Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/world/middleeast/30cnd-mideast.html
July 30, 2006
Rice Postpones Lebanon Trip After Israeli Strikes Kill 54
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and CHRISTINE HAUSER [israel’s 2-front war] [began around 7-12-06] [Israel has encountered fierce fighting from Hezbollah] [perhaps unanticipated] [Hezbollah has conitued to rain down rockets deeper and deeper into Israel: noy between Haifa and Tel Aviv] [rice] [state] [rice had dinner with PM Olmert but has now postponed anything else due to a huge counter strike by Israel] [*************] [in today’s externan and govt] [***************]
QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — A series of Israeli airstrikes in this small mountain town today killed dozens of people in the deadliest single attack in the war here so far, prompting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to postpone a trip to Lebanon, [*************]where she had been due to hold talks with government officials nearly three weeks into the conflict.
At least 54 people were killed, including 37 children, in the attack in Qana, news agencies reported. Rescue workers and neighbors worked frantically to find survivors among the wreckage of a house, where two large extended families were hiding in a garage. [***********]Six small children, their mouths open and full of dirt, were brought out and laid on stretchers.
“I felt as if I was turning around, and the earth was going up, and I was going into the earth,” said Mohamed Chaloub, a father of five who was thrown into a doorway and managed to escape. All five of his children, including a 2-year-old child, were killed. His wife, sister and aunt were also killed.
Responding to the strikes on Qana, the White House urged Israel today to take more care to avoid civilian casualties in Lebanon. It said that Ms. Rice was working to arrange the conditions for a “sustainable” halt to the violence. [*************]
The strikes on Qana came after Ms. Rice returned to Israel on Saturday evening to press for a substantive agreement that could lead to a more rapid cease-fire and the insertion of an international force along the Lebanese border with Israel. [***********]
Ms. Rice, on her way back to the region from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, had praised the Lebanee government, which includes two Hezbollah ministers, for agreeing on the outlines of a possible cease-fire package. [***********]
But she canceled a visit to Beirut, Lebanon, today after the Qana strikes. Ms. Rice spoke to the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, and told him that she felt that “this would not be the day for her to come to Beirut,” according to R. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs. [******************]
“She felt she had work to do in Israel,” he told CNN’s Late Edition. [**********]
While there has been a sense that President Bush, after his meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, had suddenly decided to give Israel a shorter period in which to attack Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said in a statement today that Israel was not “rushing in” to a cease-fire before Israel had achieved its goals. [***********]
Mr. Olmert said today that Israel regretted the death of civilians in Qana, where he said Hezbollah had fired rockets at Kiryat Shmona and Afula. [*********]
The Israeli government said in a statement on its Foreign Ministry’s Web site that the Israeli Army had attacked missile launch sites in the area of Qana, from where it said hundreds of missiles were launched towards the Israeli city of Nahariya and the communities in the western Galilee. [**********]
Mr. Burns said Ms. Rice supported the Lebanese government and wanted to see it strengthened, especially by extending its sovereignty down to the southern border with Israel, a region where Hezbollah had become a “state within a state”.
“Obviously, what happened today in Qana is a tragedy and we hope very, very much this kind of incident will not be repeated in the future,” he said. “But Israel does have a right to defend itself.”
He said attention now needed to be turned to creating a “sustainable” cease-fire.
In Qana, neighbors said that they ran to the house after the first strike, around 1 a.m. local time, and that they heard screams and tried to reach people trapped inside, but the strikes persisted and they could not reach them. Later in the morning, rescue workers pulled bodies of 22 people out of the rubble, but neighbors said more bodies were inside.
The death toll climbed as rescue workers retrieved more people from the collapsed building, carrying limp bodies away on stretchers and in blankets.
Thousands protested in Beirut today and a mob of young men started breaking windows and damaging buildings. Television footage showed crowds of men attacking a United Nations building in the capital.
The Israeli government said Hezbollah had “turned the suburbs of Lebanon into a war front by firing missiles from within civilian areas.” It said 18 Israeli civilians have been killed and over 400 have been wounded by Hezbollah rocket attacks, which have disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of Israeli citizens. [***********]
Israel said residents in Qana and the region had been warned several days in advance to leave the village. [*********************]
The United Nations Security Council met for an emergency session today to discuss Lebanon at the request of Secretary General Kofi Annan. Mr. Annan said he hoped council members would realize “how dangerous the situation is and how it can’t escalate and get out of hand and the urgency for them to act,” Reuters reported. [********]
Ms. Rice is working to draft a Security Council resolution that would allow for the insertion of 15,000 to 20,000 international peacekeepers along the Lebanese border with Israel and along Lebanon’s border with Syria, to prevent the rearming of Hezbollah. The force would also work with the Lebanese Army to enable it to begin patrolling the border itself. [**************]
American officials said they might seek a resolution authorizing the force as early as Wednesday. The United States has been isolated in its refusal to call for an immediate cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon, arguing that the conditions were not ripe for a sustainable cease-fire.
But the international cry for a halt to Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon has been growing, especially after Israel hit a United Nations post, killing four United Nations observers. Israel denied the accusation by Mr. Annan that the post was deliberately hit, but with the death toll in Lebanon reported by officials there to be more 450 people, mostly civilians, pressure on the United States has been growing to give Mr. Olmert an earlier deadline. [*****************]
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Qana, Lebanon, for this article, and Christine Hauser from New York. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company