Israeli air strike kills 40, including 21 children

QANA, Lebanon, July 30 (Reuters) An Israeli air strike killed at least 40 Lebanese civilians, including 21 children, in the southern village of Qana today, in the bloodiest single attack during Israel's 19-day-old war on Hizbollah.

Lebanese Red Cross workers covered the corpse of one dead child with a blanket. A woman in a red-patterned dress lay crumpled and lifeless in the broken masonry. A leg poked out from the rubble nearby. A child lay dead in the street.

Several houses collapsed and a three-storey building where about 100 civilians were sheltering was destroyed, witnesses and rescue workers said.

Israel's military said it had warned residents of Qana to leave and said Hizbollah bore responsibility for using it to fire rockets at the Jewish state.

Distraught people in Qana screamed in grief and anger amid the rubble of wrecked buildings.

People scrabbled at slabs of concrete with their bare hands to try to reach those still buried in the debris.

The bodies they pulled out included those of a baby and a 70-year-old man.

Ibrahim Shalloub, speechless with distress, was desperately looking for his sister, still buried under the rubble.

Qana is already a potent symbol of Lebanese civilian deaths at the hands of Israel's military.

In April 1996, Israeli shelling killed more than 100 civilians sheltering at the base of U.N. peacekeepers in the village during Israel's ''Grapes of Wrath'' bombing campaign.

Reuters SP VP1248