BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) – Four Israeli missiles yesterday slammed into a refrigerated warehouse where farm workers were loading vegetables near the Lebanon-Syria border yesterday, killing at least 28 people, according to officials at the Syrian hospitals where the dead and wounded were taken.

At least 12 other workers were wounded in the attack.

More were likely buried under the rubble, said Ali Yaghi, a Lebanese civil defence official at the scene. A bulldozer was brought to the site to try to uncover any survivors.

Arab television channels showed videotape of Lebanese soldiers and orange-garbed rescue workers hauling body after body out of the ruins of the warehouse. Many of the victims were dismembered and their bodies appeared scorched. Some of the corpses were laid out in rows, covered with heavy blankets. The nearby orchard was badly damaged; crates of fruit lay in a jumble nearby.

The attack occurred about two miles inside the border when five Syrian refrigerator trucks arrived at a vegetable warehouse to load peaches and apples for the Syrian market, said drivers and witnesses. They said there were about 150 people at the warehouse when the attack occurred.

The toll of dead and injured was provided by the emergency services at the al-Qusair National Hospital on the Lebanese-Syrian border and the National Hospital in the Syrian city of Homs.

Syria’s official news agency, however, reported that 33 were killed, 23 of them Syrians. The Syrian dead included 18 men, two elderly women and 3 young girls, it said. Ten were wounded.

The Israeli army issued a statement saying it was checking reports that farm workers and a vegetable storehouse were hit.

“The IDF (Israeli Defence Force) attacked from the air two structures in the Bekaa Valley, on suspicions that weapons were being transported there.”

Some of the workers were killed by flying rocks and shrapnel after the missiles struck, Yaghi said.

Yaghi said civilian pickup trucks were dispatched to haul the bodies, as well as the wounded to the Syrian hospitals. Roads toward hospitals in Lebanon had been cut off by Israeli airstrikes earlier Friday. A Lebanese ambulance also carried some victims, he said.

The agricultural site was run by a Lebanese company.