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REPORTING FROM LEBANON

Strikes reach farther

Israel destroys key bridges north of Beirut while Hezbollah rockets land deeper across the border

BY MATTHEW MCALLESTER | Newsday Staff Correspondent
August 5, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israel further isolated Lebanon's capital city Friday by destroying bridges on the main north-south highway - the last relatively safe main road out of Beirut to neighboring Syria. Hezbollah, meanwhile, launched its deepest rocket strike yet into Israel.

Three rockets landed near Hadera, 50 miles south of Lebanon's border and 30 miles north of Tel Aviv, Israeli police said. Nearly 190 rockets were fired on other Israeli towns, killing three civilians.

An Israeli air strike killed at least 28 farm workers at a farm in al-Qaa, near the Syrian border, as they loaded peaches and plums onto trucks, news services reported, quoting security officials and a foreman at the site. Israel said it was looking for weapons caches.

Attacks in Beirut killed five civilians, according to the Lebanese Red Cross. A Lebanese soldier also died in an air strike. Two Israeli soldiers were killed by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile, the army said, and a third soldier was reported to have died later.

More Israeli air strikes turned two southern Lebanese houses to rubble Friday, burying more than 50 people, security officials said. That number could not be confirmed and the number of dead was not known.

The bombings of the four bridges on the north-south road were Israel's first major attacks on the Christian heartland north of Beirut. They left secondary roads as the only effective way to get supplies, aid and people into and out of the city. While many residents in the south have fled, central Beirut has not been a target and is still widely populated. Aid officials, Lebanese leaders and Beirutis said they were concerned the destruction of the highway would make life increasingly hard.

"Now we have a big problem," said Rashid Abi Younis, 42, a house painter who lives close to the Fidar Bridge in the Halat neighborhood, about 15 miles north of Beirut. He stood staring at a gap where a highway had been until the Israelis bombed it at around 8 a.m. Friday. It looked to have been about 200 yards long, and now was a blanket of gray rubble on the valley floor below.

People stood on the precipice of the road's edges and gazed down at other people clambering over the ruins. "They found a man there," Abi Younis said, pointing at a torn section of concrete and twisted rebar. "He was jogging under the bridge."

Cars and trucks that normally would speed north on the highway were detouring on a road nearer the Mediterranean coast. Beirut's gas stations already have lengthening lines of customers.

Officials fear the city and country will become all but cut off from the outside world.

"The Israeli enemy's bombing of bridges and roads is aimed at tightening the blockade on the Lebanese, cutting communications between them and starving them," Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said in a statement issued Friday.

"Our attacks last night were aimed at stopping the flow of weapons to Hezbollah," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman.

Throughout the day, the roughly 10,000 Israeli troops who have invaded Lebanon battled Hezbollah guerrillas in villages in the south of the country. Partly because of the Israeli army's reluctance to permit foreign reporters to accompany them into Lebanon, it has been hard to determine independently how far Israeli soldiers have pushed into the country. Israeli officials have said they may continue as far north as the Litani River, roughly 20 miles north of Israel.

At least 530 Lebanese and 75 Israelis have died in more than three weeks of war.

On its other front, meanwhile, an Israeli air strike early Saturday in the southern Gaza town of Rafah killed at least two Palestinians and wounded five others, officials said. The Israeli army said its aircraft fired at several armed Palestinians; a local doctor said the dead were civilians.

This story was supplemented with wire reports.

Related topic galleries: Defense, Transportation, Vehicles, Armed Conflicts, Armed Forces, Road Transportation, Religious Conflicts

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