Militants Warn of ‘Open War’

Israeli warplanes smashed Hezbollah chief Sheik Hassan Nasrallah’s headquarters Friday, and shortly afterward the militant group vowed to unleash “open war” and crippled an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast.

The rapid exchange of blows marked a sharp escalation in three days of intense fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Four Israeli sailors were missing after the ship was hit by what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described on its website as an unmanned drone packed with explosives. But early today, army spokeswoman Capt. Noa Meir said she could not confirm the report.

“We’re still examining the ship” to determine what the weapon was, she said.

The escalation began at sunset Friday as Israel staged a massive airstrike on the one-story building that housed the living quarters and offices of Nasrallah. He survived, and quickly called Hezbollah’s television station to make a menacing live statement.

“The surprises I promised you will start now. The Israeli war vessels that inflicted damage on our infrastructure ... will burn and sink in front of you,” he said. “This is the start.”

Almost immediately after, the Israeli ship was hit.

With airstrikes intensifying, rhetoric hardening and civilian casualties mounting, Israel and Hezbollah seemed determined Friday to ratchet up the fight. Israel drew up a list of fresh targets, vowing that the strikes would grow even more punishing in coming days.

Israeli officials have threatened to attack Lebanon until Hezbollah releases two Israeli soldiers captured this week in a brazen raid into northern Israel.

In the crowded, predominantly Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that are Hezbollah’s nerve center, intersections, highway overpasses and bridges were blown to pieces Friday. Vast fans of black smoke climbed high into the sky from the Beirut airport, which was bombed for the second day in a row.

The country was under virtual siege, its ports blockaded, its airport crippled and roads and bridges to the borders shattered.

“It was just fire, fire, fire, like hell,” said Ahmed Sebah, 42, a firefighter who was wounded in a missile attack on a bridge in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “Why are they doing this? Does a bridge really make such a difference?”

At least 73 Lebanese have been killed and nearly 200 wounded. In Israel, at least 12 have died -- the eight soldiers killed in the cross-border raid and four civilians since then.

Across a broad swath of northern Israel, thousands of people spent a second day huddled in bomb shelters while Hezbollah guerrillas fired more than 80 rockets. Two Israelis were killed and dozens were injured.

A woman and her 5-year-old grandson died when a Katyusha rocket hit their home in a collective farming community on Mt. Meron, which lies close to the frontier and is also the site of an Israeli military base.

Two other Israelis, a woman in the coastal town of Nahariya and a man in the northern town of Safat, died Thursday in rocket attacks. Both towns were hit hard again Friday.

Roads in the north of the country were largely deserted Friday, and the few pedestrians picked their way through pockets of broken glass and debris.

After capturing the two soldiers, the Shiite Muslim militant group demanded talks with Israel over Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by the Jewish state. Nasrallah vowed to keep the Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips.

He said from the beginning that Hezbollah would meet force with force. And by Friday, talk of negotiation had fallen by the wayside.

“We are going to open war,” Nasrallah warned Israel in his speech. “You have chosen an all-out war with a nation which ... has capability, experience and courage.”

The military said early today that four sailors were still missing after the attack on the warship, that fire had broken out on board and that the vessel’s steering mechanism was disabled, either in the initial strike or by a secondary explosion.

The stricken Israeli ship was to be towed back to the port of Haifa. Meir identified it as a Saar 5 missile ship. A search for the four was still going on early today, both aboard the ship and in the waters off the Lebanese coast, the military said.

The army said a nearby foreign vessel was hit shortly afterward, but it did not identify its nationality.

The possibility of a prolonged, bloody conflict could deepen instability beyond the borders of the two small Mediterranean nations. Such a fight would pit Israel against foes Iran and Syria, Hezbollah’s two main backers, at a time when Iran’s influence has grown mightily. U.S. and Israeli officials have made it clear they hold Iran and Syria responsible for Hezbollah’s actions.

U.S. interests also would be imperiled if Iraqi Shiites, who are linked by blood and belief to Shiites in Lebanon, become further radicalized against the United States, Israel’s most important strategic ally.

Mindful of the danger of regional escalation, President Bush made a round of telephone calls to Arab leaders Friday in an effort to stem the bloodshed. The international community fretted that Israel’s attack was felling too many civilians.

But Bush also repeated that Israel had a right to defend itself, and he pointedly stopped short of calling for a truce. His support for Israel caused friction with other world leaders attending this weekend’s Group of 8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In an emergency session Friday, the United Nations Security Council took no action on Lebanon’s plea to call a cease-fire.

In Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s senior security advisors, meeting before the start of the Jewish Sabbath, approved a new round of military targets.

Israeli media reports, citing senior commanders, said the fresh onslaught in coming days would include sites in densely populated areas. The army said it had dropped more leaflets warning people that they were in danger if they lived close to Hezbollah installations.

