960416

Israeli missiles

hit PLO commader's

home

SIDON: Israeli helicopters blasted the home of a radical Palestinian guerrilla commander at a refugee camp in south Lebanon on Tuesday, wounding his three-year-old son, security sources said.

They said three helicopters slammed six missiles into a three -storey building housing the home of Munir Maqdah at Ain el-Hilweh camp at dawn, blasting his bedroom and damaging other parts of the house.

Maqdah, commander of a radical PLO splinter group opposed to peace with Israel, was not home, the sources said. They said his son was lightly wounded while a man and a woman were also wounded and taken to hospital.

At least 24 people have been killed and 127 wounded, most of them civilians, since Israel began operations last Thursday against Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon in retaliation for Hizbollah rocket attacks on communities in northern Israel.

It was the first time that Israeli aircraft had attacked a Palestinian camp since the blitz began.

Israeli aircraft later launched a dozen raids into villages in south Lebanon and the southern edge of the Bekaa Valley, a Hizbollah stronghold.

No reports on casualties were immediately available.

Israeli heavy guns also pounded the villages. But it was all quiet in the port of Tyre where Israel gave civilians until 10 a.m. (0700 gmt) to flee.

Some 400,000 villagers have already fled the south.

In an earlier attack around midnight, Israeli jets fired two rockets into a house in the Maronite Christian village of Sighbeen in the eastern Bekaa valley, killing a Maronite man and wounding three members of his family, security sources said.-Reuter