Friday September 5 11:18 AM EDT

Eleven Israeli Soldiers Killed, One Missing

By Paul Holmes

JERUSALEM (Reuter) - Israel said 11 marine commandos were killed early on
Friday and a 12th was missing and presumed dead after its costliest clash in
Lebanon since at least 1985.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a thorough investigation into the
disaster, which an army statement said occurred during an operation north of
the city of Tyre that was countered by "terrorists."

It followed by about 10 hours the killing of four young Israelis in a triple
suicide bombing in the heart of Jerusalem.

Netanyahu, responding to the double trauma, vowed that Israel would not bow
to "depraved terrorists."

"These murderers will not annihilate Israel," Netanyahu said in a statement.

A former commando himself, he later told a news conference that there would
be a full investigation into why the Lebanon operation went so badly wrong.

He called it the worst such incident he could recall "in 20 years of
following these things" but said it would not prompt a radical re-think of
Israel's military policies in Lebanon.

The clash took place outside a 15-km (nine-mile)-deep security zone which
Israel occupies in south Lebanon.

The death toll was the highest since Israel pulled the bulk of its 1982
invasion forces out of Lebanon in 1985 and established the zone with the
declared aim of protecting northern Israel from guerrilla raids.

"As long as there are attacks against us in an attempt to harm the state of
Israel and settlements in the north...we have no choice but to take
defensive measures inside Lebanon itself," Netanyahu said. "This policy will
not change."

The missing man was presumed to have been blown up when the commando force
ran into attack from high-powered explosives and gunfire, the army said.
Four men were wounded, one seriously, the army said. Most of the soldiers
were aged 20 to 22.

The statement gave no details about the operation in which the force was
engaged. Israel has frequently mounted undercover raids north of its
security zone against Hizbollah guerrillas.

Opposition Labour Party leader Ehud Barak, a former Israeli chief of staff,
told Israel army radio that the missing soldier was probably carrying
explosives on his back that blew up during the clash.

News photographers in Lebanon took pictures of a Lebanese soldier holding
the charred and severed head of an Israeli after the clashes in the village
of Ansariyeh, south Lebanon.

In Beirut, Hizbollah secretary general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said the
radical Shi'ite group was holding no live Israeli prisoners.

"We have parts of bodies including four legs and half a head...which we will
make use of in the framework of future swaps," he told a news conference.

In Lebanon, a security source said Lebanese army troops and guerrillas from
Hizbollah and the Shi'ite Moslem Amal Movement battled the Israeli
commandos.

A Lebanese army statement said civilians also took part in the clashes. It
said the fighting killed a woman and a young girl and wounded six other
civilians.

Friday's army statement said a search-and-rescue operation went on until
almost dawn to evacuate dead and wounded but found no trace of the missing
soldier, strengthening the belief that he "was apparently killed in the
blast."

Netanyahu called the dead soldiers Israel's finest combat troops and said
the four Israelis killed in the suicide bombings, claimed by the Moslem
militant group Hamas, were the flower of the country's youth.

Three were schoolgirls, 14, and the fourth a man aged 20.

"Israel is engaged right now in a dual front against terrorists who want to
destroy the Jewish state," Netanyahu said. "By their own statements (they)
are interested neither in peace nor in seeing any Jews living here in the
Middle East."

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