Attacks, casualties grow on both sides of conflict

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Israeli forces killed 33 agricultural workers in northeast Lebanon Friday in a wave of airstrikes that also pierced the country's Christian heartland for the first time and severed its last major highway link to the outside.

Hezbollah forces responded by firing a missile that exploded just 30 miles north of Tel Aviv, the farthest they have reached into Israel. The rest of northern Israel came under a daylong barrage of 191 missiles that killed three people and injured more than 30.

Israeli soldiers pushed slowly north from the border in heavy ground fighting that left three Israeli soldiers dead. The Red Cross said 48 people were killed in Lebanon in about 90 Israeli airstrikes.

Israeli helicopters today attacked suspected Hezbollah positions in the southern city of Tyre, although The Associated Press reported that Hezbollah's TV station claimed that fighters repelled helicopter-borne troops, killing one soldier. Israel declined to comment.

At the United Nations, negotiations between the U.S. and France over a plan to end the hostilities continued. Spokesmen for countries involved in the talks said the two sides made progress and could reach agreement over the weekend.

The Israeli airstrikes hit four bridges in heavily Christian seaside villages north of the capital that historically have formed one of the strongest fronts against Islamic militancy in Lebanon.

The attacks severed the last remaining major highway connection from Beirut to Syria and to the northern port of Tripoli. Israel said it hit the bridges to halt the flow of weapons from Syria.

"Because the most direct arteries have been blocked, they are using more indirect means," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, a spokesman for the Israeli army. "These bridges, unfortunately, served as a conduit for this resupply from Syria. We are not going to allow missiles to be transported southward and used to kill our citizens."

However, the strikes also alienated a population that has been largely hostile to Hezbollah. Christians make up an estimated 35 percent of Lebanon's population, the highest percentage of any country in the Middle East.

Over the years, they have often sympathized with Israel, even briefly collaborating in battling Palestinians during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon in the midst of the country's 15-year civil war.

While some prominent Christian leaders have formed political alliances with Hezbollah in recent years, many ordinary Christians have been wary of the rise of radical Shiite power and Hezbollah's alliances with Syria and Iran. In the early days of the current conflict, they have tended to blame Hezbollah for starting it with a cross-border raid in which it seized two Israeli soldiers.

Much of that sentiment has waned as Israel's attacks have widened, and Friday's strikes in the Christian heartland prompted Christian political leaders to respond with anger.

"People don't see eye to eye with Hezbollah on all things, but this is a question of an attack on Lebanon," said Farid Khazen, a Christian member of parliament.

The worst reported violence in Lebanon was in the village of Qaa, in the Bekaa Valley about three miles from the Syrian border, where Israeli officials said they launched strikes against what they believed to be a weapons storage site. Truck traffic was observed between the area and the Syrian border, said a military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But town administrator Saadeh Tawm said the site was a refrigerated agricultural storage facility where farmworkers, including a number of Syrian Kurds, were loading fruit for transport elsewhere.

A total of 33 bodies were recovered, he said.

"We are 230 kilometers from the border with Israel," Tawm said. "So how could there be military activity here?"

Thirty Israelis have been killed by missiles since the fighting erupted on July 12, including eight killed Thursday — five of them in the northern coastal town of Acre.

Israel says the missile strikes, now totaling more than 2,500, the worst sustained fire on Israeli cities since the battle for statehood in 1948. Friday's attack on Hadera, about 50 miles south of the Lebanese border, marked the deepest Hezbollah has struck. No one was hurt.