Thread: Can Israel Win?

An OP-ED

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/744061.html

Days of darkness

By Gideon Levy

In war as in war: Israel is sinking into a strident, nationalistic atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything. The brakes we still had are eroding, the insensitivity and blindness that characterized Israeli society in recent years is intensifying. The home front is cut in half: the north suffers and the center is serene. But both have been taken over by tones of jingoism, ruthlessness and vengeance, and the voices of extremism that previously characterized the camp's margins are now expressing its heart. The left has once again lost its way, wrapped in silence or "admitting mistakes." Israel is exposing a unified, nationalistic face.

The devastation we are sowing in Lebanon doesn't touch anyone here and most of it is not even shown to Israelis. Those who want to know what Tyre looks like now have to turn to foreign channels - the BBC reporter brings chilling images from there, the likes of which won't be seen here. How can one not be shocked by the suffering of the other, at our hands, even when our north suffers? The death we are sowing at the same time, right now in Gaza, with close to 120 dead since the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, 27 last Wednesday alone, touches us even less. The hospitals in Gaza are full of burned children, but who cares? The darkness of the war in the north covers them, too.

Since we've grown accustomed to thinking collective punishment a legitimate weapon, it is no wonder no debate has sparked here over the cruel punishment of Lebanon for Hezbollah's actions. If it was okay in Nablus, why not Beirut? The only criticism being heard about this war is over tactics. Everyone is a general now and they are mostly pushing the IDF to deepen its activities. Commentators, ex-generals and politicians compete at raising the stakes with extreme proposals.

Haim Ramon "doesn't understand" why there is still electricity in Baalbek; Eli Yishai proposes turning south Lebanon into a "sandbox"; Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military correspondent, proposes an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses and the next day to conduct a parade of prisoners in their underwear, "to strengthen the home front's morale."

It's not difficult to guess what we would think about an Arab TV station whose commentators would say something like that, but another few casualties or failures by the IDF, and Limor's proposal will be implemented. Is there any better sign of how we have lost our senses and our humanity?

Chauvinism and an appetite for vengeance are raising their heads. If two weeks ago only lunatics such as Safed Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu spoke about "wiping out every village where a Katyusha is fired," now a senior officer in the IDF speaks that way in Yedioth Aharonoth's main headlines. Lebanese villages may not have been wiped out yet, but we have long since wiped out our own red lines.

A bereaved father, Haim Avraham, whose son was kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in October 2000, fires an artillery shell into Lebanon for the reporters. It's vengeance for his son. His image, embracing the decorated artillery shell is one of the most disgraceful images of this war. And it's only the first. A group of young girls also have their picture taken decorating IDF shells with slogans.

Maariv, which has turned into the Fox News of Israel, fills its pages with chauvinist slogans reminiscent of particularly inferior propaganda machines, such as "Israel is strong" - which is indicative of weakness, actually - while a TV commentator calls for the bombing of a TV station.

Lebanon, which has never fought Israel and has 40 daily newspapers, 42 colleges and universities and hundreds of different banks, is being destroyed by our planes and cannon and nobody is taking into account the amount of hatred we are sowing. In international public opinion, Israel has been turned into a monster, and that still hasn't been calculated into the debit column of this war. Israel is badly stained, a moral stain that can't be easily and quickly removed. And only we don't want to see it.

The people want victory, and nobody knows what that is and what its price will be.

The Zionist left has also been made irrelevant. As in every difficult test in the past - the two intifadas for example - this time too the left has failed just when its voice was so necessary as a counterweight to the stridency of the beating tom-toms of war. Why have a left if at every real test it joins the national chorus?

Peace Now stands silently, so does Meretz, except for brave Zehava Gal-On. A few days of a war of choice and already Yehoshua Sobol is admitting he was wrong all along. Peace Now is suddenly an "infantile slogan" for him. His colleagues are silent and their silence is no less resounding. Only the extreme left makes its voice heard, but it is a voice nobody listens to.

Long before this war is decided, it can already be stated that its spiraling cost will include the moral blackout that is surrounding and covering us all, threatening our existence and image no less than Hezbollah's Katyushas.

Another oped same website....


ANALYSIS: Israel failing to give U.S. the military cards it needs

By Ze'ev Schiff

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the figure leading the strategy of changing the situation in Lebanon, not Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Defense Minister Amir Peretz. She has so far managed to withstand international pressure in favor of a cease-fire, even though this will allow Hezbollah to retain its status as a militia armed by Iran and Syria.