“Israel is ready to take whatever measures it deems necessary to protect its citizens from death and injury,” said David Baker, a government spokesman.

Though Israel’s offensive was launched in response to the raid Wednesday that left eight soldiers dead and two in Hezbollah hands, Israeli policymakers spoke openly of a wider goal of bringing the long-hated militia to its knees.

“We had predicted that Hezbollah would break the rules of the game, and we intend to break this organization,” Defense Minister Amir Peretz said. “We don’t intend to end this operation and allow the situation with Hezbollah to return to the way it was several days ago.”

Israel’s army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, put it more bluntly.

“Our intention is to hunt Hezbollah,” he said in Tel Aviv. “This campaign is extensive and intensive, and for now we’ve made Hezbollah its foremost target.” The Lebanese government must take all measures to rein in the group or face an even more devastating onslaught, Halutz said.

“Israel wants to make clear to both greater Beirut and Lebanon that they’ve swallowed a cancer, and have to vomit it up,” he said.

In Lebanon, anxiety mounted. The crammed, tumbledown southern Beirut neighborhood of Hrat Hreik was deserted and bomb-pocked Friday. The streets, usually ringing with the cacophony of taxis, buses and motorbikes, stretched quiet and empty for blocks. Shutters were pulled down tight on apartment buildings; shops were dark behind locked grates.

Only Hezbollah security guards roamed the pavement, walkie-talkies scratching in their hands and machine guns slung across their chests. Jets buzzed overhead; explosions echoed through streets.

The intersections that had been struck looked like surreal still lifes: rusting ladders on the ground, shops blasted open, cars twisted into rubble. The small pink mannequins in a baby clothing shop had been blown up and caught in tangles of fallen wire.

A large, unexploded missile lay by the curb outside Hezbollah’s media offices, just around the corner from a small park with a life-size wooden cutout of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The offices were empty except for the guards, who shooed away a few young men creeping cautiously from their homes to take cellphone pictures of the missile.

“People are begging [Nasrallah] to fight. They want to be human bombs,” said a bearded Hezbollah guard. Standing watch outside the offices, he refused to give his name. “This is the difference between us and them: They fear death and love life. We are believers in another life, and we welcome death.”

Hezbollah had evacuated some of the civilians from the neighborhood, sent out guards to patrol the streets and put out a call from the mosques for blood donations. The government, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.

The Lebanese government is weak and fractious, a newly formed body still finding its footing after decades of civil war and Syrian domination. Lebanese officials have denied knowing in advance about Hezbollah’s plan to capture Israeli soldiers, and objected to Israel’s insistence on holding the entire country responsible.

The concern was echoed by Bush, who urged Israel against weakening the Lebanese government.

“We’re concerned about the fragile democracy in Lebanon,” Bush said at a news conference Thursday, remarks apparently intended as a message to Israel.

Some in Israel also called for calm.

“I think the state of Israel has the full right to defend itself, but the question is, after these two days, how and when and to what degree do we claim this right?” said lawmaker Zehava Galon of the leftist Meretz-Yahad party. “To put it more simply: Is it enough to be in the right, or should we also be smart?”

Speaking at the U.N. Security Council, Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman argued that Israel was responding to an act of war.

In an unusual moment of diplomacy, Gillerman turned to Lebanese special envoy Nouhad Mahmoud next to him and whispered in his ear. When reporters later asked what he had said, Gillerman said he had told Mahmoud that they both wanted the same thing: to eliminate Hezbollah.

“I told him, deep in his heart, he wishes he could be sitting next to me making the same statement because if we succeed, his country will be the beneficiary,” Gillerman said.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Turn in the battle

Fighting in Lebanon escalated dramatically, with Hezbollah reportedly using an unmanned aircraft as a weapon. The group’s headquarters was hit by an Israeli missile. Recent developments:

Lebanon

Beirut: Hezbollah headquarters destroyed, along with the home of the group’s leader; infrastructure and apartments in southern suburbs hit by rockets; airport struck by missiles.

Jiye: Power station fuel tanks attacked.

Chtoura: Bridges on highway to Syria destroyed.

Eastern Bekaa Valley: Television transmission antennas hit.

Israel

Haifa, Safat, Nahariya: Hit by rocket attacks.

At sea

Israeli Saar 5 missile ship hit by what was reportedly an explosives-laden drone, but type of weapon unconfirmed by military. Four sailors missing.

Sources: Associated Press, Times reporting

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Stack reported from Beirut and King from Jerusalem. Times staff writers Maggie Farley at the United Nations and James Gerstenzang in St. Petersburg and special correspondent Rania Abouzeid in Beirut contributed to this report.