It was just before dawn and near the end of Israel's airborne commando raids on Wednesday close to the city of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon.

His body and those of his 18-year-old son Hussein, four nephews and a relative were strewn in the garden of his house where they had been hiding from the air strikes during the commando attack.

"I was just on the phone with Awad to ask what was going on in his neighbourhood. He said there were helicopters and bombardments, but that they were quite far away," Abdel Rahim Haidar told AFP.

"Then nothing. His phone just died. This morning we all ran to his house and found this terrible, terrible sight," he said.

In the garden, women wailed as they held the bodies of the dead. One man held a Koran, reading verses loudly.

"Israel is immoral," screamed a young woman. "Come and take a picture of the crimes of (US President George) Bush," another woman told an AFP photographer on the scene.

In a wheatfield not far from the area, the bloodied bodies of a woman and her five children, aged between three and seventeen, lay in a Bedouin tent. The bodies of Maha Shaaban Al-Issa, 40, and her children were riddled with bullets, mostly in the head and the chest.

Her husband and two remaining children were critically wounded and taken to hospital.

During the night, an Israeli helicopter made a brief landing near Baalbek where commandos stormed an empty hospital run by the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah and engaged in fierce clashes with militants for several hours.

Witnesses told AFP that an Israeli helicopter had dropped the commandos at the Dar Al-Hekmah hospital before it was forced to clear the area because of Hezbollah fire. The gunship then headed to a nearby wheatfield to await the end of the commando operation.

"The Bedouin family ran out of their tent because they were terrified from the Israeli helicopter, then they were all shot. Their relatives and friends in nearby tents escaped unharmed because they stayed inside," said a neighbour who did not wish to be identified.

Their bodies were returned to the tent where they were covered with blankets, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.

The commando operation, the most northerly ground attack by Israeli forces since the start of the crisis on July 12, left 14 civilians, including seven children, dead and more than 20 others wounded.

Five other people were captured by the commando force which took them into Israel.

The Israeli army said that "several members of Hezbollah" had been captured and brought back to Israel, while the Shiite militant group said that all those captured were "normal civilians".

Parallel to the battles on the ground and in the air, a war of rumors was also raging.

Israeli voice messages received in Lebanon said "the courageous" operation was meant to "save our (two) soldiers" who were captured by Hezbollah on July 12. The capture triggered a massive Israeli onslaught on its northern neighbor.

Hezbollah sources claimed the group had lured the Israelis by spreading rumors about the presence of an important Hezbollah figure in the hospital, which had been emptied of patients, doctors and staff since the start of the offensive.

They said the group also sent several convoys into the hospital in the last few days, including the personal car of Sheikh Mohamad Yazbek, member of the Hezbollah Shura consultative council and representative in Lebanon of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz denied that "the goal of the operation was to seize a particular Hezbollah leader."

The operation provoked many Baalbek residents to flee for safety. Dozens of cars, white scarves fluttering in the wind through their windows, left the ancient city where shops were closed, streets empty and many houses demolished.

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