As such, she needs military cards, and unfortunately Israel has not succeeded to date in providing her with any. Besides bringing Hezbollah and Lebanon under fire, all of Israel's military cards at this stage are in the form of two Lebanese villages near the border that have been captured by the IDF.

If the military cards Israel is holding do not improve with the continuation of the fighting, it will result in a diplomatic solution that will leave the Hezbollah rocket arsenal in southern Lebanon in its place. The diplomatic solution will necessarily be a reflection of the military realities on the ground.




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Also from the Syrian perspective there seems to be a contradiction between the American strategy and the steps Israel has taken with regards to Syria. Washington wants the solution to the problem of Hezbollah as a militia to be found in Lebanon. There are those in Washington who are recommending a connection to Syria must be found on this matter, but at the State Department and the White House they say this would simply invite Syria back into Lebanon, and this should not be allowed.

Damascus must be worried about a foiling of the American-Lebanese diplomatic plans. Syrian concerns should have stemmed from Israel, but for days now Israel is doing everything possible to convince Damascus it is not in any danger. If there is no danger from Israel, Damascus can certainly allow itself to undermine any possible plan meant to weaken and defeat Hezbollah. It will act on its own and with Iran without any fear.

Israel has limited options for continuing the fighting. Since it has not succeeded to date to restrict Hezbollah's war of attrition against urban centers in Israel, including the targeting of Afula, the only option is a rapid operation for the capture of southern Lebanon in order to destroy the Hezbollah rocket arsenal prior to the transfer of a multinational force to the area. It may have other serious options, but these will not affect the rocket arsenal of Hezbollah. This is a race against time and against Hezbollah that is aided by Syria and Iran.

The further along the diplomatic process moves, international pressure will be exercised against Israel, including by the Americans, calling for an end to the targeting of Lebanese infrastructure. There is no point mobilizing reserve divisions if they are not going to be used appropriately, from a strategic point of view, before the end of the war.

The argument voiced is that the divisions are not adequately trained because of the cuts to the defense budget and it is not acceptable in view of the situation Israel is in. This is not the right time to blame the Finance Ministry, and it is not the only one to blame.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/744043.html

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/inte...429358,00.html

Israeli's Puzzling Military Strategy

By Siegesmund von Ilsemann

Israel underestimated Hezbollah, which is strategically more powerful and better armed than most expected. The Islamic militia is taking on even Israel's most powerful weaponry. Joystick warfare isn't working, but Israelis don't have the appetite for a bloody groundwar.

Getty Images
Hezbollah's Russian weapons can pierce even the toughest Israeli armor.
Last Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert issued an oath of disclosure when he said: "I have no intention of saying when we will end the campaign in Lebanon." But then he revealed the real reason that he hasn't been able to do so by admitting that the military action had already lasted longer "than we had expected."

So far, Israel's successes in the war against Hezbollah have been meager. Its military has not managed to eliminate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah or present the world press with evidence of a major weapons depot in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, the bombardment of Israeli territory continues, with Hezbollah firing about 100 rockets a day into the country's north. Indeed, the entire course of the conflict is puzzling from a strategic perspective.



In the past, Israel sought to defend its security with lightning campaigns. But this time it seems to be pursuing the approach the Americans tested in Iraq and dubbed "Shock and Awe." But even there the strategy, which involved large-scale aerial bombardment, didn't remain successful for long, as evidenced by the bloody guerilla war America's enemies have been fighting there for more than three years now.

"This strategy also cannot work" against an underground army like Hezbollah, which is supported by a large segment of the population, says Philip H. Gordon of the Washington-based Brookings Institution. In fact, sending in ground troops is the only way to track down Hezbollah's weapons caches and firing positions. But it's an approach that has proved to be anything but easy.

Tough adversaries

Sixteen days into the Lebanon campaign, Israel had already lost 33 of its soldiers, a much higher death count than the Israeli public can stomach in the long run. "The Shiites are much tougher adversaries than we expected," Israeli officers said after returning from the front.

Advancing Israeli combat units are encountering perfectly constructed position systems wherever they go. Lethal explosive traps and a weapons arsenal than can even destroy Israel's most advanced weaponry are creating unexpected problems for the attackers. "Never before has a terrorist organization had such highly advanced military technology at its disposal," laments retired General Yaakov Amidror.

