Israeli air attacks kill nine in Lebanon

TYRE (Lebanon): Israeli warplanes killed nine people, including five children, early today in raids on Lebanon as the Jewish state showed no sign of easing its blistering air campaign in which over 1,000 people -- mostly civilians -- have died.

The military said its air force overnight had carried out over 100 raids around Beirut and the south of Lebanon targeting what it called "Hezbollah buildings", destroying four rocket launchers and targeting several launch sites.

Hassan Sader -- a political member of Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah -- his wife and his five children died under the rubble when the four-storey building where they lived collapsed after a bombing raid by Israeli planes, police said.

Two people were killed and 15 wounded in an Israeli strike on the southern Lebanon Palestinian refugee camp of Ain Al Hilweh, the first time Israel has bombarded the Palestinian refugee camp.

The camp is the largest in Lebanon and home to some 50,000 people. Two shells fell near the home of Colonel Munir Maqdah, a radical military chief of the Fatah movement in Lebanon, Palestinian sources said.

Victims were pulled out of a house destroyed by the strike in the north of the camp near Sidon, the main city of south Lebanon. They were taken to three hospitals as rescue efforts continued to try to find any others trapped inside.