Massacre Prompts Call For Cease-Fire Israeli Shells Kill Scores At U.N. Base

The eight-day Israeli-Hezbollah war changed irrevocably Thursday. Now it is about human carnage. Now it is about the deaths of people who had sought refuge from the war.

Israeli artillery shells, fired in retaliation for a rocket barrage, slammed into a U.N. compound filled with hundreds of refugees near Tyre in southern Lebanon, killing at least 90 people, many of them women and children, and wounding at least 100.

The blasts of several 155 mm artillery shells turned the shelter into a bloody nightmare of dismembered bodies. Lebanese camera teams recorded gruesome images of dead children being zipped into body bags, grief-stricken parents and hospital floors slick with blood. U.N. relief workers cried and hugged one another for support as they went about their tasks.

An older man pounded his temples and wailed, “God, why did they do this to us? Why did they do this to us? Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“I couldn’t count the bodies,” Mikael Lindvall, a U.N. official who visited the compound shortly after the attack, said in an interview. “There were babies without heads. There were people without arms and legs.”

Suddenly, Israel faces the prospect of near-global condemnation if it continues its pace of shelling.

And suddenly, the United States began rethinking strategy. Up to now, the Clinton administration, in lock step with Israel, had focused only on blaming Hezbollah for the war.

On arrival in St. Petersburg, Russia, Thursday, Clinton called on both sides to observe an immediate ceasefire, saying it has become “painfully clear” the border conflict must end.

U.S. officials announced Secretary of State Warren Christopher will travel to the Middle East on Saturday, breaking off from Clinton’s traveling party in Russia in a peacekeeping attempt.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres of Israel, responding to Clinton’s call in a CNN interview, said Israel is ready to implement a cease-fire immediately if Hezbollah also agrees to halt its rocket attacks against Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon and towns in Israel. “I think we can negotiate a solution or an agreement without shooting at each other,” Peres said. “There is no need for fire in order to reach an agreement.”

There was no immediate response from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed political party and militia that draws most of its membership from Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims.

The shelling at the U.N. installation instantly compounded the price Lebanese civilians have paid during Israel’s intensive wave of assaults, designed to punish Hezbollah guerrillas for their attacks on Israeli troops in an Israeli-occupied portion of southern Lebanon and their cross-border rocketing of towns in Israel’s northern Galilee region.

In a separate incident Thursday morning near the southern Lebanese market town of Nabatiyah, an Israeli air attack killed 11 people, including a mother, her 4-day-old baby and six other children, according to Lebanese news reports. The death toll from the Israeli campaign now stands at about 150, most of them Lebanese civilians, according to unofficial U.N. and Lebanese estimates. The guerrilla rocket attacks have injured about 50 Israelis, but no one has been killed in Israel.

Israeli officials expressed regret for Thursday’s shelling but blamed the tragedy on guerrillas from Hezbollah. In Jerusalem, officials said Israeli gunners were trying to hit Hezbollah fighters who moments earlier had fired Katyusha rockets toward Israel from a position estimated by U.N. spokesmen as lying 350 to 400 yards from the compound.

“We don’t want to see any woman, or child or Lebanese civilian killed, but they are the victims of Hezbollah,” Peres told reporters.

U.N. spokesman Lindvall estimated the number of dead at 94. Other accounts from Lebanese rescue teams and police around Tyre ranged from 75 to more than 100. The precise total was difficult to establish because bodies, many of them in pieces, were taken to several hospitals.

U.N. officials accused the Israeli gunners of disregarding the safety of the refugees and noted they had repeatedly protested to the Israeli army in recent days after incidents in which Israeli shelling imperiled civilians and U.N. personnel.

After a surge in Hezbollah attacks on the Israeli-occupied border strip and northern Israel in recent months, Israel began its offensive April 11 in an effort to force the Lebanese and Syrian governments to rein in Hezbollah guerrillas. Hezbollah says it is fighting to drive Israeli troops from the Lebanese territory they occupy as what Israel calls its “security zone.”

Syria keeps 35,000 troops elsewhere in Lebanon and exercises decisive influence on important government decisions here. In addition, Israeli and U.S. officials have said Hezbollah supplies from Iran pass through Syria and on to southern Lebanon through Syrian-controlled areas in the Bekaa Valley.

Since warning residents of southern Lebanon to leave, Israel has pounded towns and villages with 3,000 to 4,000 artillery shells and 50 to 100 airstrikes a day, according to U.N. estimates. Although most residents of southern Lebanon have heeded the warning, some have stayed behind in their homes or sought refuge nearby in U.N. compounds manned by peacekeeping troops.

In addition to attacking the sources of Hezbollah fire, Israeli warplanes and helicopter gunships have destroyed Lebanese infrastructure, including two major electric power stations for Beirut, and blasted Hezbollah offices and residences in the capital’s Shiite-inhabited southern suburbs. Israeli warships have blockaded major Lebanese ports, searching arriving ships in a blow to the country’s commerce and to its hope of recovering from a long civil war and previous Israeli invasions.

Israel has said it is taking pains to avoid civilian casualties while reserving the right to strike Hezbollah targets wherever they reveal themselves. Saturday, an Israeli helicopter rocketed what Israeli officials said was an ambulance used by Hezbollah for military operations, killing two women and four children, including a 2-month-old baby. The driver and father of three of the dead children denied any Hezbollah connection.

The U.N. compound hit in Thursday’s incident sits in the village of Qana, about six miles southeast of the port city of Tyre. The compound serves as the battalion headquarters for Fijian peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon. Since the offensive began, it also had become a refuge for about 400 civilians, many of whom were staying in an open-sided thatch-roofed hut normally used as a recreation hall, according to Lindvall.