Aug. 4, 2006

8 civilians, 4 soldiers killed in bloodiest day of war

By YAAKOV KATZ

In Israel's bloodiest day since the confrontation with Hizbullah erupted over three weeks ago, eight civilians and four IDF soldiers were killed on Thursday, as the army prepared to deepen its ground incursion into Lebanon.

The eight civilians all died, and dozens were wounded, during a massive rocket barrage on northern Israel in the afternoon. More than 130 Katyushas hit within a 90-minute period, with dozens of projectiles falling in Acre, where four people were killed near a home where residents were standing on a balcony. Another man was killed in the city when a rocket explosion caused him to lose control of his car and drive into a pole. The three other fatalities were hit near Ma'alot.

Three of the four soldiers were killed at close to noon when an antitank missile hit their tank during a firefight in Rajamin in the western sector. Two died instantly, while the third was mortally wounded. In the course of the battle, the IDF killed 14 Hizbullah gunmen and captured five.

The names of two of these three IDF casualties were released last night. Sgt. Andrei Brudner, 18, from Rishon Lezion, will be laid to rest at the military cemetery in the city at 11. a.m. on Friday. Sgt. Itamar Tzur, 19, from Be'er Tuviya, will be buried there at 3 p.m. Friday.

The IDF force comprised an armored battalion belonging to the 188th Armored Brigade and the reserve's Alexandroni Brigade.

Details relating to the fourth fatality had not been released by the military censor at press time.

The IDF was pressing forward Thursday night with its ground offensive. Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered the army to prepare for the second stage of operations, which calls for an advance to the Litani River ­ 40 kilometers into Lebanon ­ in a bid to gain control of Katyusha launch sites.

Meanwhile Thursday, Hizbullah leader Shiekh Hassan Nasrallah, for the first time since fighting began 22 days ago, offered to stop rocket attacks on northern Israel in return for an end to airstrikes throughout Lebanon.

"Anytime you decide to stop your campaign against our cities, villages, civilians and infrastructure, we will not fire rockets on any Israeli settlement or city," he said in a taped video statement broadcast on Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV and carried simultaneously on all other Lebanese and Arab satellite channels.

But he also vowed to launch rockets into Tel Aviv if Israeli jets were to strike at Beirut proper. "If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity... We will bomb Tel Aviv," he said.

Speaking directly to Israelis, Nasrallah said, "The only choice before you is to stop your aggression and turn to negotiations to end this folly."

In the course of the day, seven IDF brigades took up positions in more than 20 villages in southern Lebanon as the army began to carve out a security zone that would be clear of Hizbullah. On Thursday night, OC Ground Forces Maj.-Gen. Benny Gantz said the IDF planned to make the security zone larger than the previously planned depth of 6 to 8 km.

Military sources said that the IDF would create a zone 15 km. deep, a move that would require the insertion of at least one more infantry division into Lebanon.

"We are moving closer to the launch sites," Gantz said during a briefing in Tel Aviv. "We will operate there with more force in an effort to minimize attacks like the ones we experienced this afternoon."

The IDF brigades, comprising at least 10,000 soldiers, were essentially recreating a buffer area similar to the one Israel maintained until it withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. Senior officers said they believed this would be done by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, IDF reservists operating in the western sector killed four Hizbullah gunmen, and destroyed two rocket launchers and an arms warehouse.

IAF jets dropped leaflets over southern Beirut warning residents to evacuate three Shi'ite neighborhoods, a possible prelude to renewed air attacks on the Lebanese capital, security officials said. Israeli jets hit southern Beirut with at least four missiles at about 3 a.m. Thursday, for the first time in more than a week.

Aug. 5, 2006
Two reserve soldiers were killed
YAAKOV KATZ

Two reserve soldiers were killed in clashes with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon on Saturday. Army forces killed at least 50 Hizbullah guerillas over the weekend, the IDF said.

