Israeli soldiers killed in close-quarters fighting
The Israel Defense Forces also reported at least 22 were wounded in the close-quarters fighting in Bint Jbeil, which the Israeli military has named Hezbollah's "terror capital" and which Israel said on Tuesday was under its control.
Israeli soldiers returning to northern Israel afte
July 27, 2006 11:15 AM
nd Hezbollah resistance was strong in Bint Jbeil.
More Israeli troops are on their way to the area, the IDF said.
The Israeli soldiers reported heavy casualties among Hezbollah fighters.
Hezbollah has not released casualty figures since the fighting began, after the group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid July 12.
Smoke was rising Wednesday from the center of the southern Lebanese city of Tyre after huge explosions were heard that seemed to come from there.
Hundreds of foreign nationals; including Americans, Canadians, Britons and Australians; left Tyre Wednesday for Cyprus on board a ship chartered by the Canadian government.
Israel denies U.N. hit was deliberate
Meanwhile, emotions ran high Wednesday after four U.N. observers died in southern Lebanon in what the U.N. secretary-general said was an "apparently deliberate" Israeli airstrike.
Israel angrily denied the accusation.
The observers, with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), were killed when an Israeli bomb made a direct hit on their bunker in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. They had called an Israeli military liaison about 10 times in the six hours before they died to warn that the aerial attacks were getting close to their position, according to a U.N. officer.
Lebanese security sources told CNN Wednesday at least three precision-guided bombs were dropped by Israeli aircraft on the U.N. observers' bunker.
A Western diplomat familiar with preliminary U.N. assessments of the scene also said that it appeared the weapon that hit the bunker was precision-guided.
But Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni denied that the strike was deliberate.
"Of course it was not a deliberate action," she said.
U.S. Welcomes Israeli investigation
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and "expressed his regret at this tragedy in Lebanon."
"We are pleased that the government of Israel has announced that it will conduct an immediate investigation," said U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton. "We expect it will be thorough and highly professional."
"The government of Israel has definitively said that they were not deliberately targeting the UNIFIL outpost," Bolton continued. "We certainly take them at their word and note that there's no evidence to the contrary."
Annan was attending tense diplomatic talks with key Middle East figures in Rome. Those negotiations -- being held to agree to a plan to halt the hostilities in Lebanon -- have failed, according to sources involved in the talks and sources in Jerusalem and Washington.
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