Fresh Hizbollah rocket attacks kill 2 in Israel

NAHARIYA, Israel, July 14 (Reuters) Scores of rockets fired by Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon slammed into northern Israel today, killing two people including a child and wounding more than 50, officials and medics said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said the heaviest bombardment in a decade ''cannot and will not be allowed to continue'' as fury mounted inside the Jewish state.

''Israel will not tolerate a continuation of these rocket attacks and will take whatever steps are necessary to bring them to a halt,'' said David Baker, an official in Olmert's office.

Four Israelis have now been killed and nearly 150 wounded in rocket barrages since violence escalated after Hizbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others on Wednesday in a cross-border raid.

Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed 66 people, almost all civilians. At least 200 have been wounded.

An Israeli woman and child were killed when a rocket hit a house in the Mount Meron area, medics said.

Officials have ordered tens of thousands of residents into bomb shelters. Some have crammed their families and belongings into cars and headed south instead. Many streets are empty.

Israeli radio stations have opened frequencies for northern residents that only broadcast warnings of incoming rocket attacks and other messages related to the crisis.

In the wake of Hizbollah's stepped-up attacks today, Olmert's security chiefs approved fresh reprisal raids.

More than 300 short-range Katyusha rockets have fallen on 20 Israeli towns since Hizbollah's initial cross-border incursion.

At least 20 people were wounded by rockets that fell on the coastal city of Nahariya today, some 10 km south of the Lebanese border, medics said.

One rocket smashed into a house in the town of Safed, 15 km (10 miles) from the border, wounding 10.

''The rockets have been fired to intimidate us,''Nahariya Mayor Jackie Sabag told Israel Radio.

Ratcheting up the stakes, two rockets were fired into Israel's third-largest city of Haifa last night, the deepest strike into Israeli territory.

Hizbollah denied responsibility for the attacks, which hurt no one. Haifa is 35 km south of the Lebanese border.

Israel has said the Haifa raid was a ''red line''.

''We will destroy Hizbollah's capabilities, from the level of its infrastructure but also its personalities,'' Interior Minister Roni Bar-On told Israel's Channel 1 television.

The Israeli army pulled out of southern Lebanon in 2000, 22 years after it moved in to fight Palestinian guerrillas who controlled a border strip.

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