Cpl. Kiril Kazhsan, 26, from Haifa, a reservist from Brigade Two, was killed when an anti-tank missile hit a building in which he was stationed in the southern Lebanese village of Ita A-Sha’ab Saturday afternoon. At least 19 others were wounded — one seriously — in heavy exchanges of fire in the same village. Kazhsan will be laid to rest at 4 p.m. on Sunday in the military cemetary in Haifa.

Capt. Dr. Igor Rothstein, 34, from Poriya Neve-Oved, also in the reserves, was killed by an anti-tank missile fired at ground forces on Friday during clashes in southern Lebanon. He will be laid to rest at 5 p.m. on Sunday in the military cemetary in Be’ersheba.

The two were the first reservists killed in combat since the fighting in Lebanon began.

Meanwhile, an IDF soldier was seriously wounded after being hit by a mortar shell on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon. He was evacuated to Nahariya Hospital where he was operated and stabilized. Another soldier sustained light injuries.

OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam said on Saturday that he expected to see a decrease in the extent and range of the Hizbullah rocket attacks on Israel, as the terrorists would be pushed further and further northward.

On the other hand, he said in an interview to Army Radio that the terrorist organization would retain a certain launch capability.

His statements came just one day after rockets reached further south than ever before, landing near Hadera, some 90 kilometers from the Lebanese border.

Outlining the campaign’s objectives, Adam said the goals were to reach and neutralize rocket launch sites and to strike Hizbullah infrastructure and terrorists.

The major general asserted that the IDF was meeting the goals that it had set.

He reminded his listeners that when the campaign started over three weeks ago, the IDF assessed that it would take "several weeks."

In contrast to the words of Minister of National Infrastructures Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor), Adam asserted that the army was not surprised by the extent of the Hizbullah resistance.

He also expressed doubt at a statement made earlier by former chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who said that the IDF would not be able to resolve the campaign decisively.

Aug. 6, 2006
Man, daughter buried side by side in Acre
By TOVAH LAZAROFF

Shimon Zribi, 44, and his daughter Mazal, 15, were laid to rest next to each other on Friday after they died holding hands when a Hizbullahlaunched rocket landed in front of their Acre home the day before.

In the small cemetery outside Acre, their shroud- covered bodies were lowered into the ground in twin plots to a chorus of wails and sobs from grieving relatives. In the background, one could hear the thud of additional rockets falling in the area.

Their funeral was followed by that of Albert Ben-Abu, 41, a father of five young children aged 1-15, who was a victim of the same attack.

Looking at his body from the women's section, his wife Hagit almost fainted, but then stood her ground.

The two brothers who were also killed in the attack, Arieh, 51, and Tiran Tamam, 31, will be buried in the same cemetery outside Acre on Sunday morning.

Shimon, Mazal and Albert were all neighbors in the same apartment building in Acre. On Friday the Ben-Abu family sat shiva in the building's bomb shelter even as crews cleaned up the street outside and social workers roamed the halls. When a warning siren went off, one of Albert's sons stood in the hallway praying.

Standing outside the apartment wearing a shirt torn as a part of the mourning ritual, Yossi Ben-Abu described his brother Albert as a good person who did everything he could for others.

Albert worked with computers and had served in Lebanon in the 1980s, said Yossi. He showed pictures of Albert holding his newborn son last year during the circumcision ceremony, including one with Albert draped in a prayer shawl.

When he heard of the attack, Yossi came to the apartment and found Albert's wife Hagit. She knew only that her husband had been wounded and taken away.

Yossi said they searched for him in the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya only to find that he had been taken to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for surgery. He drove there with Hagit.

"We had just entered the emergency room when the hospital called to say that he had died," recalled Yossi.

Unlike the Ben-Abu family, Raz Zribi, 18, and his mother Linda did not sit shiva in their apartment. Instead they received mourners on a mattress set up in the large shelter in am Acre hotel.

