Israel Strikes Lebanon After Militants Capture 2 Soldiers

Israel bombed Beirut’s airport early today and sent troops and tanks deep into Lebanon after guerrillas from the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others in a meticulously planned border raid.

It was Israel’s first major offensive in Lebanon in six years, marking a return to a battlefield that for many Israelis became a quagmire.

A wave of overnight Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon killed more than 20 civilians, officials said, and an Israeli woman was killed when Lebanese guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets at the coastal town of Nahariya.

Israel confirmed that its air force had struck Beirut’s airport to halt air traffic to and from the capital, saying that the airport was used as a hub to transfer weapons. It was unclear how long the airport would remain closed.

Israel’s thrust across its northern border Wednesday left it waging simultaneous warfare on two fronts: in the Gaza Strip, where nearly 80 Palestinians have been killed during a 2-week-old offensive that also began after the seizure of an Israeli soldier, and in Lebanon, where troops spent two decades locked in a debilitating and inconclusive conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described Hezbollah’s raid as an act of war, for which he said the Lebanese government bore responsibility.

The ramifications threatened to spread across the region. The White House and Israeli officials quickly cast blame on Syria and Iran, Hezbollah’s patrons.

“These are difficult days for Israel and its citizens,” a grim-faced Olmert told reporters. “There are elements, to the north and south, that are threatening our stability and seeking to test our determination. They will fail and pay a heavy price.”

Israel is reeling from the capture of three soldiers in less than three weeks. A 19-year-old Israeli tank gunner, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, was seized by Hamas-linked Palestinian militants June 25 in a raid just outside the Gaza Strip.

At a triumphal news conference in south Beirut, Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said Israel would have to agree to an exchange of prisoners if it wanted its soldiers back.

“What we say is that these hostages won’t be returned to their homes except through one way: indirect negotiations and a swap,” Nasrallah said. “Let the Israelis do whatever they want -- no military operation will result in the return of the soldiers.”

The incursion into Lebanon coincided with heavy new fighting in Gaza. By day’s end, at least 23 Palestinians had been killed there, the biggest one-day death toll of the offensive and the most lethal day of clashes in the coastal strip in nearly two years.

The confrontation in Lebanon, however, was read by nearly all as far graver in its scope and potential repercussions.

The White House called Hezbollah’s action an “unprovoked act of terrorism” and condemned it “in the strongest terms.”

In a statement issued as President Bush flew to Germany for a six-day visit there and in Russia, where he will take part in the annual Group of 8 conference, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said the attack “was timed to exacerbate already high tensions in the region and sow further violence.”

The administration called for the soldiers’ “immediate and unconditional release.”

In seizing the soldiers, Hezbollah staged what Israeli military officials acknowledged was a highly sophisticated, multi-pronged attack, a hallmark of the guerrilla group’s operations during its long fight against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, which has since become a significant force in Lebanese politics, remains, in effect, the governing power in Lebanon’s Shiite-dominated south.

Under cover of rocket and shell fire at northern Israeli hamlets and border army outposts, the guerrillas sprayed gunfire at two armored Israeli jeeps patrolling the frontier. It was at the site of that attack, which left three soldiers dead, that the two Israelis were captured, Israeli news reports said.

Israeli commanders, perhaps mindful that an army investigation of Shalit’s capture had faulted troops at the scene for responding too slowly, ordered a hot pursuit into Lebanon.

Once across the border, however, Israeli forces fell into an ambush. A tank drove over powerful explosives laid in its path about three miles inside Lebanon, and four soldiers died in the blast. A fifth was killed trying to recover the stricken tank.

In the southern slums of Beirut, a Shiite stronghold, celebratory gunfire rang out after the capture of the soldiers was announced on Hezbollah’s Al Manar television channel.

Israel has handed over prisoners to Hezbollah in exchange for soldiers or their remains. In 2004, the government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released more than 400 Arab prisoners, jailed for anti-Israel activities, to free a kidnapped Israeli businessman and obtain the remains of three soldiers.

Apparently alluding to that episode, Nasrallah had a taunting bit of advice for Olmert and his neophyte defense minister, Amir Peretz: “I suggest they ask former leaders and ministers about their experience in Lebanon.”

Israel holds nearly 10,000 Arab prisoners, most of them Palestinian. Most prisoners with family or residency in Lebanon were freed in the earlier exchanges.

In the hours after the raid, Israel mounted a fierce show of force, even as hopes waned that the captured soldiers would be rescued swiftly. Fighter jets screamed over southern Lebanon, striking dozens of targets, including roads, bridges and what were described as Hezbollah positions.

Israeli warships loomed off the coast in Lebanese territorial waters, and artillery batteries shelled villages just east of Lebanon’s coastal port of Naqoura.

