DRIPPING blood, the row of dead men’s boots sat atop the cemetery wall where their owners died, blasted apart by the deadliest Hezbollah rocket attack of the three-week war.

Twelve Israeli reservists were killed in Kfar Giladi yesterday, when a Katyusha, fired during one of Hezbollah’s most intense bombardments, scored a direct hit on one of the cars in which the soldiers were waiting in this hilltop kibbutz, two miles from the Lebanon border.

“The Katyusha fell between them — all the bodies were in one big pile,” said an Israeli photographer who arrived on the scene within minutes.

The destruction intensified on both sides of the border, with Hezbollah last night firing a barrage of rockets on the northern city of Haifa. Three people were killed and 160 were injured.

Israel killed at least 19 people in southern Lebanon with intensive air and artillery strikes. Land batteries in northern Israel pummelled the area throughout the day, at times firing more than one high- explosive shell a second.

Ground fighting continued along the Lebanon border, while officials in south Lebanon reported that some villages were bombed non-stop for half an hour. In Beirut Israeli F16 jets fired more than half a dozen missiles into the southern districts.

United Nations officials said that two civilians died when an airstrike hit a pick-up truck travelling just in front of a UN aid convoy heading for the southern city of Tyre.

Israel also claimed to have caught and interrogated one of the Hezbollah fighters who helped to seize two Israeli soldiers during a cross-border raid on July 12 — the event which sparked the war.

Hezbollah appeared determined to show that its rocket launchers remain intact despite Israel’s 26-day offensive. The Shia group fired about 150 missiles into Israel yesterday, into Haifa, Kiryat Shemona and across the Sea of Galilee. But Israeli jets last night attacked the Lebanese town of Qana and destroyed the launchers that fired rockets on Haifa, as well as launchers in Tyre, the Army said.

By far the deadliest attack was on Kfar Giladi, where the rocket appeared to have landed on the soldiers’ car, blasting football-sized holes in it. The hatchback was destroyed and the blaze incinerated an adjacent vehicle, leaving charred wrecks outside the graveyard where Joseph Trumpeldor, the early Zionist fighter who was killed during a battle between Arabs and early Jewish settlers in the 1920s, is buried. His dying words were: “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.”

Emerging from their bomb shelters, the kibbutzniks rushed to evacuate the wounded. They shook their heads with anger, but also with bewilderment that the soldiers did not heed the sirens — clearly audible even from The Times’s hotel near by. “I saw the whole situation,” said Gidon Giladi, as he sought protection from further rocket attacks inside abandoned military fortifications in the kibbutz that was founded by his grandfather. “It was really horrible. I could not count the bodies. They arrived here last night and parked right here. They were reservists, on their way to Lebanon.

“We were waiting for the shells to fall down, and they did. We had a feeling it was very, very close. Then we heard from one of our emergency crew that a car was burnt up, so we went to extinguish the fire.

“We in the north are used to this so we know how to behave when the siren sounds. I am afraid that this shouldn’t have happened.”

As he spoke, ambulances raced through the black smoke down the hill to a makeshift helicopter landing pad, where military helicopters rushed the worst injured of the bandaged survivors to hospital in Haifa.

The attack exacted the highest death toll of the conflict in Israel — the previous highest being eight railway mechanics killed in Haifa last month. Hezbollah has now killed 58 Israeli soldiers and 34 civilians.

As religious volunteers conducted a search to recover and bag every particle of flesh, according to Jewish burial traditions, Major Zvika Golan, of the Israel Defence Forces’ Northern Command, said that the deadly missile had been packed with steel balls or bullets that scattered on impact, lacerating everything for 20 to 30 metres.

Told of the deaths during the weekly meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, said: “Lucky that we are dealing with Hezbollah today, and not in another two or three years.”

Haim Ramon, Israel’s Justice Minister, said that the Israeli military would continue to attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, and that its soldiers would stay there until an international force arrived. “We must continue the fighting, continue to hit whoever we can hit from Hezbollah,” he told Israel Army Radio.

However, Lebanese officials point out that Israel’s targets have included bridges and roads, as well as ports, airports, factories and farms.

Last night Israeli forces killed two Palestinians — one in the Gaza Strip and the other in the West Bank — and detained Aziz Dweik, the parliamentary speaker and a Hamas leader, Palestinian officials said.

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