As warning sirens rang out, the shelter filled with soldiers, guests and other families from their apartment building who had checked into the hotel along with them.

Barefoot and sitting on a stool outside the shelter, wearing a torn black T-shirt and jeans, Raz was calm as he spoke of the father and sister that he lost.

His father Shimon, who worked in an aluminum factory in Karmiel, "did everything for me," said Raz. "All the money he had he spent on his children, not on himself; he was the best father in the world." Raz added, "I know that he is in heaven."

His sister Mazal, nicknamed "Mazzi," loved music, sports, hanging out with her friends and in particular her boyfriend.

"We fought a lot and we loved each other a lot," he said.

When Hizbullah first began launching rocket attacks from Lebanon in mid-July, he and his family left the city and sought shelter in Hadera. On Wednesday the owner of the guest house they were staying in wanted them to leave because he needed the rooms.

Although it worked out that they could stay in the end, his father decided that enough was enough and it was time to return home.

When the warning siren sounded on Thursday afternoon, he and his family went into the apartment's communal shelter. But he, Mazal and his father went out after they heard a rocket fall nearby to examine the damage.

They stood on the lawn outside their apartment and that's when the second rocket hit, he said. "What happened, happened," said Raz.

"There was smoke and the lawn was filled with blood," said Raz. He was lightly wounded on one finger on each hand, which were wrapped in white gauze.

Still calm as he spoke, he described how he saw his sister and father lying on the ground. It was clear to him that they were dead, he said, and added, "They were holding hands."

Such sentiments were notably lacking last year, when White House officials expressed frustration with Jewish community leaders for not explicitly backing the nominee. They wondered why Bolton ­ who was credited, as an assistant secretary of state in 1991, with overturning a 1975 UN resolution denigrating Zionism as racism ­ could garner open support only from diehard supporters of Bush administration foreign policy such as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

The perception among Republicans was that the Jewish establishment was beholden to the Democrats.

Aug. 5, 2006
Sgt. Or Shahar, 20, killed in Lebanon
JPost.com Staff

An IDF soldier, 20-year-old Sgt. Or Shahar from Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, was killed in the Lebanese town Nabi al-Awadi late Friday night.

While his engineering corps unit was operating in the area at about 1 a.m., Lebanese operatives fired a mortar shell at his vehicle, wounding both him and another soldier.

Shahar, who was seriously wounded, later died of his wounds. The other soldier was lightly wounded and did not require medical treatment in Israel.

Nabi el-Awadi is located north of Metulla near the Lebanese village of Ataybe, where Sgt. Yonathan Sharabi was killed on Thursday in a battle with Hizbullah guerrillas.

Shahar was meant to celebrate his 21st birthday on Sunday.

Army Radio reported that his grandfather was killed while defending Kibbutz Yad Mordechai during the War of Independence in 1948.

These days, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai is under the incessant threat of Kassam rockets fired by Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip.

In Memoriam

• Shimon Zribi, 44
• Mazal Zribi, 15
• Albert Ben-Abu, 41
• Tiran Tamam, 31
• Arieh Tamam, 51
• Shanati Shanati, 18
• Amir Naeem, 18
• Muhammad Fa'ur, 17
• Sgt. Andrei Brudner, 18
• Sgt. Itamar Tzur, 19
• Sgt. Alon Feintuch, 19
• Cpl. Yonatan Sharabi, 19
• Sgt. Or Shahar, 20
• Manal Azzam, 27
• Baha Fayed a-Karib, 36
• Muhammad Subhi Salim Mana, 23
• St.-Sgt. Daniel Shiran, 20
• St.-Sgt. Omri Haim Almakayes-Yaakobovitch, 20
• Cpl. Kiril Kazhsan, 26
• Capt. Dr. Igor Rothstein, 34
• Frieda Kellner, 87
• Fadiya Juma'a, 60
• Sultana Juma'a, 31
• Samira Juma'a, 33

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