Israel Expands Lebanon Attacks : Mideast: Residents are given time to flee as 35 villages are bombed and shelled in effort to drive out guerrillas. Rocket salvos continue to hit northern Israel.

Israeli forces, expanding their offensive in Lebanon, on Monday bombed and shelled 35 villages believed to shelter pro-Iranian guerrillas, but Jerusalem said it would halt the attacks if Lebanese or Syrian troops disarmed the guerrillas and drove them out.

After giving an estimated 250,000 Lebanese villagers five hours to flee their homes, Israeli troops began firing with heavy artillery from their self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon. Israeli warplanes bombed, rocketed and strafed the villages in repeated strikes.

According to Radio Lebanon, 20 people were killed and 74 wounded in the attacks. One Israeli soldier was killed, a military spokesman here said, and three more were wounded in a counterattack by guerrillas belonging to Hezbollah, or Party of God.

With about 40 people reported killed and more than 160 others wounded in two days of fighting, the conflict is now the worst Arab-Israeli clash since Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization from the country.

The clashes continued through the night and intensified at dawn today, according to Israeli military sources, as each side kept up its bombardment of the other. Israeli artillery pounded villages from which Hezbollah has operated for nearly eight years, and the guerrillas fired back with Katyusha rockets and mortars.

“Israel’s escalating attacks constitute not only a military blow to Lebanon but also a political strike to the United States and its peacemaking efforts,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Faris Bouez said in Beirut, noting that U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher is due in the region Saturday.

In Singapore, where he is attending a meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, Christopher accused Hezbollah of trying to sabotage the peace talks. “The Hezbollah is an opponent of the peace process,” he said. “. . . We must not let the opponents of the peace process undermine it.”

In Washington, the State Department said Christopher has no plans to cancel his scheduled tour of Middle Eastern countries next week in an effort to advance the peace talks.

As Syria and the PLO joined Lebanon in denouncing the Israeli actions as “aggression,” concern mounted in Israel itself that negotiations with its Arab neighbors might also prove to be a victim of the operation.

“This is still small potatoes, but in the Middle East small potatoes can grow into something enormous,” warned Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, the retired head of military intelligence. “The situation is dangerous. It could explode into a larger conflict; it might quickly destroy the whole peace process. . . . Nothing in the Middle East finishes the way you expect.”

Israeli officials sought to contain the conflict, stressing that Jerusalem wants to pursue the peace talks with both Lebanon and Syria and that this action is aimed solely at ensuring its safety from Hezbollah attacks.

The anxiety increased, however, as Hezbollah fired more salvos of rockets through the day at communities and farms in northern Israel. Most of the more than 70 rockets, which are fired in bunches from multiple-rocket launchers, fell harmlessly, according to military spokesmen, but one woman was wounded and some houses were damaged.

“The Israeli government, the prime minister and his Cabinet must without any compromise stop the Katyusha fire on this city and allow us to live like all the citizens of Israel,” said Mayor Prosper Azran of Kiryat Shemona, where two Israelis were killed by rocket fire Sunday.

Israeli officials said they launched the action, dubbed “Operation Accountability,” in response to an escalation of Hezbollah attacks on Israeli forces in the security zone--seven soldiers had been killed there this month--and to increasing Katyusha attacks on the country’s northern communities.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told foreign diplomats the operation has two aims: “One, to directly hurt those trying to attack us--Hezbollah and other organizations that have participated in attacks against Israel. Second, to get the attention of residents and governments involved so they will put on pressure to stop Hezbollah.”

But Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, was defiant. “What is happening is not going to stop us from continuing and escalating our confrontation to drive the Israeli enemy out of Lebanon by force of arms,” Nasrallah said at a funeral at Baalbek, in eastern Lebanon, for Hezbollah members killed in Sunday’s raids.

Israeli leaders also sought to reassure their nervous citizens that the operation would not develop into a costly ground war like the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon. But Israel Army Radio reported late Monday that an armored column was moving north toward the border.

“From our point of view, we can stop this . . . now,” said Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, a retired general who once commanded the northern front, as he visited the border region. “Definitely, we don’t want to waste any lives on either side of the border. All we want is quiet.”

Yet Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin acknowledged that a significant part of his Cabinet, an estimated eight of the 18 ministers, has serious misgivings about the operation.

Meeting late Monday night, the Cabinet decided not to commit ground forces for the present, Israeli political sources said, but to continue the campaign of air and artillery bombardment for the rest of the week.

In their attacks Monday, Israeli warplanes, helicopter gunships and artillery concentrated on the Lebanese villages facing the security zone, according to official Israeli sources.

Militarily, Israeli officials said the campaign is meant to deny Hezbollah this area as an operating base and thus to put Israel’s northern communities out of range of the guerrillas’ Katyushas.

The political goal, however, is to drive tens of thousands of villagers toward Beirut--early reports spoke of more than 60,000 people already heading north Monday evening--and thus to increase pressure on the Lebanese government of President Elias Hrawi to reassert its authority in the region.

The exodus was accelerated by warnings over the radio station of Israel’s allied militia, the South Lebanon Army, telling villagers to evacuate.

Civilian casualties were mounting, according to Radio Lebanon, as Israeli warplanes and artillery intensified their attacks on the villages. U.N. officials were trying to negotiate the safe passage of residents who had not left by the Israeli deadline, and U.N. peacekeeping forces were trying to arrange a cease-fire early today so that convoys could leave.

“We are trying to exert pressure on the Lebanese government through actions in the field so that it will remove Hezbollah from the region,” said Jacques Neriah, Rabin’s diplomatic adviser and a native of Lebanon. “If it is not politically strong enough, we feel that it has good allies to the east (Syria) for this. . . . We should not underestimate the Syrian influence in Lebanon.”

BACKGROUND

Members of Hezbollah, or the Party of God, are followers of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran, and they seek to extend his ideas for an Islamic republic across the Muslim world and beyond. The group consists mostly of Shiite Muslims from Lebanon. They launched Hezbollah in 1982 with Iranian support, including money and arms, and remain close to Tehran in their politics, opposing the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations as virtual capitulation to the Jewish state. After Israel withdrew most of its forces from Lebanon in 1985 after a three-year war, Hezbollah expanded into southern Lebanon, a Shiite homeland. It built up its guerrilla forces there to confront Israel’s self-declared “security zone,” a buffer strip of about nine miles along the border. Hezbollah now has an estimated 5,000 armed personnel, according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Its pride has been a readiness to die in fighting against Israel, particularly against the continued occupation of southern Lebanon.