Hezbollah's Russian-made "Kornet" rockets are even capable of puncturing the multi-layer armor of Israeli "Merkava" tanks. The group's portable anti-aircraft systems are a threat to combat helicopters and other Israeli aircraft, which had previously enjoyed unlimited air sovereignty in the region.

Bunker busters and cluster bombs

Early last week, Israel's northern command reported that it had taken control of the Lebanese border town of Bint Jbail. But on Wednesday it became the site of Israel's biggest losses in the current campaign. By Thursday, Israel conceded that the town was by no means under its control. Indeed, Hezbollah's tough resistance has held up the Israeli advance along the entire border -- and this despite the fact that Israel's army is using virtually every conventional weapon at its disposal. Within 12 days, its artillery has launched more than 20,000 rocket-propelled grenades, including US-made M483A1 cluster weapons. Each of these grenades ejects 88 small but highly explosive charges across its target area. Because of unavoidably high civilian casualties, most experts consider the use of such weapons in residential areas to be in violation of international law.

Its supply of precision-guided weapons has dwindled so quickly that Jerusalem was forced within days to ask Washington for an expedited shipment of its so-called bunker-busting GBU-28 bombs.



DER SPIEGEL
Israeli and Hezbollah strikes
The Israelis dropped 23 tons of bombs on the supposed hideout of its archenemy, Hassan Nasrallah. And yet the Hezbollah leader made a triumphant appearance the next day on his organization's television station and threatened his Jewish enemies with even more devastating counterattacks.

Only one week after saying the Israeli Army would withdraw from Lebanon "within a few days," Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said last week the country now plans to establish a "temporary" security zone after all. But Israeli military officials say the security zone will be only be two-kilometers wide -- a pointless effort from a military standpoint. For his part, Hezbollah's Nasrallah has sought to exploit this strategic waffling and apparent lack of a serious plan on the part of the Israelis.

Even retired German General Helmut Harff, the former commander of German military contingents in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo, had assumed that a "buffer zone of 30 to 40 kilometers" would be needed to put a stop to Hezbollah's rocket attacks. A week ago, Harff was convinced that setting up that security zone would "happen very quickly." In the end, however, he too was mistaken.

THE BATTLE FOR LEBANON
Has Israel’s assault weakened Hezbollah—or made it stronger?
by JON LEE ANDERSON
Issue of 2006-08-07
Posted 2006-07-31


On a deceptively peaceful afternoon in the last week of July, Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah strategist, puffed on a cigar and spooned up a dish of ice cream. Three scoops: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. We were sitting in Lina’s Café, on Rue Hamra, in downtown Beirut. For eleven days, the city had been shuttered, nearly empty of people and traffic, as the Israeli military pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south of the country, where Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” had dug its tunnels and bunkers and stored thousands of Iranian-built missiles. Bridges, tunnels, roads, and apartment buildings lay in ruins, and almost three-quarters of a million Lebanese had fled their homes in fear. But for the moment, at least, Ali Fayyad ate his ice cream in peace. Some of the shops were open, and more people were out on the street, because Condoleezza Rice was in town to meet with the Lebanese leadership and everyone figured—rightly––that the Israelis would hold fire over downtown Beirut until she left.

Fayyad is a burly man in his forties. As a member of the Hezbollah politburo, he is close to the group’s supreme leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and everything he told me at Lina’s, about the cross-border abduction of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others on July 12th, and the all-out armed conflict that followed, was an authorized version. “Our aim is to get Israel to return Lebanese lands”—he meant Shebaa Farms, a small strip of land occupied by Israel since 1967—“and to release three of our prisoners,” Fayyad said. “One of the prisoners has been held for almost thirty years.” He was referring to Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese man who, in 1979, killed an Israeli man and his four-year-old daughter. (Another daughter, who was two, was accidentally smothered when her mother tried to keep her quiet in the crawl space where they were hiding.)

“We’ve made many efforts to have them returned, and have tried everything, including diplomacy, with no results,” Fayyad said. “So we were left with no other choice but to kidnap Israeli soldiers. The idea was ‘prisoners for prisoners.’ And we have exchanged prisoners with Israel in the past.”

