12 Killed, 25 Injured in Israeli Raids on Guerrillas in Lebanon

Israeli jets blasted four guerrilla bases of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah on Thursday. Police said 12 people were killed and 25 wounded on the third day of clashes between Shiite Muslim rebels and Israelis.

It was the heaviest single-day casualty toll from Israeli raids this year. Police said the dead included a housewife, her teen-age son and a 9-year-old girl. The woman’s husband, two other sons and two neighbors, including a 5-year-old, were wounded.

The rest of the casualties were guerrillas, police said. Six guerrillas were killed and 18 were wounded in a morning raid on a Hezbollah training base near the village of Janta in eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, 75 miles north of the Israeli border.

Three more guerrillas died in an afternoon raid on Dardghaya in a U.N.-policed area in southern Lebanon, police said. Israeli planes fired three rockets into a house used by Hezbollah in the village six miles north of the Israeli-occupied “security zone” in southern Lebanon. The three civilians were killed by a rocket that crashed into their home.

Thursday’s air raids came two days after Hezbollah guerrillas attacked a military outpost in Israel’s so-called “security zone” in south Lebanon. A militiaman of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army was killed and four others were captured.

In Beirut, Lebanon’s foreign minister, Faris Bouez, summoned American Ambassador Ryan Crocker to express Lebanon’s “alarm over Israeli attacks deep in Lebanese territory.” The strike on Janta was Israel’s deepest in Lebanon this year.