Hezbollah attack puts Israel on a second front
SHOMERA, Israel -- A deadly cross-border attack by Hezbollah gunmen into northern Israel yesterday opened a second front in Israel's battle with Islamic extremists, just two weeks after Hamas fighters crossed into southern Israel and kidnapped a soldier.
The gunmen attacked an army patrol, killing three Israeli soldiers and abducting two more. In response, Israeli troops stormed into southern Lebanon and bombed bridges in operations that left five more Israeli soldiers dead.
Israeli troops plunged deep into Lebanese territory for the first time since Israel ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. Today, Israeli jets struck runways at Beirut International Airport, forcing its closure and the diversion of flights .
The fighting increased tension in the Middle East even as Israel stepped up its campaign in the Gaza Strip, launched to rescue an Israeli soldier captured June 25 by Hamas militants. Early today, Israeli jets bombed the Palestinian Foreign Ministry and damaged surrounding houses.
The Hezbollah attack and the Israeli response raised the specter of even wider regional conflict. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel declared the raid near the northern border town of Zarit ``an act of war by the state of Lebanon against the state of Israel," and vowed to hold the Lebanese government responsible.
The clashes ended six years of relative quiet that had boosted the economy on Israel's northern border and brought a measure of relief to southern Lebanon after the long Israeli military presence. Puffs of white smoke from brush fires set by a barrage of Hezbollah missiles rose from green slopes on the Israeli side of the mountainous border, and loudspeakers in small towns ordered residents to stay inside bomb shelters.
US officials defined the conflict even more broadly, blaming Iran and Syria, backers of both Hamas and Hezbollah.
``We also hold Syria and Iran, which have provided long-standing support for Hezbollah, responsible for today's violence," White House press secretary Tony Snow said in a statement. ``Hezbollah's actions are not in the interest of the Lebanese people, whose welfare should not be held hostage to the interests of the Syrian and Iranian regimes."
Hezbollah and Hamas are both listed as terrorist groups by the United States. They oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and advocate replacing it with an Islamic state. But recently, both groups have won significant support from voters in democratic elections, and Western governments have struggled to craft a response to groups that have won a measure of popular legitimacy while attacking civilians.
Hezbollah, the Shi'ite group that won popularity fighting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, controls much of southern Lebanon and some suburbs of Beirut, and holds seats in parliament and two Cabinet positions in the Lebanese government. It has resisted government pressure to disarm.
Hamas, which pioneered suicide bombings as a tactic to fight Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, won control of the Palestinian Authority in January elections. The group has vowed not to give up its armed wing, despite international demands to disarm.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, called the attack by Hezbollah yesterday and by Hamas on June 25 ``the beginning phase of the next Middle Eastern war," which he described as ``Israel against fundamentalist Islam."
In contrast, Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah painted the attacks as the continuation of violent opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa of Syria , speaking at a joint news conference with Ali Larijani, Iran's top negotiator in its standoff with the West over its nuclear program, denied that Syria was involved and blamed Israel for the crisis. ``For sure, the occupation is the cause provoking both Lebanese and Palestinian people, and that's why there is Lebanese and Palestinian resistance," he said in Damascus.
Israeli analysts said the attack appeared to be a gamble by Hezbollah to assert itself as a regional player at a time when it is under pressure in Lebanon to disarm.
General Doron Tamir, formerly the Israeli Army's chief intelligence officer, said in an interview that Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah wants to ``send a signal to the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, and the Iranians that he's in charge and he's still conducting the revolution."
Hezbollah leaders said they would not return the two newly captured soldiers unless Israel agrees to a prisoner exchange, echoing the demands Hamas has made since the kidnapping of 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit. Israel is believed to hold only three Lebanese prisoners.
``No military operation will free them," Nasrallah declared. The group said the two were in ``a safe place."
He said the operation was planned for months, and was unrelated to the Hamas seizure of Shalit. Nasrallah said Hezbollah had no other means of forcing Israel to release its prisoners.
Publicly, Israeli officials have said they will not negotiate for the captives, but diplomatic efforts to free Shalit continue as Egypt and other mediators work through the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Israel also stepped up operations in Gaza, where at least 23 Palestinians were killed yesterday.
Reeling after three soldiers were captured in less than three weeks, the Israeli military said it would call up thousands of reservists as the army faced its most widespread fighting in years -- a sharp disappointment just a year after Israel pulled out of Gaza.
In Shomera, a town of pink stucco houses and 78 families less than two miles from the border and near the spot where the initial Hezbollah ambush took place, the Peretz family was ambivalent about how Israel should respond.
Gabriel Peretz, 48, was working yesterday afternoon on a sauna he was building out of blond wood for visitors to the bed-and-breakfast he runs with his wife, Ada, 46. But their cellphones kept ringing as guests called to cancel their stays because of the violence.
``We had six years of a quiet, beautiful life. Now everything is coming back to us, the bad situation, the bad economy," he said. ``We are afraid."
He spoke over the deafening claps of Israeli artillery firing into the Lebanese hills and tinny loudspeaker announcements ordering Shomera residents inside to avoid Hezbollah missile fire.
Israel should respond forcefully, he said, but without being drawn into a long, unpopular battle like the one he was part of as a soldier in the Lebanese war in the 1980s. He said Israel should reoccupy part of southern Lebanon, but only a few miles past the border, to capture Hezbollah outposts like the one visible from the next town, Zarit, near the site of the ambush.
At the headquarters of the Israeli military's Northern Command near Safed, operations officer Colonel Boaz Cohen declared that ``Every target in Lebanon is a legitimate target."
In the carefully coordinated attack yesterday, Hezbollah fighters hit an Israeli border patrol of two Humvees with heavy gunfire, antitank fire, and an explosive planted in the road. Three soldiers died, several others were badly wounded, and two were captured.
As Israeli forces moved into Lebanon hours later, an Israeli tank was blown up by a mine, killing four soldiers; a fifth was killed when he came under fire while trying to rescue them, the military said. Israeli airstrikes hit seven Hezbollah bases inside Lebanon as well as roads and five bridges.
Israel continued its air and sea assault today. Israeli Army Radio reported that the object of the attack on the airport was to shut down air traffic in and out of the Lebanese capital.
In 2000, Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers from a border patrol. Their bodies were later traded, along with an Israeli civilian, for hundreds of prisoners and some 50 bodies of Lebanese fighters held by Israel. The group tried another kidnapping last November near the border town of Ghajar but failed.
Fighting broke out again May 28, when a Hezbollah attack on an Israeli border post quickly escalated into an exchange of artillery and missiles that ended in a UN-brokered truce.
The prospect of a prisoner exchange has sharply divided the public. In Shomera, Gabriel Peretz said it would only invite more abductions. ``They kidnap two today, they will kidnap two more tomorrow."
His wife, Ada, disagreed. ``Why not? If he was your son?" she asked. ``I think about their parents."
Globe correspondent Matthew Kalman contributed to this story. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. 
