Destruction rained down from the night sky as warplanes pounded power stations leaving smoldering evidence of enemy aggression
Another "Israeli" blitz leaves chain of raging infernos from north to south

   By mid-morning the fire had been doused and the smoke smothered, but earlier on Tuesday the interior of the Jamhour power station was an inferno.
Streams of burning oil jetted out of banks of electrical machinery that were on fire, as dense black smoke blotted out the stars above. The air reeked of burning rubber and plastic. The flames reached as high as a five-storey building and bathed the surrounding area in an eerie orange glow.
Firefighters fought a losing battle to contain the blaze, directing jets of water and foam at the inferno. Burning oil poured down a conduit, the flames threatening to trap firemen and reporters. A hose was hurriedly directed toward the drain as choking reporters scurried through the thick black smoke.
One civilian was wounded when the "Israeli" warplanes bombed the plant in the first of two sorties.
A Syrian worker who lived in a small building beside the power station said he heard the jets flying low over Jamhour.
“I went outside to listen to them and as I went back into the house, the bombs hit the plant,” he said.
Three employees of the Melec engineering company remained in the main building, ignoring the inferno raging around them.
“I told them to leave and come to my house nearby but they refused to leave their machines,” an engineer with Melec said. He added that the employees had not been injured in the raid.
One of the bombs had blasted a 2-meter deep hole in the slip road leading to the power station. Army bulldozers clanked back and forth, hurriedly filling the hole with rubble and soil to allow the firefighting vehicles through.
Other troops monitored cellular phones and walkie-talkies. Anxious faces constantly turned skywards. Everyone remembered the tragic consequences of the last time Jamhour was bombed in June 1999. Several fireman had been killed when "Israeli" warplanes returned for another sortie just after a firefighting team had entered the burning plant.
After touring the area on Tuesday morning, George Mouawad, director-general of Electricite du Liban, told reporters that 90 percent of the facility had been destroyed.
Mouawad was accompanied by Syrian Electricity Minister Munib Saem Dahr, who inspected the charred site filled with twisted metal. Shattered glass crunched beneath his feet.
A somber Dahr, who stopped to gaze at the ruin before him, pledged that Syrian and Lebanese solidarity would not be broken by “this act of barbarism.”
Security sources said the plant was hit by at least three bombs ­ one directly striking a row of transfer stations, destroying 11 of the 12.
Another bomb struck the main building, destroying the control center, ripping into concrete and shattering windows.

Baalback

Try as they might, Tuesday morning is one morning that Caroline, Katrine, Fadia and Karine Jaafar are unlikely to forget.
Fast asleep in their home, some 500 meters across the road from Baalback’s power station, the girls awoke to a deafening roar and a rain of glass and pieces of bedroom furniture as their room was torn apart by the blasts leveling the power station.
“We were asleep and suddenly we couldn’t see or hear anything,” said their mother, Katia. “The electricity was gone and it was so dark we couldn’t even see each other.”
Too frightened to leave the house, Katia grabbed her screaming daughters, aged 10, eight and six, and her son, and made a blind dash for the bathroom at the back of the house where they sat huddled under the staircase. She tried to comfort her children as best she could but the three girls were bleeding from wounds caused by the shower of glass.
“It was so dark and we could not get out,” she said. “The children were screaming.”
Katia and her family waited until the roaring outside had died down and then ran for shelter. They headed straight for the house of Katia’s brother, Ali Jaafar, 1.5 kilometers up the road toward Baalback. Katia remembers nothing of the journey.
When they arrived, they found that their sanctuary too had been damaged. Showing reporters around the remains of his plush carpeted bedroom, strewn with broken glass from the shattered windows, Ali Jaafar, 56, explained what he had seen the night before.
“The first rocket didn’t break them,” he said, pointing to huge cracks running vertically and horizontally across the back and side walls of the room. “The second rocket broke the windows.”
His sister’s home, though structurally intact, suffered far more damage and the interior was a total wreck. Glass, broken furniture and slates from the roof carpeted the floor.
The fields outside the home revealed more savagery of the blast with strewn bits of twisted metal beams, rocket casing and chunks of concrete ripped loose and blasted in all directions.
Compared to this, Ali Jaafar escaped lightly. None of his family were physically injured in the blast and his home will be more easily repaired. He is simultaneously thankful and defiant: “We don’t need bridges or water or electricity and we want nothing from "Israel",” he said with the righteous determination that belongs to the unfairly punished. “We’ve been at war with "Israel" for many years, we’re not sorry and we want the resistance to see it to the end.”
Lying huddled together under a blanket, the children, though clearly traumatized, appear to remember few specifics.
“They’re still very scared,” Katia said pointing toward her eight-year-old lying prone with a bandaged forehead. “And Katrine is running a fever.”
Under the watchful gaze of her grandmothers, and after some gentle encouragement from her father Hussein, Karine raised her right hand and made the victory sign. Smiling shyly, she ventured the only comment any of the sisters make on the previous night’s events: “I don’t like "Israel".”

Deir Nbouh

 Much of north Lebanon was plunged into total darkness early on Tuesday, after "Israeli" jets pounded the Deir Nbouh power station near Zghorta.
The attack destroyed two transformers, one which transferred electricity from Syria to regions in Akkar, Dinnieh and Zghorta, and another which transferred electricity from the Baddawi plant to Beirut. However, most of Tripoli’s power supplies survived the blow, as the city’s grid is linked to the Deir Ammar and Horeisha plants which were not targeted.
George Mouawad, the director general of Electricite du Liban, indicated that the two small transformers that survived the attack could help provide some electricity to the northern villages, although the rationing would affect Tripoli.
EDL would link a high voltage cable from the Deir Nbouh station to the Deir Ammar station which will distribute electricity to the northern regions.
However, he noted that the Deir Ammar station would not be able to supply electricity to the entire region. He said that maintenance teams had begun repairing the damage, adding that army engineers would clear the rubble to allow for more extensive repair work.
“We’re studying other alternatives so that we’ll be able to supply all regions with six to eight hours of electricity per day inside and outside Beirut,” Mouawad said.