40 farm workers killed or injured by Israeli airstrike
An Israeli missile hit farm workers loading vegetables into a refrigerator truck near the Lebanon-Syria border today, killing or wounding as many as 40 people, the workers’ foreman said.
The Lebanese and Kurdish farm labourers were in a field in a strip of no-man’s land along the border, foreman Rabei al-Jabali said.
He said 40 casualties were taken to a hospital in Syria, because roads in Lebanon were cut off by Israeli airstrikes earlier today.
Earlier, Hezbollah guerrillas hammered northern Israel with a barrage of 45 rockets within a half hour, killing two Israelis.
One rocket crashed into a house in the Arab village of Mughar, near the town of Tiberias, claiming one woman and seriously wounding a second person, police said.
A second Israeli died in the town of Kiryat Shemona, police said.
At least four people were wounded in Kiryat Shemona, Safed and Kfar Horpash.
The latest casualties came after eight Israelis were killed in two northern towns yesterday, one of the heaviest civilian casualty tolls since fighting erupted on July 12. It raised the death toll to 29 Israeli civilians killed by the missiles.
Police commander Dan Ronen said 45 rockets rained onto towns across the north within one half-hour period, and the rockets continued to fall after that initial barrage, reaching 120 by mid-afternoon.
The events pointed to a new tactic of Hezbollah militiamen, who appear to co-ordinate the firing of a huge number of rockets at one time, rather than sending off isolated missiles. Some of the rockets can carry as much as 132lbs of high explosives and hold as many as 50,000 metal ball bearings.
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