Despite a draft UN ceasefire resolution that was cobbled together over the weekend, violence escalated in the Middle East yesterday with 15 Israelis killed in the deadliest day of Hizbullah rocket attacks since fighting erupted on July 12th. In Lebanon, at least 19 people were killed in Israeli air strikes on the south of the country.
While Israeli officials expressed quiet satisfaction over the draft resolution, which was hammered out by US and French officials, Hizbullah rejected its terms, especially the clause stating that Israeli forces could remain on the ground in south Lebanon until the arrival of an international peacekeeping force.
A Katyusha rocket landed yesterday in the middle of a group of Israeli reservists who had gathered at Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz in northern Israel, killing 12 of them and wounding another 12. Blood stained the ground as bodies, covered by blankets, lay on stretchers. Nearby, a forest burst into flames, sending a pall of thick smoke over the kibbutz.
Kibbutz members said the reserve soldiers had ignored orders to take cover when the siren sounded to warn of incoming rockets. "Those that were close to the explosion were torn to pieces," said one kibbutz member. "It was a bloodbath."
Toward evening, missiles slammed into the northern port city of Haifa, crushing a house, killing three people and wounding dozens. Two other houses were partially demolished in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighbourhood. Five people were pulled out alive from the rubble of one of the collapsed homes.
The deaths yesterday brought to 94 the number of Israelis killed since the fighting erupted, 36 of them civilians and 58 soldiers.
Hizbullah said the attack on Haifa was in response to an Israeli aerial bombardment a few hours earlier on the Shia-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut. In Ansar, a village near the southern town of Nabatiyeh, four people were killed yesterday in an Israeli air strike when missiles flattened their home, Lebanese security officials reported.
Israeli planes also targeted the city of Tyre, from where missiles have been fired at Haifa. Witnesses said one man was killed as he sat on a bench drinking coffee in the city. The driver of a van carrying bread out of Tyre was killed when he was hit by a missile fired from an Israeli drone. There were also reports of two civilians being killed when a missile hit a pick-up truck ahead of a UN convoy on the way to Tyre.
The deaths brought to over 750 the number of Lebanese civilians killed since the fighting erupted. Lebanese officials say that in some villages not all the bodies have been discovered and that the real death toll is more than 900.
With the death toll having risen sharply in Israel yesterday, politicians and commentators began speculating over whether the government might expand the ground operation under way in south Lebanon in an effort to push Hizbullah's short-range rockets out of range of northern Israel.
The sudden escalation in violence came just a day after the US and France announced that they had reached an agreement on a draft UN ceasefire resolution. Early yesterday, Israeli officials had voiced satisfaction over the terms of the resolution, pointing out that it allowed Israel to stay in south Lebanon until an international peace-keeping force arrived, allowed the Israeli army to respond to Hizbullah attacks and called for an arms embargo on the Shia group.
But some Israeli observers pointed out that if the army remains for an extended period in Lebanon as it waits for an international force, its soldiers will increasingly become targets for Hizbullah fighters.