6 Israel Soldiers Killed; Talks Seem to Be Target

Five Israeli soldiers were killed and five others wounded in southern Lebanon Sunday afternoon, according to Israeli military authorities, when a roadside bomb blew up the truck in which they were traveling. The attack was one of the worst Israeli forces have suffered in the region.

A sixth soldier was killed, and another wounded, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank earlier Sunday when armed Palestinian guerrillas in Hebron opened fire with automatic rifles on a guard post, the second such attack in Hebron in the last week.

Both attacks appeared intended to disrupt the year-old Arab-Israeli peace talks, which have just entered their seventh round in Washington, by provoking Israel into retaliation and reminding the world community that negotiations have failed to resolve the Middle East conflict.

“There is no doubt that this was an attack, first of all, on the peace process,” Brig. Gen. Moshe Yahalon, the West Bank commander, said in Hebron. “They want to tell everyone that without them there will be no resolution and that they do not agree to a negotiated resolution. They hope this will rally Arabs to the rejectionist front.”

The attack on an Israeli convoy near Kaoukba in southern Lebanon was one of the deadliest ever mounted against Israeli forces in the region since Israel established its “security zone” there seven years ago to protect its northern border from infiltration by Palestinian guerrillas.

A spokesman at Israeli Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv said that a roadside bomb, estimated to weigh 60 pounds and packed with bullets, was detonated as a seven-vehicle convoy passed, carrying troops into the region as replacements for soldiers on duty at Israeli posts there.

Witnesses in Meemis, a nearby village in the Ahmadiyeh Hills outside the Israeli-controlled zone, told a correspondent for the Associated Press in Lebanon that they saw an Israeli military vehicle explode in flames immediately after the explosion. A tank-led force rushed into the region, they said, and helicopters evacuated the casualties.

The Islamic Resistance, the military wing of the pro-Iranian fundamentalist Muslim group Hezbollah, proclaimed its responsibility in a statement broadcast by its radio station, Voice of Islam.

A Hezbollah spokesman asserted in Beirut that “at least 15 Israeli soldiers were killed or wounded and two military vehicles, including a tank, were destroyed.” He said the guerrillas who carried out the attack “returned safely to base,” but he did not say how large the unit was.

Hezbollah, or Party of God, opposes the Arab-Israeli negotiations. Since the talks began last October, Hezbollah and its allies have attacked the Israelis repeatedly in southern Lebanon, insisting that the border enclave can be liberated only through military struggle and not negotiations.

After a lull of several weeks during the Lebanese parliamentary elections, Hezbollah resumed its attacks this month, according to Israeli sources, and fighting in the region now appears certain to escalate.

Israeli artillery pounded the villages of Jabbour, Abi Rashed and Sreireh across the security zone border with hundreds of shells after Sunday’s attack, according to the Israeli news agency Itim. There were no immediate reports on casualties or damage from the bombardment.

Although Israel usually responds with air strikes against guerrilla strongholds in southern and eastern Lebanon after such clashes, no immediate air strikes were reported. Israeli warplanes have struck Lebanon at least 29 times this year.

The casualties in Sunday’s attack were the highest since a clash with Palestinian guerrillas Nov. 26, 1990, in which five Israelis were killed.

Israel’s security zone, established in 1985, stretches about nine miles into Lebanon and covers about 440 square miles of Lebanese territory.

The dead Israeli soldiers were identified as Lt. Eran Shoham, 21; Sgt. Assaf Golan, 19; Cpl. Niv Amuyal, 19; Cpl. Sirhan Wassam, 20, and Sgt. Avraham Assulin, 20.

In Hebron, two gunmen, believed to belong to an armed cell of Hamas, another fundamentalist Islamic group, reportedly opened fire on an Israeli guard post in a narrow alley near the Cave of the Patriarchs, a religious shrine sacred to both Jews and Muslims.

One soldier, Sgt. Shmuel Gersh, 32, was killed, according to the military spokesman, and another was wounded in the attack.