Conflict Rages Before Talks

Israel on Sunday absorbed the heaviest blow of its 3 1/2 -week-old war against Hezbollah, with a dozen reservists killed in a rocket strike at a military staging area and at least three people killed and dozens hurt by a volley that exploded in the heart of Haifa.

Amid the growing bloodshed, Israel signaled its determination to seize the battlefield advantage while United Nations action is pending on a cease-fire proposal crafted by the United States and France.

Israeli warplanes struck scores of targets across Lebanon, killing at least 31 people and injuring dozens. Powerful explosions echoed across Beirut’s southern suburbs early today, and the Israeli military said Hezbollah strongholds in the eastern Bekaa Valley were hit overnight as well.

Near-constant Israeli artillery barrages thundered north across the border into Lebanon throughout Sunday, even as Hezbollah guerrillas fired more than 160 rockets into northern Israel and fought Israeli troops in close-quarters combat in a string of villages close to the frontier.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Sunday that the proposed U.N. resolution might not halt the fighting immediately.

“I would hope that you would see very early on an end to large-scale violence ... the firing of rockets that needs to stop for the next phase,” Rice said. But, she added, “we can’t rule out that there could be skirmishes for some time to come.”

Rice said she hoped for a vote on the resolution today or Tuesday.

Lebanese officials criticized the draft, saying that unless it were overhauled it would do nothing to quell the warfare. They complained that the language left the door open for Israel to keep up its crippling attacks and appealed for the international community to order Israel to remove its ground troops from southern Lebanon.

“It is against Lebanese interests and against peace,” parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, head of the Shiite Amal party, said of the document. “This draft proposal will keep the doors open for war.”

Mohammed Shatah, a senior aide to Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, said the proposal lacked “immediate steps to make it stick.”

Syria, one of Hezbollah’s main patrons, also faulted the draft. On a visit to Beirut, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said the plan was “a recipe for the continuation of the war.”

Israel maintained official silence on the proposal, which calls for an immediate end to hostilities and seeks to lay the groundwork for a second resolution that would establish an international force to support the Lebanese army in the border zone. However, senior officials indicated that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government considered its terms generally favorable.

In the meantime, Israel said it would press ahead with its offensive, meant to purge Hezbollah from a 4-mile-deep strip of southern Lebanon. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz today also cited a senior military strategist as saying Israel would consider striking strategic infrastructure and Lebanese government installations.

“We must continue the fighting, continue to hit whomever we can hit from Hezbollah,” Justice Minister Haim Ramon said on Israel’s Army Radio.

Although the Israeli public still broadly supports the government’s war aims, Sunday’s deaths staggered the country, not only because they represented the highest single-day toll since the conflict began, but because the circumstances were particularly painful.

The 12 Israeli soldiers were killed as they congregated at the entrance to Kfar Giladi, a communal farm on the border being used as a military base.

The deaths in a single incident of so many reservists, citizen-soldiers who left jobs and families to rush to the war front, were an enormous blow to national morale, worsened by reports that the fatalities might have been prevented if the soldiers had taken cover when warning sirens sounded.

Haifa, where at least three people were killed Sunday, suffered a greater one-time loss of life July 16, when eight railway workers were killed in a rocket strike. But Israelis shuddered at televised scenes of chaos and panic in a vibrant city considered one of the country’s jewels.

Sirens wailed, smoke billowed over the skyline, and rescue workers scrambled to clear rubble to check for survivors.

Haifa has long been a city where Jews and Arabs have lived side by side, and all three of the dead were members of Israel’s Arab minority.

The dead included an elderly man and woman who were having coffee in a garden outside a building that took a direct hit. Arriving at the scene, the man’s daughter cried in Arabic: “Is father dead?”

While previous strikes on Haifa had been isolated, this one involved a concerted volley that hit one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, raising the specter of more rockets hitting densely populated areas in the city of nearly 300,000 residents.

Hours after Sunday evening’s rocket strike on Haifa, Israeli warplanes targeted missile launchers in the Lebanese village of Qana that the army said were used in the attack.

“This attack in Haifa is precisely what Israel is trying to prevent. This is vivid proof of the necessity of Israel’s operation,” said David Baker, an official in the prime minister’s office. “We will not allow Hezbollah to terrorize our cities.”

The day’s events stoked fears of a surge in casualties while the Security Council prepared to vote on the proposed resolution, with each side seeking to inflict heavy blows and gain an edge in negotiations to come.

More than 700 Lebanese and 94 Israelis have died since the conflict erupted July 12, when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

In Lebanon, Israeli airstrikes ranged from Beirut’s southern suburbs to the country’s southern fringe. Three Chinese peacekeepers were wounded when the U.N. post they were manning was struck by a Hezbollah rocket, the U.N. peacekeeping force announced.

More than a dozen Israeli airstrikes early today targeted the area of eastern Lebanon near the Syrian border.

