Israel hits Beirut airport again in widening Lebanon campaign

A Lebanese woman inspects a shop destoyed by air strikes in southern Beirut. Picture / Reuters

BEIRUT - Israel struck Beirut airport again on Friday and bombed Lebanese roads, power supplies and communication networks in a widening campaign after Hizbollah guerrillas seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight.

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Hizbollah, which wants to trade its captives for prisoners held in Israel, has showered rockets across the frontier in its fiercest bombardment since 1996 when Israel launched a 17-day blitz against southern Lebanon and Hizbollah.

Israeli aircraft fired two rockets into a runway at Beirut's international airport, witnesses and security sources said.

The airport has been shut since Israel, which ended its 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, bombed its runways on Thursday.

Israeli warplanes blasted the main Beirut-Damascus highway, tightening an air, sea and land blockade of Lebanon, and bombed targets in Beirut's teeming Shi'ite Muslim suburbs, killing three people and wounding 40, security sources said.

Their deaths brought to 60 the number of people, almost all civilians, killed in Lebanon since Israel's campaign began.

New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has advised against all travel to Lebanon.

It said there was "extreme risk" to New Zealanders' safety because of the escalating tensions and those in Lebanon should avoid the southern suburbs of Beirut and areas south of the capital.

The Israeli military said Hizbollah had fired more than 130 missiles into Israel in 48 hours, killing two civilians and wounding over 100. It said Hizbollah's main security compound in southern Beirut had been among targets hit on Friday. Reuters reporters said they could see no sign of damage at the site.

Black smoke billowed from a burning fuel depot at the Jiyyeh power plant south of Beirut and from fuel tanks bombed at the capital's airport on Thursday evening. Israeli ships shelled the coastal road near Jiyyeh, witnesses said. Air raids struck several mobile telephone relay stations in eastern Lebanon.

Israeli jets also struck a Palestinian guerrilla base in eastern Lebanon. The pro-Syrian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command said there were no casualties.

Israel holds Lebanon responsible for the actions of Hizbollah, a Syrian- and Iranian-backed Islamist group which has members in parliament and in the mainly anti-Syrian cabinet.

The fragile Beirut government, too divided to disarm the Shi'ite faction that effectively controls south Lebanon, has urged the UN Security Council to call on Israel to halt its onslaught when the top world body meets later on Friday.

But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his security chiefs opted on Thursday evening to ramp up the bombardment.

That followed two unprecedented missile strikes on the port of Haifa, blamed by Israel on Hizbollah, which denied it had fired on the city, 30km from the Lebanese border.

No one was hurt in the attack.

The violence in Lebanon coincided with an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip launched last month to try to retrieve another captured soldier and halt Palestinian rocket fire.

The army said on Friday it had pulled out of the central Gaza Strip, which it entered as part of the offensive. It said its forces had targeted an office of the ruling Hamas militant group in the northern Gaza Strip and a bridge overnight.

Troops fired a tank shell at a vehicle, killing one Palestinian and wounding another, Palestinian medics said.

The violence in Lebanon is the fiercest since 1996, when Israeli troops still occupied southern Lebanon, and fears are rising it could spread to Syria, which backs Hizbollah along with its ally Iran.

The UN Security Council was to meet later on Friday but the United States has already vetoed a council resolution put forward by Qatar on behalf of Arab states that called on Israel to immediately end its military incursion in Gaza.

- REUTERS