HEZBOLLAH increased its conflict with Israel yesterday by firing a new long-range Khybar missile 30 miles (50km)into the Jewish state.

The attack raised fears that the group may be preparing to carry out a threat by its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, to strike south of Haifa, and even to Tel Aviv.

Israeli police confirmed that “at least one missile of unknown type” landed in Afula, just south of Nazareth. They said that it was packed with a 100kg warhead and had a range of 60 miles.

However, bomb disposal experts quickly established that it was not the most feared weapon in Hezbollah’s arsenal, the Iranian Zelzal rocket which has a 400kg warhead and a range of 130 miles.

Hezbollah’s al-Manar radio station announced the launch with a fanfare, saying that it had fired five Khybar 1 missiles — which are named after a Jewish tribe near Medina and the battle in which they fought early followers of the Prophet Muhammad.

However, Israeli experts said that the missiles might simply have been renamed Fajers. Hezbollah has already used the Iranian-made Fajer-3 to hit Haifa, but has not yet used the longer-ranger Fajer-5.

Elsewhere Hezbollah fired 96 smaller rockets at several towns, including one which struck a hospital in Nahariya, near the Lebanese border, withiout injuring anyone.

The hospital has evacuated all patients into underground bunkers.

The latest attacks came on a day of heavy shellfire, Israel pounding Lebanese border towns with artillery and Hezbollah setting forests on fire in northern Israel with a hail of Katyusha rockets.

Military experts in Beirut believe that the so-called “Khybar” rocket was launched from well inside Lebanon to protect the launch team from Israeli jets patrolling the border.

It came two days after the leader of Hezbollah pledged in a television address to unveil a “hyper-rocket” that would “take the war to a new phase”.

Israeli and Lebanese military analysts, meanwhile, believe that the Israeli army may be planning to shift tactics and increase the intensity of its aerial and artillery bombardment of villages in southern Lebanon before it sends in ground troops.

There were reports of Israeli troops pulling back from Bint Jbeil, the Hezbollah stronghold where Israel lost nine soldiers in a single day this week, and military officials told Israeli radio that softening up towns with a heavier use of artillery was one lesson that they had learnt there.

The town was under heavy shellfire yesterday in what UN officers suspect is a plan to force the last civilians to flee before destroying it completely and killing any remaining Hezbollah fighters, a tactic encouraged by bellicose elements of the Israeli media.

“I think the Israelis are contemplating flattening villages down to the last house,” Richard Morczynski, a political officer for the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (Unifil), told The Times.

Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the commander of Unifil, told The Times that after more than two weeks of heavy fighting, Hezbollah was “still strong”, and only a political solution would end the conflict. “A military victory will never be possible,” he said.

Unifil estimates that 800 to 1,000 Hezbollah combatants are deployed throughout the south, operating in groups as small as 12 to 15.

“Sometime they use radio frequencies that are the same as ours and we can hear them talk,” Mr Morczynski said.

“They say, ‘This is Brother 13. We are going to carry out Operation 7. Hope you are all safe’.

“They are mobile, dedicated and willing to act. When there’s shelling, they’re not scared. They’re not sitting in bunkers.”

HEZBOLLAH’S ARSENAL

Israeli commanders say that Hezbollah has fired around 1,500 rockets into Israel so far. Apart from the new weapon fired yesterday, packed with a 100kg warhead and with a range of 60 miles, Hezbollah’s arsenal is believed to include:

610mm ‘ZelZal’: range 130 miles, warhead 400kg

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