Retaliatory Rockets Rain on Israel; 3 Hurt

JERUSALEM — Guerrillas in Lebanon fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday, wounding three people in retaliation for a deadly strike on a Lebanese city by pro-Israeli militia members the day before.

The attacks, both aimed at civilians, were the heaviest on each side of the border in 16 months, unnerving Israeli leaders already struggling against terrorism.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu interrupted a Mediterranean vacation to visit the rocket-shattered border settlement of Kiryat Shemona and warn that Israel will “respond severely” to attacks on civilians.

But his government appeared to be making every effort to avoid an escalation, and a presidential aide said there will be no broad Israeli retaliation unless the strikes from Lebanon continue.

For nearly three weeks, since two suicide bombings in a Jerusalem market killed 16 people, the government’s top priority has been to try to force Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to act against terrorists opposed to an Arab-Israeli peace settlement. Israeli officials, however, are increasingly worried about tensions along the border with Lebanon.

Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim guerrilla group, is fighting to oust Israeli troops and their South Lebanon Army militia allies from southern Lebanon. The Israelis in 1985 set up a 9-mile-deep “security zone” there with the declared aim of keeping the guerrillas out of northern Israel.

In April 1996, after a 17-day Israeli offensive in which at least 150 Lebanese died, Israel and Hezbollah agreed to stop targeting noncombatants in their conflict.

This week’s violence, the worst breach of that accord, started Monday with the bombing of a car in southern Lebanon. It killed two teenagers, the son and daughter of a South Lebanon Army militia unit commander who had died four years earlier in a similar explosion.

Blaming Hezbollah for the bombing, the militia struck back the same day, firing mortar and artillery that killed six civilians in Sidon, a Lebanese provincial capital that had suffered little in the past two years of fighting.

Israeli defense officials and U.N. monitors along the border said a rogue commander of the South Lebanon Army, which is trained and financed by Israel, launched the strike on his own from the nearby Christian town of Jezzine.

But Hezbollah, claiming that Israel had given the orders, retaliated by firing about 80 Katyusha rockets toward Israeli territory, according to Timor Goksel, spokesman for the U.N. Interim Forces in Lebanon. He said at least half the rockets landed in Israel.

“At 7 o’clock we heard on the news that it’s quiet, everything’s OK,” a resident of Kiryat Shemona told Israel’s Army Radio. “And then precisely three or four minutes later there was a barrage of Katyushas, at least 20 or 30.”

Three Israeli civilians were wounded and a fourth was treated for shock. The rockets, falling in three waves between 7 and 9 a.m., demolished homes, damaged crops and drove thousands of people into underground shelters in Kiryat Shemona and western Galilee. Vacationers fled or canceled reservations, ending a booming vacation season for northern Israeli hotels.

“This is something we cannot tolerate,” Netanyahu declared. “We have a simple principle. If there is quiet on the Israeli side of the border, there will be quiet on the Lebanese side.”

Israeli officials coupled the warning, however, with unusual public criticism of the attack on civilians in Sidon, which Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai called “totally against Israeli policy.”

Netanyahu appealed to Syria, the power broker in Lebanon, to curb Hezbollah. A guerrilla leader in Beirut, the Lebanese capital, declared the group ready to oblige if Israel assures the safety of civilians in Lebanon.

A Netanyahu aide said that because Tuesday’s rocket attack against Israelis caused few casualties and was provoked by “an act of local rage,” Israel is prepared “to consider it a passing incident and call it a day” instead of retaliating.