Israelis Storm Shia Village in Search for Soldiers

Israeli troops and tanks stormed this southern Lebanon village Friday after being ambushed by Muslim guerrillas on the fifth day of Israel’s huge sweep to find two captured soldiers, U.N. officials said.

A military source in Tel Aviv said Israeli soldiers entered Kfar Dounine to conduct searches and were fired on by guerrillas in the village.

The Israelis opened up with tank and machine-gun fire and swept into the Shia Muslim village, which is five miles north of Israel’s so-called “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

U.N. Soldier Wounded

Timur Goksel, spokesman for the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, told reporters that a Ghanaian soldier was wounded. Other casualties were not known.

Kfar Dounine is headquarters of the Ghanaian battalion attached to the nine-nation U.N. force.

“There was a lot of shooting in the village,” Goksel said. “Tanks and armored personnel carriers moved into Kfar Dounine.”

Reporters were unable to get into the village when the Israelis sealed it off, but explosions and heavy machine-gun fire were heard and plumes of smoke rose above the hamlet.

Goksel said 70 men were herded into Kfar Dounine’s mosque for interrogation as Israeli troops searched the village house-to-house.

U.N. and Lebanese security sources estimated that 1,500 Israelis with Centurion and Merkava tanks, helicopter gunships and armored vehicles were combing 16 villages for the missing men and their captors.

Ultimatum Ignored

An anonymous telephone caller claiming to represent the Islamic Resistance movement, an alliance of fundamentalist Shia Muslims, dominated by the pro-Iranian Hezbollah (Party of God), said Wednesday the group killed one of the captured soldiers when Israel ignored an ultimatum to withdraw. He did not identify which soldier had been killed and said a photograph proving the death would be produced on Thursday. No photograph was made public.

In an interview with Israeli television on Friday, Lt. Gen. Moshe Levy, the Israeli military chief of staff, said that his troops had been withdrawn from a large part of the search area, “including the town of Tibnine and its surrounding area, as a result of a development during the course of the searches.”

He did not say what the development was and gave no indication of whether Israel had news of the missing men.

On Friday, Hezbollah’s weekly newspaper, Al Ahd, published what it said was a photograph of the two Israelis, both wounded in a Monday ambush, lying on beds in a hide-out. It said the photo was taken before Wednesday’s reported killing.

The push is the biggest Israel has mounted since it withdrew the bulk of its forces from Lebanon last June after three years of occupation.