Is there even any doubt?

Israeli warplanes carried out pre-dawn attacks for
the third consecutive night on Beirut’s southern suburbs, a bastion of
the Shiite Hezbollah militia, police said, as Israel’s largest city Tel
Aviv braced for a rain of retaliatory rocket fire.

“…raking neighbouring areas with heavy machinegun fire,
local police said.”

The United States and France meanwhile faced
mounting pressure as they battled to overcome differences so that the
UN Security Council can pass a resolution calling for a halt to the
Middle East conflict.

The fighter-bombers struck the suburbs of Beirut five times, police
said, without immediately being able to give details of the targets.

Israeli helicopters meanwhile swarmed over the coastal town of Tyre in
south Lebanon, raking neighbouring areas with heavy machinegun fire,
local police said.

The choppers fired four missiles at the northern entry to the town, braving anti-aircraft fire.

The operation was preceded by heavy bombardments of the Tyre region,
the police added. Dozens of targets to the south and east of Tyre were
hit from the air and the sea.

Israeli warplanes had pounded areas north and south of Lebanon on Friday, killing at least 38 people.

As ambassadors from the two nations remained locked in intensive talks
in New York, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke with the French and
US presidents, Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush, a UN spokesman said.

Chirac told Annan that France was looking for “wording acceptable to
all” in a resolution being formulated to call for a halt to violence
between Israel and Hezbollah, Chirac’s office said on Friday.

And Bush and Annan discussed the diplomatic negotiations and “efforts
to create a way forward,” Bush spokesman Tony Snow said.

In the a 15-minute conversation Bush also “expressed his concern about
continued violence in Lebanon and Israel,” Snow said.

Asked whether this meant that there had been a breakthrough in talks to craft a resolution, Snow said: “No, I don’t think so.”

While the Security Council struggled to set terms for a ceasefire,
Israel said it had lost three more soldiers in combat in south Lebanon
and three civilians to missile fire inside Israel.

Rockets fired from Lebanon hit their deepest targets inside Israel,
striking the town of Hadera, just 45 kilometres (25 miles) north of the
commercial capital of Tel Aviv.

No
one was hurt in the strike some 75 kilometres (45 miles) south of
Lebanon’s frontier, Israeli television said, which came after Hezbollah
leader Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday threatened to target Tel Aviv.

Twenty-six of the civilians killed in Friday’s air raids died when
Israeli aircraft bombed the village of Qaa in northeast Lebanon, police
and Red Cross officials said.

Most of the dead were Syrian farm workers, some of whom had been loading a refrigerated vegetable truck.

The Lebanese government says more than 900 of its civilians have died.
The three civilian and three soldier deaths in Israel brought official
Israeli casualties to 44 soldiers and 30 civilians killed since the
Jewish state launched its offensive in Lebanon on July 12.

Israel claimed to have killed more than 200 Hezbollah fighters, but the militia admitted to only about 40 losses.

Israeli jets wrecked four bridges on the coastal highway leading north
from Beirut, effectively cutting the last practicable road between the
Lebanese capital and the Syrian border.

The Lebanese Red Cross said five civilians were killed and 15 were
wounded in the raids but other bodies might be trapped beneath rubble
which cascaded down the mountainside.

Seven people were killed and 10 others wounded when an Israeli air
strike hit a two-floor house in the southern Lebanese border village of
Taibeh, police said.

A senior
official with the UN Children’s Fund said the south of Lebanon faced
dire drinking water and fuel shortages which threaten the outbreak of
epidemics if Israel keeps up attacks on the country.

“The situation is getting desperate,” Paul Sherlock, a New York-based
senior advisor for emergencies on water and sanitary in UNICEF, told
AFP.

South of the capital, the
Israelis targeted the coastal suburb of Uzai, near Beirut international
airport, for the first time in their massive campaign by air, land and
sea.

Further down the Mediterranean
coast, authorities in Tel Aviv began preparing bomb shelters, with
rockets such as those fired at Hadera getting closer by the day.

“The Islamic Resistance bombarded the town of Hadera, which is 75
kilometres from the Lebanese frontier, with a salvo of Khaibar-1
rockets,” the movement’s Al-Manar television station said.

The Khaibar-1 has a much greater range and bigger warhead than the Katyusha rockets usually fired by Hezbollah.

A statement from the Islamic Resistance said the strike was “a response
to the Zionist aggressions that have hit different parts of Lebanon, in
particular certain distant regions, and the barbaric massacre of
civilians near Qaa.”

Tel Aviv, a
city of 1.5 million people, lies 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the
Lebanese border, out of range of the Katyusha and Fajr-3 rockets which
Hezbollah has fired daily into northern Israel.

Israeli public television quoted a senior military official as saying
the army would destroy all Lebanese infrastructure if Hezbollah carried
out its threat.

Israeli warplanes have already wrecked much of that infrastructure –
the government of Lebanese Premier Fuad Siniora estimates damage so far
at more than 2.5 billion dollars — and continued to do so on Friday.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said Israel would pursue its drive
against Hezbollah in south Lebanon until an international force of some
15,000 combat-ready troops was deployed there.

On Thursday, Defense Minister Amir Peretz’s spokesman said the army had
been ordered to prepare to take control of southern Lebanon.

In Tel Aviv, an army spokeswoman said Israeli ground troops were
operating around 20 border villages in a bid to push Hezbollah fighters
further north.

Interior Minister
Roni Bar-On said the Israeli military now controls a strip of land up
to eight kilometres (five miles) deep in southern Lebanon, adding that
the ground operation involved “six regiments” or around 10,000 troops.

The main thrust of Israeli operations on Friday morning was from the air.

The main bridge was near the “Casino du Liban” in the Mediterranean
port of Junieh — the heartland of Christian Lebanon 20 kilometers (12
miles) north of Beirut but politically and culturally a million miles
from the Shiite suburbs that are the fief of Hezbollah.

Large plumes of smoke billowed into the sky as two of the bridges collapsed and Lebanese troops blocked traffic.

The air strikes punched gaping holes into the other two bridges,
destroyed several cars and buses and set off large fires on the
mountain flanks.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/08/04/060805025946.f8hpni1g.html