MOHAMMED AKKASH’S voice cracked as he listed the names of ten grandchildren killed just hours earlier in an Israeli air raid on his son’s home. “The youngest one, Safat, was just six months old. Is a six-month-old baby a resistance fighter?” he asked bitterly.

A paunchy man with grizzled crew cut, short white beard and weather-beaten face, Mr Akkash stared at the ground as he sat outside his home beneath an awning erected to protect mourners from the noon sun.

Before dawn his son, Sayyed Adil Akkash, a 41-year-old Shia Muslim cleric allegedly connected to Lebanon’s Hezbollah party, had been killed with his wife and 10 children when as many as four missiles struck his three-storey home on a stony hillside outside the village of Doueir.

The missiles levelled the building, leaving only a pile of rubble and twisted steel rods. A nearby field of green tobacco plants was coated in a thick layer of dark grey dust.

It took rescue workers two hours to extract the victims’ remains. “The first one they brought in was just three years old. They brought her in pieces,” said a spokesman for the Sheikh Ragheb Harb Hospital, a Hezbollah-funded institution.

“There’s nothing that can justify this,” said Hassan Ramal, a neighbour. “Israel is acting the same way it is in Gaza. Why did they hit a house full of children? Is this how Ehud Olmert takes his revenge?”

ISRAEL

MONICA LERER died just after 7am yesterday as she sat in a plastic chair on her fifth-floor balcony in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, savouring the cool of the early morning and the breeze off the Mediterranean.

A Katyusha rocket fired by Hezbollah militants from across the Lebanese border six miles to the north smashed through two storeys of her modern apartment block in Nightingale Street. It destroyed her balcony, sending it crashing down to the floor below.

Moments earlier police had told residents to get in their shelters. Most of Mrs Lerer’s neighbours dutifully descended to their fortified bunkers before the arrival of the first Hezbollah missiles. Why the 40-year-old Argentinian immigrant stayed put is a mystery.

“We we saw her lying on the balcony one floor down,” said Moshe Arad, her neighbour. “It looked like a direct hit on her.”

Mrs Lerer arrived in Israel three years ago with a wave of Jewish immigrants who fled Argentina’s economic crisis. Her husband was away from home at the time of her death, as were two of her three children.

Relatives said they did not yet know whether Mrs Lerer would be buried in Israel or Argentina, but her death looked certain to perpetuate the Middle East’s endless cycle of violence.

“We have to go into Lebanon and hit them very, very hard,” declared Edward Zorkin, 57, a neighbour. “We have to kill all the Arabs there.”

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