News agencies reported that two Lebanese civilians were killed, and Israeli commanders said they believed Hezbollah had suffered casualties.

After nightfall, Israeli warplanes staged their closest foray to the Lebanese capital, striking what was described as a Palestinian militant base 10 miles south of Beirut.

Asked whether the Lebanese capital was a prospective target of Israeli strikes, Col. Boaz Cohen, head of operations for Israel’s northern command, told reporters in the northern Israeli town of Safat, “You will see in the next few days.”

In Israel, the Lebanon incursion prompted a sense of national crisis -- much more so than when Israeli troops entered Gaza on June 28, some 10 months after withdrawing from the coastal territory.

People made a point of staying close to a radio or television to follow the nonstop coverage. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s main index plunged 4.3% on the news, the biggest one-day drop in nearly a year.

Thousands of citizens were expected to be called up for army reserve duty because of the crisis, and many Israelis said the prospect of a fresh entanglement in Lebanon brought back painful memories.

“I was in the Lebanon war. I remember it all, and I’m afraid we’ll get into a mess like back then,” said Shimshon Sapir, 40, a grocer in Tel Aviv.

Israeli forces have not ventured more than a few yards into Lebanon since May 2000, when they withdrew from a self-created buffer zone and ended an occupation that began in the early 1980s. Since the pullout, there have been occasional flare-ups along the border, but nothing approaching the seriousness of Wednesday’s confrontation.

Israeli commanders could not say with certainty whether the captured soldiers were alive.

“We had no news about what their condition is,” Maj. Gen. Udi Adam told reporters in Safat. “The assumption is that they are alive.... Several spots of blood were found, but I can’t tell you just from that what their condition is.”

In many aspects, the Lebanon crisis paralleled Israel’s confrontation with the Islamist group Hamas in Gaza. Israel holds the Hamas-dominated Palestinian government responsible for Shalit’s captivity, despite protestations from Hamas political leaders such as Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh that they had no advance knowledge of the abduction.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora took the same stance as Haniyeh, insisting that his government bore no responsibility. Syria did the same, and blamed Israel.

“Certainly the occupation [of the Palestinian territories] is the cause provoking both Lebanese and Palestinian people, and that’s why there is Lebanese and Palestinian resistance,” Syrian Vice President Farouk Shareh was quoted by the Associated Press as saying in Damascus, the capital.

Israel, which last month sent fighter jets over Syrian President Bashar Assad’s summer palace to emphasize its displeasure with Syria for harboring hard-line Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, pledged for now to leave Syria out of the dispute.

“We think at the moment the debate is between us and the government of Lebanon,” said Adam, the Israeli commander.

Other Israeli officials, however, said action against Syria could become part of Israel’s strategy to win the release of all three captive soldiers.

Some analysts said the border confrontation put a sharper edge on the long-standing enmity between Israel and Iran.

“Hezbollah is an Iranian tool. It answers to Iranian concerns,” said Eran Lerman, a former Israeli intelligence officer who directs the Israel office of the American Jewish Committee.

The full scope of Israel’s intended response to the border raid was not immediately clear.

Israel’s Cabinet met Wednesday evening in special session, after which participants emerged tight-lipped and somber-faced.

“The government of Israel has made decisions,” was almost all that Cabinet minister Yitzhak Herzog would say.

Olmert said earlier that Israel’s response would be restrained but “very, very, very painful” to those who had carried out the attack.

Along the border, residents of several Israeli communities spent the day huddled in bomb shelters, an ordeal military officials said could continue for some time.

For some in Israel, the Hezbollah raid raised the alarming and crucial question of whether Israel’s powers of deterrence, long the linchpin of its military strategy, were on the wane.

Israeli analysts said the raid might point to an emerging rivalry between Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni Muslim-dominated Hamas.

“There is a competition, though nobody talks about it. Hezbollah is under pressure to do the same thing to show they are at least as able,” said Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University. But the two groups are also capable of cooperation to achieve a common goal of weakening Israel, other analysts said.

Hezbollah and Hamas, or at least its exiled leadership, “are almost brothers in arms, brothers in fate and objective,” said Shaul Mishal, a professor at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the study of the two groups.

Hezbollah leader Nasrallah suggested that the latest capture would give Hamas more leverage in its standoff with Israel, which has brushed off that group’s demands for a prisoner release.

“This could provide a solution to the Gaza crisis,” he said, “now that one plus two makes three.”

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Times staff writer King reported from Jerusalem and special correspondent Bekker from Safat. Special correspondent Rania Abouzeid in Beirut and staff writer Ken Ellingwood in Jerusalem contributed to this report.