If that really was Hezbollah’s plan, it went wrong from the beginning. Tensions were already high, because of the Hamas kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in Gaza, two weeks earlier, and Israel responded with bombing raids, including one, the next day, on Beirut’s airport. That night, a rocket fired from Hezbollah territory hit Haifa, and more missiles, in both directions, soon followed, resulting in casualties and the threat of regional war.

Fayyad seemed both surprised and offended by the scale of the Israeli attack, which he said Hezbollah never expected. Although Hezbollah’s rockets were landing in Haifa, Nahariya, Safed, and Nazareth, he also claimed that it had been reluctant to target civilians. “First, for humanitarian and moral reasons, and, second, because when civilians are killed we come out as the losers,” he said. “Far more of our people get killed than Israel’s.” Still, for Fayyad, the events had the logic of reprisal: Israel had hit “civilian infrastructure,” and so Hezbollah fired rockets into “occupied Palestine,” by which he meant all of Israel.

The past two weeks have represented a return to first principles for Hezbollah, which was founded in the early eighties, after Israel invaded Lebanon. The group became known internationally when it was accused of bombing the United States Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing two hundred and forty-one American servicemen; that was followed by attacks on Israeli targets around the world. In Lebanon, Hezbollah draws support, in the Shiite community and beyond, for its role in driving the Israeli occupation forces out of the country in 2000. Since then, Hezbollah has presented itself as a political party, gaining two posts in the Lebanese cabinet and fourteen seats in the parliament. But, rather than disarming, it bolstered its military capacity, with Iranian and Syrian help. Now that it is under siege, the contradictions of its position—as part of the Lebanese state, but also as a clandestine body that subverts it—are plainer than ever. On July 14th, Nasrallah went on television and addressed Israel directly: “You wanted an open war. We are heading toward an open war, and we are ready for it.”

The Israelis, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his novice Defense Minister, Amir Peretz, quickly shifted their aims from retrieving the soldiers to destroying, or at least crippling, Hezbollah. Hundreds of Lebanese had already been killed, most of them civilians; dozens of Israelis had been killed, about half of them civilians. As Fayyad considered these numbers, he puffed on his cigar and said that Israel, and not Hezbollah, had made the greater strategic miscalculation.

“The real battle started four days ago, when the Israelis moved their troops into Lebanon, and it became a ground war,” he said. “That is the preferred situation for Hezbollah. They fought four days to take Maroun al-Ras, just one mile from the border, on very open ground, with tanks—four days.” A few days after our conversation, control of Maroun al-Ras was still in dispute, and Israel was facing more resistance than expected in the village of Bint Jbail.

But Hezbollah’s interests are not reducible to the conventional terms of a casualty balance sheet. Hezbollah has embedded itself deep within Lebanese society, in effect creating a state within a state, with an extensive social-service network. Even if Israel manages to dislodge Hezbollah’s fighters, Nasrallah will likely remain the most powerful politician in the country, in part because the chaos of the last weeks has exposed the weakness of the government. Most of the Lebanese analysts I spoke with said they believed that Hezbollah had, on its own terms, been significantly strengthened by the conflict.

The damage to Lebanon, meanwhile, has been catastrophic. Fayyad said that he had arranged to evacuate his father from the family home in a village near the Israeli border, but he emphasized that Hezbollah’s forces would not leave south Lebanon without a fight. “You must remember that the point of resistance is not to hold ground and face off in front of another position,” Fayyad said. “That is classical warfare, but we are guerrillas. If the Israelis want to take the territory all the way up to the Litani River, do you think they can do it without heavy casualties?”

Fayyad finished his ice cream and stubbed out his cigar. Before we left Lina’s, he said, “This doesn’t mean that the battle isn’t difficult for us. It is. It’s painful, too. But the longer it goes on the harder it will be for them.”

Across town, the talks between Condoleezza Rice and the Lebanese faltered the moment she announced that the Bush Administration would not yet press Israel for a ceasefire. “It doesn’t do any good to raise false hopes,” she said after a meeting with Lebanese, European, and U.N. officials in Rome two days later. “It’s not going to happen. . . . I did say to the group, ‘When will we learn?’ The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken ceasefires.”



