Israeli Troops, Guerrillas Battle in South Lebanon

Israeli troops fought an intense battle with pro-Iranian guerrillas in southern Lebanon for most of Tuesday after three Israeli paratroopers were killed in an ambush on their armored vehicle as it patrolled along the edge of Israel’s cross-border security zone.

After guerrillas belonging to the Party of God, or Hezbollah, detonated a roadside bomb and destroyed the armored vehicle, Israeli forces counterattacked with warplanes, helicopter gunships, tanks and artillery, according to reports from the region.

Hundreds of shells from long-range Israeli artillery and the shorter-range howitzers and tanks of the South Lebanon Army, a local Israeli-maintained militia, fell in a four-hour barrage on half a dozen Shiite Muslim villages where Hezbollah guerrillas often take shelter, Lebanese radio stations said.

The guerrillas managed to return some of the fire, hurling a few Katyusha rockets back at Israel’s self-proclaimed Lebanon security zone and the villages where it recruits members for the South Lebanon Army.

“There is a real war under way in the central sector,” an officer with the U.N. peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, said. “The exchange is the heaviest in months and months.”

Israeli spokesman put their casualties at three killed and two critically wounded in the original attack; Western news agencies reported that at least eight Lebanese civilians and one UNIFIL soldier, a Ghanaian hit by shrapnel, were wounded in the subsequent bombardment.

The flare-up, the fiercest since five Israelis were killed in another roadside bombing last October, appeared linked to the likely resumption of the Arab-Israeli peace talks in Washington in a week’s time.

Before most of the previous eight rounds of talks, Hezbollah guerrillas attacked Israeli forces and the South Lebanon Army to underscore their rejection of the negotiations and remind Israel that they would still be there, whatever was agreed in Washington. Through its guerrilla attacks, Hezbollah was hoping to force Israel to pull out of southern Lebanon.

The fighting Tuesday began shortly before noon, Israeli military sources said, when Hezbollah guerrillas detonated the roadside bomb by remote control amid an Israeli patrol near the village of Kantara.

The U.S.-made armored troop carrier gave the men inside little protection from such a powerful bomb, the sources said.

One of the patrol’s objectives, ironically, was to search for such hidden bombs, more than 40 of which have been found so far this year in the region. Tuesday’s bomb exploded in the same area as one that killed two members of the South Lebanon Army on April 1.