Five people were killed early Sunday when Israeli aircraft bombed a house in the southern Lebanese village of Ansar, Lebanese security officials and Arab media said. Hezbollah's Al-Manar television later reported that another body had been found, raising the toll to six, but officials could not immediately confirm that. Al-Jazeera television reported three people dead in Naqoura, on the Mediterranean coast side of Lebanon's border with Israel. But security officials could confirm just one person killed there, when Israeli missiles slammed into a three-story house around 4 a.m. (0100GMT). Ground fighting raged across swaths of south Lebanon as well on Sunday. Al-Manar ran an urgent statement from Hezbollah saying fighters forced Israeli troops to retreat from the border village of Adaisse. Two Israeli tanks and two bulldozers were destroyed, and their crews were either killed or wounded, it said. The Associated Press quoted Witnesses as saying that Israeli artillery shells were raining down on Kfar Kila, less than a kilometer from the Israeli border. Israel withdrew 10 tanks from the neighboring town of Taibeh, leaving three behind, al-Manar said. Intense shelling was also reported Sunday morning in the Lebanese border village of Houla, and in villages along the Litani River, which runs east-west across south Lebanon. Security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, said the victims in Ansar were a man named Ibrahim Asie and four of his relatives. Four airstrikes hit Ansar Sunday morning, at 1 a.m. (2200GMT Saturday), 6 a.m. (0300GMT), 7 a.m. (0400GMT) and 10:30 a.m. (0730GMT), security officials and Lebanon's National News Agency said. Asie and his family were killed in the second one, and the third strike hit a road nearby as rescuers were pulling the bodies out of the rubble of the house, which was flattened, NNA reported. Al-Manar reported eight people were wounded in the village, which lies about 25 kilometers (15.53 miles) north of the border, near the market town of Nabatiyeh. Israeli warplanes destroyed a water purification station in the village of Jibsheet, as well as a Lebanese army vehicle in Ansar, security officials said. Local Arab media reported air raids on the apple-growing Iqlim al-Tuffah province as well.
