Israeli air strike kills 35, including 21 children

LEBANON: An Israeli air strike killed at least 40 Lebanese civilians, including 21 children, in the southern village of Qana on Sunday, in the bloodiest single attack during Israel's 19-day-old war on Hizbollah.

Lebanese Red Cross workers covered the corpse of one dead child with a blanket. A woman in a red-patterned dress lay crumpled and lifeless in the broken masonry. A leg poked out from the rubble nearby. A child lay dead in the street.

Several houses collapsed and a three-storey building where about 100 civilians were sheltering was destroyed, witnesses and rescue workers said.

Israel's military said it had warned residents of Qana to leave and said Hizbollah bore responsibility for using it to fire rockets at the Jewish state.

Distraught people in Qana screamed in grief and anger amid the rubble of wrecked buildings.

People scrabbled at slabs of concrete with their bare hands to try to reach those still buried in the debris.

The bodies they pulled out included those of a baby and a 70-year-old man.

Ibrahim Shalloub, speechless with distress, was desperately looking for his sister, still buried under the rubble.

Qana is already a potent symbol of Lebanese civilian deaths at the hands of Israel's military.

In April 1996, Israeli shelling killed more than 100 civilians sheltering at the base of U.N. peacekeepers in the village during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" bombing campaign.

Meanwhile Israeli forces made a new incursion into Lebanon on Sunday and were engaged in fierce battles with Hezbollah guerrillas in the southeastern border area, Lebanese police said.

Clashes were raging on the outskirts of the village of Taibe, a few kilometers (miles) to the west of Fatima gate, a sealed border crossing into into Israel, they said.

A Hezbollah statement said its Shiite militant guerrillas were engaged in "fierce confrontations" with Israeli forces which had moved into the Taibe region.

"Since 7:30 am (0430 GMT), fierce confrontations between the heroes of the the Islamic Resistance and treacherous groups of the (Israeli elite unit) Golani which made an incursion in the Taibe region," it said.

Israeli troops reached the border town of Bint Jbeil, a main Hezbollah stronghold, before pulling back into the Lebanese hilltop border village of Marun Al-Ras on Friday.

Earlier Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded the Shi'ite Muslim town of Khaim in southern Lebanon on Sunday,security sources said. village of Metula as the bombardment took place.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army.

At least 483 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 51 Israelis have been killed in the fighting that erupted when Hizbollah guerrillas captured two Israeli soldiers in a July 12 cross-border attack.

Meanwhile Some 30 rockets fired from south Lebanon landed across northern Israel early Sunday, without causing any injuries, police said.

The rockets landed in the port of Haifa and the towns of Nahariya, Kiryat Shmona and Acre, a police spokesman told AFP.

Hezbollah militants have fired up between 1,600 and 1,800 rockets at northern Israel since the start of the Lebanon conflict on July 12, according to the police and the army.

Eighteen civilians have been killed in the attacks, including 10 in the port of Haifa, Israel's third largest city and industrial center some 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the Lebanon border. More than 300 people have been wounded.

Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have also been killed since the start of the offensive. Meanwhile Israeli aircraft bombed the homes of two Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, wounding two people, witnesses said.

One missile struck the house of the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees in Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, the coalition of militants said. Flying debris and glass wounded the militant's brother and sister-in-law in a neighbouring house.

Israel had warned the Popular Resistance leader to leave his home half an hour before the strike, the witnesses said.

"It was a facility used to store weaponry," an Israeli army spokeswoman said, confirming the attack.In a separate strike, Israel fired a missile into the home of a member of the Islamic militant group Hamas in Gaza City. The house was destroyed, but there were no casualties.

Earlier An Israeli undercover unit shot dead two Palestinian militants in the West Bank on Saturday, including a top Islamic Jihad commander, Palestinian armed groups said.

Palestinian witnesses said undercover soldiers in the West Bank city of Nablus opened fire at several Palestinians, killing two gunmen without engaging in a clash. Initial reports from the witnesses said the militants had returned the soldiers' fire.

The army said troops fought a gun battle with the militants. Palestinian armed groups said the dead men were Islamic Jihad's most senior commander in Nablus and a member of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction.

The witnesses said the senior Islamic Jihad commander appeared to be the army's target in the raid. The Israeli military said it was checking the report.

-qana, sidon, beirut, Kiryat Shmona, Gaza, Nablus, Sunday, Reuters, AFP.