the form of air strikes and
limited, temporary incursions.

Nasrallah warned against such an escalation and said
Hizbollah’s rockets could still reach Israel even if its
fighters were pushed back from the border.

“A land invasion will be a disaster for the Israeli army, a
disaster for their tanks, officers and soldiers,” he said.

A 40-strong U.S. Marine force landed in Lebanon on Thursday
to evacuate to Cyprus about 1,200 stranded Americans.

It 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.

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 shelling against a Palestinian home in the Gaza
Strip killed a Hamas militant and four relatives, including two
children, sources in the governing Islamist group and medics
said.

Israel’s Gaza offensive, launched on June 28, has killed
about 115 Palestinians, half of them militants.

(Additional Reporting by Beirut, Jerusalem and Dubai
bureaux)