For the first time, Israeli forces targeted areas north of Beirut destroying four bridges on a major highway, whilst troops continued efforts to create a security zone in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel.
While the UN Security Council struggled to set terms for a ceasefire, Israel said it had lost three more soldiers in combat in southern Lebanon and three civilians to missile fire inside Israel.
No one was reported killed in the Hezbollah strike on Hadera, some 75 km south of Lebanon's frontier, Israeli television said. The attack came after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday threatened to target Tel Aviv.
Twenty-six of the civilians killed in Israeli air raids on Friday died in the village of Qaa in northeast Lebanon, near the border with Syria, police and Red Cross officials said.
Most of the dead were Syrian farm workers, some of whom had been loading a refrigerated vegetable truck.
Bridges destroyed
Israeli jets wrecked four bridges on the coastal highway leading north from Beirut, effectively cutting the last practicable road between the Lebanese capital and the Syrian border.
The main bridge was near the "Casino du Liban" in the Mediterranean port of Junieh -- the heartland of Christian Lebanon 20 km north of Beirut.
Large plumes of smoke billowed into the sky as two of the bridges collapsed and Lebanese troops blocked traffic.
South of Beirut, the Israelis targeted the coastal suburb of Uzai, near Beirut international airport, for the first time in their massive campaign by air, land and sea.
Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon Israeli air strikes on two villages flattened houses, burying 57 people in the rubble, Lebanese security officials and the country's official news agency reported.
Israel denied attacking the villages.
Lebanon's National News Agency reported that Israeli airstrikes flattened a building in Aita al-Shaab, 2 km inside Lebanon.
A large number of civilians were inside at the time, but the exact number was unknown, it said.
It also said warplanes hit Taibeh, about 5 km from the Israeli border, destroying a house where 17 people had taken refuge.
Police said seven people were killed and 10 others wounded in the strike in Taibeh.
But Israeli army spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal said the Israeli air force had not hit the two areas.
“The air force had no targets in those villages," he said.
The Lebanese government says more than 900 of its civilians have died. The three civilian and three soldier deaths in Israel brought official Israeli casualties to 44 soldiers and 30 civilians killed since the Jewish state launched its offensive in Lebanon on July 12.
Israel claimed to have killed more than 200 Hezbollah fighters, but the militia has admitted to only about 40 losses.
Tel Aviv braces
Further down the Mediterranean coast, authorities in Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv began preparing bomb shelters, with rockets such as those fired at Hadera getting closer by the day.
"The Islamic Resistance bombarded the town of Hadera, which is 75 kilometres from the Lebanese frontier, with a salvo of Khaibar-1 rockets," Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station said.
The Khaibar-1 has a much greater range and bigger warhead than the Katyusha rockets usually fired by Hezbollah.
A statement from the Islamic Resistance said the strike was "a response to the Zionist aggressions that have hit different parts of Lebanon, in particular certain distant regions, and the barbaric massacre of civilians near Qaa."
Tel Aviv, a city of 1.5 million people, lies 100 km from the Lebanese border, out of range of the Katyusha and Fajr-3 rockets which Hezbollah has fired daily into northern Israel.
Israeli public television quoted a senior military official as saying the army would destroy all Lebanese infrastructure if Hezbollah carried out its threat.
Israeli warplanes have already wrecked much of that infrastructure – the government of Lebanese Premier Fuad Siniora estimates damage so far at more than US$2.5 billion.
Push into southern Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said Israel would pursue its drive against Hezbollah in south Lebanon until an international force of some 15,000 combat-ready troops was deployed there.
On Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz's spokesman said the army had been ordered to prepare to take control of southern Lebanon.
In Tel Aviv, an army spokeswoman said Israeli ground troops were operating around 20 border villages in a bid to push Hezbollah fighters further north.
Interior Minister Roni Bar-On said the Israeli military now controls a strip of land up to 8 km deep in southern Lebanon, adding that the ground operation involved "six regiments" or around 10,000 troops.
At least four civilians were buried alive under the rubble of their house in the village of Aita al-Shaab -- on the Lebanon-Israel border but behind Israel's frontline -- after it was hit by an Israeli air strike, police said.
But the main thrust of Israeli operations on Friday morning was from the air.