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Israel Allows U.N. Convoy to Resupply Observers Kenneth R. Timmerman, NewsMax.com ROSH HANIQRA, Israel -- Israel allowed a United Nations resupply convoy to enter Israel today at this border town along the Mediterranean sea, as part of an agreement with the U.N. to open "humanitarian corridors" into embattled areas of southern Lebanon.
Today's U.N. column was bringing supplies and fuel to U.N. observers positioned within binocular range of the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil and the Israeli border.
After Israeli soldiers searched the U.N. vehicles to ensure they were not carrying munitions, a French-built VAB armored escorted two U.N. trucks full of supplies across the border, where they were met by two Israeli jeeps shortly after 5 p.m. local time.
The Israelis said they would escort the U.N. vehicles through Israel to the border crossing at Avivim, around an hour's drive inland from here.
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From there, the U.N. convoy will re-enter Lebanon, to resupply the observer post near Bint Jbeil.
"It's a normal mission," said Sgt. Damien Delon, 26, a French tank commander on loan to the U.N. mission in Lebanon. "The only thing that's different is the itinerary.
Sgt. Delon and another French officer who declined to give his name to Newsmax said that the U.N. position in Bint Jbeil had not been fired on, as far as they knew.
"There have been no French casualties" with the U.N. force in Lebanon during the recent fighting, they said.
"This is our work [as peacekeepers]," one French officer told Newsmax. "We do the same thing in Africa, in Bosnia."
Just an hour earlier, as the U.N. vehicles were waiting to be cleared through the border by the Israeli military, reporters could hear the sound of katyusha rockets being fired from very close nearby, just across the border in Lebanon.
The firing zone was well within the border zone the UNIFIL force is supposed to be monitoring.
Less than ten seconds, plumes of smoke rose from half a dozen points in the nearby city of Nahariya where the rockets landed. One rocket set off a raging fire not fifty meters from the main Nahariya hospital.
Just yesterday, a Hezbollah rocket crashed into a hospital ward, devasting an entire wing of the building facing Lebanon, but without causing casualties.
"We were not lucky," the deputy director of the hospital, Dr. Moshe Daniel, 60, told NewsMax during a tour of the hospital earlier this afternoon. "We were prepared."
The Nahariya hospital was built with a vast underground shelter equipped with medical equipment and supplies, in the event of a nuclear, biological, or chemical strike.
It is the only NBC-resistant shelter in any hospital in Northern Israel.
"At one am on the first night of the attacks, we gave the order to evacuate the entire northern wing of the hospital, facing Lebanon," Dr. Daniel told NewsMax.
All 180 patients are now being treated in the underground facility.
Editor's note:
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