Israel pounds Lebanon, Hizbollah rockets hit Haifa

BEIRUT, July 18 (Reuters) Israeli warplanes today battered Lebanon, killing 31 people, and more Hizbollah rockets hit northern Israel, killing one, with no sign that diplomacy would halt the week-old conflict any time soon.

Civilians on both sides were angry about the bombardment that has cost 235 lives in Lebanon and 13 in Israel, but Israeli and Hizbollah leaders showed no willingness to halt the fighting or heed proposals for a new U.N.-backed stabilisation force.

''I don't even know where our neighbourhood was,'' said a Lebanese Shi'ite, looking for where his home had been on the edge of a bomb-blasted Hizbollah compound in southern Beirut.

''They're still bombarding the area to grind it to dust. What kind of crime is this?'' said the man, giving his name as Hassan.

Israelis, stunned by Hizbollah rocket attacks, said they wanted their army to smash the guerrilla group and most favoured killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a poll showed.

''We are killing those we need to kill,'' said Hanna Dehan, 60, speaking near the city of Haifa, where eight people were killed on Sunday when a Hizbollah rocket hit a train station.

A rocket attack on the northern Israeli town of Nahariya killed one person today. Other Hizbollah rockets hit Haifa.

In Lebanon, nine family members, including children, were killed in an air strike on their house in Aitaroun village. Ten people were killed in strikes in the south and the Bekaa Valley.

Warplanes bombed a Lebanese army barracks east of Beirut, killing 11 soldiers, including four officers, and wounding 30.

A truck carrying medical supplies donated by the United Arab Emirates was hit and its driver killed en route from Damascus.

Hizbollah said another of its fighters had been killed, only the fourth such death it has acknowledged in the past week.

While U.N. peace envoys held talks in Israel, the Israeli army was refusing to rule out a ground invasion, only six years after it ended a 22-year occupation of south Lebanon.

''At this stage we do not think we have to activate massive ground forces into Lebanon but if we have to do this, we will,'' Moshe Kaplinsky, Israel's deputy army chief, told Israel Radio.

He said the offensive, launched after Hizbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight in a cross-border raid on July 12, would require weeks to complete its goals.

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