Hezbollah’s Al Manar television said new fighting on the ground erupted early today, with Hezbollah fighters reportedly engaging Israeli troops advancing on border villages in the south.

The skyline above southern Beirut was a haze of acrid smoke late in the afternoon as nearly two dozen airstrikes and volleys from Israeli warships positioned offshore hit the neighborhoods of Bir Abed, Mesharafiya and Dahiyeh, setting at least 14 buildings ablaze.

Roads in and around Lebanon’s southern port city of Tyre were nearly empty, and people who tried to navigate the streets amid airstrikes and shelling risked their lives.

A man driving south toward Tyre, his van stuffed with bread, was killed on a stretch of road through banana groves. His head was blown apart, and packages of bread, which has all but run out in the south, spilled from the sides of the shattered van.

Another strike, on a Lebanese army position south of Tyre, killed one soldier, wounded another and left six men missing. And on a main road in Tyre, a man selling tiny cups of coffee on a main street was killed.

A day after Israel dropped leaflets warning residents to leave the Sunni Muslim city of Sidon, farther up the coast, restaurants were empty and streets were unusually deserted. Officials said a few villages in the mountains outside Sidon, including Hazhi and Charki Saida, were struck overnight.

The daylong barrage on the mountain villages outside Sidon killed six members of a family in the village of Ghazzaniya and wounded two others, emergency workers said today. They had been prevented from rescuing the survivors because of Israeli planes circling overhead.

Israel has reported seizing a number of Hezbollah prisoners, and on Sunday, the military announced that one guerrilla it was holding was involved in the July 12 raid that resulted in the capture of two Israeli soldiers. It did not say when he was captured.

The proposed Security Council resolution called for the immediate and unconditional release of the two Israeli soldiers, language that pleased Israeli officials. But the draft is silent on the status of Lebanese prisoners being held in Israel, drawing criticism from Lebanese officials.

Rice, who traveled Sunday to President Bush’s Texas ranch to brief him, said no one should expect the proposed resolution to offer a quick fix.

“There were things Israel wanted and things Lebanon wanted; everybody wasn’t going to get what they wanted,” she said.

“We are urging all states in the Security Council to back this resolution as a first step,” Rice said.

“We heard very favorable remarks about it” on Saturday, she said, and added that she would go to New York to further talks at the U.N. if necessary.

Rice and national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley, who accompanied her to Bush’s Crawford ranch, indicated again that U.S. officials saw efforts to end the violence in Lebanon as an opportunity to promote a restructuring of the Middle East. The Bush administration rebuffed appeals for an immediate cease-fire in the early days of the conflict, insisting that the larger issue of Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon had to be addressed.

Hadley said U.S. officials were hoping for a vote on the second measure “in days, not weeks.”

He said the major challenges of establishing an international peacekeeping force involved the “nuts and bolts” of setting up a large operation on the ground, including who would contribute forces, when they would be ready to go in, who would transport them and where they would be based.

Hadley painted the situation as a turning point for Iran and Syria, Hezbollah’s main sponsors. He said the two nations were faced with the choice of cooperating with the international community and cutting their support for the militant group, or risking isolation and economic sanctions.

“They are going to have to make a decision: which is, how far they want to go in defying the international community,” he said.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Casualties mount on both sides

Lebanon

Israeli warplanes and artillery cause at least 20 deaths in Lebanon as strikes range from Beirut’s suburbs to the southern border. Israeli troops battle Hezbollah guerrillas in close combat in villages near the frontier. Israeli warplanes attack Qana and destroy rocket launchers that fired on Haifa. The army says it has captured a Hezbollah militant involved in the July 12 raid in which two of its soldiers were taken.

Israel

Hezbollah fires more than 160 rockets into northern Israel, killing 12 reserve soldiers in Kfar Giladi and at least three Israeli Arabs in Haifa. Dozens are also injured in the strikes on Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city.

Diplomacy

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls the draft U.N. resolution crafted by the U.S. and France “a first step” and acknowledges that it may “take a while” to end all fighting. Lebanese officials denounce the measure for not calling for Israeli troops to leave Lebanon. Israeli officials maintain silence, though they are believed

to be supportive. Syrian President Bashar Assad warns U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that “any decision taken without a Lebanese consensus will complicate matters and deepen instability.” The United Nations is expected to vote on the measure today or Tuesday.

Casualties

More than 700 people have been killed in Lebanon. -- Israeli security officials say they have confirmed the deaths of 165 Hezbollah fighters and estimate 200 others have been killed.

On the Israeli side, at least 94 people have died, of them 57 have been soldiers and 37 civilians.

Four U.N. military observers and one civilian agency employee have also been killed in the 3 1/2 -weekold conflict.

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King reported from Jerusalem and Stack from Beirut. Times staff writers Nicole Gaouette in Crawford, Kim Murphy in Sidon and Beirut, Tracy Wilkinson in Kfar Giladi and Carolyn Cole in Tyre and special correspondent Vita Bekker in Haifa contributed to this report.