400,000 Flee Israeli Attacks 10% Of Lebanese Are Refugees; Hezbollah Vows To Create ‘Fiery Hell’

Fear-stricken residents driven by the threat of Israeli bombings fled this city by the tens of thousands Sunday, swelling Lebanon’s refugee population to more than 400,000 - 10 percent of the population.

It was the fourth day of an escalating Israeli campaign to force the Lebanese government to rein in Hezbollah guerrillas.

This normally bustling southern port city was turned into a desolate zone of abandoned buildings, closed shops and vacant streets after Israel issued an extraordinary overnight warning that the city of 250,000 had been added to the target list.

With more than 20 dead and 61 wounded since Thursday in Lebanon, Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath against Hezbollah continued at a frenzied pace, pitting the high-tech arsenal of the Jewish state against primitive but relentless barrages of old Russian rockets.

Defiant Iranian-backed Islamic guerrillas fired more than 45 Katyusha rockets into northern Israel on Sunday, their biggest single day of rocketing in three years.

In many ways, the battle has become an eye-for-an-eye affair.

For every Hezbollah rocket, Israel launches an air raid. For every instance of Hezbollah rocket damage to Israel, Israel retaliates to inflict the same type of damage.

Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, pledged that his movement would respond by turning Israel into a “fiery hell.” He said 300 suicide bombers are on their way to southern Lebanon and that they will strike Israel abroad as well.

Israeli military intelligence chief Moshe Yaalon confirmed that Israel is bracing for possible Hezbollah suicide bombs, car bombs or even explosives sent into Israel on hang gliders.

In Tyre, most of the residents immediately raced to abandon the city in cars, trucks, buses, ambulances, tractors, livestock wagons and anything else that moved after hearing a midnight warning broadcast by Israel’s proxy South Lebanon Army.

Israel had told residents of about 90 surrounding towns and villages that they risked shells and bombings if they remained.

Including Tyre itself, the area is home to 500,000 people, and officials estimate that up to 400,000 people have fled the area.

“Our house has been demolished. We were already hiding on the road last night when it happened,” said Manifi Ataway, a 65-year-old refugee of the village of Sawaneh, clutching her 2-year-old granddaughter tightly.

Her extended family was piled into a battered open-backed truck - five people in the front seat and about 15 standing in the back - caught in a traffic jam north of Sidon.

“Frustration, pain and torture,” she said bitterly at the thought of leaving behind her farm for the second time; the family also had fled an Israeli invasion in 1982.

“Whenever Israel and Hezbollah are mad at each other, we pay the price,” said Kassem Reda Ali, a 68-year-old farmer fleeing his home.

“Why prolong our agony?” he asked. “Just throw us in the sea.”

Zayneb Duhainy, a Shiite Muslim housewife, hugged her 4-year-old son and blamed the United States for not intervening to stop the Israeli offensive.

“When Kuwait was invaded, the U.S.A. rushed to its aid,” she said. “Are the Kuwaitis human beings and we’re animals?”

“We are not happy to see people abandoning the villages, but we had no choice,” said Israeli chief of staff Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, briefing reporters on the day’s operations.

“The Lebanese regime will have to decide who is in control, whether Hezbollah is in control. The Lebanese in general will have to decide how they want to live.”

The mass exodus is reminiscent of the last major Israeli strike against Hezbollah, a weeklong offensive in July 1993 that killed 130 Lebanese, wounded about 500 and uprooted half a million people.

Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, speaking on television Sunday, said the military campaign is justified by Hezbollah’s recurring attacks on Israel with crudely inaccurate but highly mobile Katyusha missiles.

The Lebanese government does not take part in the attacks but considers itself too weak to disarm the guerrillas, whose struggle to dislodge Israel from a self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon has broad popular support.

In Israel, the military campaign is being regarded as a technical and political success for the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

“Nobody in Israel harbors illusions that the operations will bring about the liquidation of Hezbollah as a military organization,” the Haaretz newspaper said. Rather, officials think that by slowly putting an intolerable squeeze on Lebanon, they will force the government and its Syrian sponsors to seek negotiations. In those talks, Israel will demand “an absolute end” to the firing of Katyushas by Hezbollah.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: WHY ATTACK LEBANON? Hezbollah has found a safe harbor and broad political support in Lebanon while receiving sponsorship from Syria. Israel hopes the attacks will make Lebanon demand that Syria halt its sponsorship of the terrorists., And with Israeli elections six weeks away, Prime Minister Shimon Peres wants to prove he can protect Israel’s security.