Israeli bombing breaks humanitarian law

Smoke billows following an Israeli air strike in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam Saturday. Israeli warplanes continued southern and eastern Lebanon bombing yesterday after troops in tanks and armoured cars punched across the border and seized a village, intensifying the war on Hezbollah despite mounting concern over the plight of civilians. PHOTO: AFP

"It is horrific. I did not know it was block after block of houses," Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, told reporters as he toured the shattered Haret Hreik district. "It makes it a violation of humanitarian law."

"It's bigger, it's more extensive than I even could imagine," he said, surveying a pile of rubble.

Israeli warplanes have pounded the area nearly every night since its war with Hezbollah began on July 12.

It was last hit early on Sunday, said the few residents not to have fled the usually packed area.

Egeland said between half a million and a million people were in need of international assistance in Lebanon, but delivering aid required safe access. "So far Israel is not giving us access," he said.

Egeland plans to travel to Israel on Tuesday to negotiate safe corridors by land, sea and air. He has estimated that $100 million is urgently needed to help avert a humanitarian crisis.

"There is definitely a humanitarian crisis unfolding in Lebanon," he said. Israel's bombardment of its northern neighbour has killed 359 people, mostly civilians.

Egeland leafed through the pages of books scattered among the rubble in the Shia Muslim quarter, where air raids have flattened a Hezbollah compound of buildings and destroyed homes.

Two veiled women carrying possessions in plastic bags made their way past the UN official.

"We are setting up a major relief operation but the violence has to stop," Egeland said, calling for a halt to the war.

"The rockets going into Israel have to stop," he said. "The enormous bombardment that we have seen here with one block after another being levelled has to stop."

The Israeli government said the military was trying to be as precise as possible in its operations in Lebanon.

"The Lebanese people are not our enemy. We cannot sit idly by while Hezbollah terrorists launch rockets at our towns and cities," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.

Hezbollah attacks and rockets have killed 37 Israelis. The war was sparked by the group's abduction of two Israeli soldiers in a raid into Israel.

Egeland said the United Nations was planning to deliver aid using a fleet of trucks and by ship into Beirut and the southern city of Tire.

"We're particularly worried for this area of Beirut and for the southern part of the country," he said.

"There are wounded who do not get sufficient treatment. There are people who do not have safe drinking water. There are, first and foremost, tens of thousands of people who are now being besieged, or in areas (of) cross fire," he said.

"It is costing too many lives and it will not lead to a solution in the south. There is no military solution to these things, it is only a political solution."

He also echoed criticism from other UN officials over the Israeli military response, which has already killed at least 350 people in Lebanon.

The Israeli military response has been "disproportionate, when to my thinking one third of the wounded and killed are women and children, then it clearly goes far beyond responding to armed groups", he said.

Egeland, who was set to visit Israel on Tuesday and the Gaza Strip too, also expressed alarm over the humanitarian situation in Gaza amid the Israeli offensive there.

The Palestinian people are also in "in its gravest hour of need in many years. We need a more effective relief effort there and we need Israel to enable the relief effort more effectively," he said.