On July 23rd, the day before Rice’s visit, I’d made my way toward the cities and towns of the Shia south––Hezbollistan, as some call it. I drove from Beirut with a few photographers, taking back roads to bypass the mangled highway interchanges and bridges. The only cars we saw were racing in the opposite direction, to the relative safety of the north, usually in caravans of seven or eight. Most were packed with families, who had attached makeshift white flags to the sideview mirrors. The previous week, an Israeli missile had hit a van full of refugees, killing sixteen of them. Some drivers flashed their lights, warning us not to proceed; most passed by at high speed, the expressions on their faces grim, intent, and scared.

Approaching Tyre, we saw that a bomb had gouged out a crater, twenty feet across and twenty feet deep, in the middle of the road. Nearby, a black S.U.V. sat accordioned and empty; it had crashed into a telephone pole. From the sky came the whoosh of a fighter jet and, much closer, the whine of a drone.

We pulled over to make way for a convoy of refugees. One driver, a man wearing a white T-shirt and steering a large black Mercedes-Benz, had several frightened-looking women and children in the back seat. As he slowed down to edge past the crater, he yelled out to us, in English, “We will never go back! We must leave this country.” In another car, a woman pointed to a child and said, frantically, “Down syndrome.” A teen-ager poked his head out of yet another car and exclaimed wildly, “U.S. Embassy!” A ****led explosion sounded, coming from beyond the city.

Over the next half hour, several more groups of cars made the run. One had its roof caved in and one of its sides smashed; it seemed impossible that anyone could drive it, but, as it came nearer, I saw an older man behind the wheel, his body bent and his head low to one side. As he passed, he called out that he had been with a woman—“a journalist like you”—and added, “She’s dead.” Later that day, news reports confirmed that a twenty-three-year-old Lebanese photographer, Layal Nejib, had been killed when an Israeli missile struck near her car on the road south of Tyre.

We turned north, to a hospital in Sidon. A large group of people—men, women wearing chadors, and children—were talking and crying at once. I recognized the man in the white T-shirt who had passed us by the crater. He appeared to be in shock, walking back and forth, trembling and shouting; several men were trying to calm him down. He was soaked with sweat. Three members of his family had been wounded. I walked up to the man and said that I had seen him less than an hour before. He turned and shouted, accusingly, “You were there and I talked to you—and then they hit us!”



Near the hospital, a mosque lay in ruins. Next door was a technical college and school run by the Hariri Foundation, which was established by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in a car bombing in February, 2005. (A preliminary U.N. report implicated Syrian intelligence; the investigation is incomplete.) One of the mosque’s white domes, still intact, was propped up, bizarrely, on top of the debris. Strips of the mosque’s red carpet, shredded by the explosion, hung from the branches of nearby trees.

A man approached and told me that he was a teacher at the Hariri school. I asked him why he thought the Israelis had hit a mosque, and he said, simply, “It was a Hezbollah mosque.” As he led me onto the grounds, a caretaker began yelling in Arabic about “Israel” and “America,” but the teacher shooed him away. I found a leaflet that had been dropped by the Israelis. It showed caricatures of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad; Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and Khaled Mashal, a Hamas leader based in Damascus, playing flutes around an urn; from it emerged the bearded face of Nasrallah. “At your service,” the caption read.

A younger man came up to me and, when we were out of earshot of others, said that Hezbollah had kept bombs in the basement of the mosque, but that two days earlier a truck had taken the cache away. It was common knowledge in Sidon, he said, and everyone was expecting the mosque to be hit. When, the previous evening, displaced people from the south had gathered on the grounds, they had been warned away.

“Everybody wants to end this Hezbollah regime, but nobody can say anything,” the young man said. He told me that he had been to the United States. “I know how the people are there, what they eat and how they live and think, and we don’t have anything like that here. We would like to live like that, without all this”—he waved toward the ruined mosque—“normally, the way you do.” He hoped that the Israelis would be successful. When another Lebanese man came up and joined us, he stopped talking. Before we parted, I asked him if he was a Christian. He looked surprised. “No,” he said. “I am Muslim. Sunni.”



Sunni and Christian politicians often publicly declare their solidarity with the Shiite Hezbollah, which routinely refers to itself as a Lebanese national “resistance movement.” But the sectarian fault lines have been affected by the current crisis. The population is estimated to be thirty-five per cent Christian, thirty-five per cent Shiite, twenty-five per cent Sunni, and five per cent Druze, and government posts are allocated to specific groups—the Prime Minister must be Sunni, for example. “Civil war is on everyone’s mind, but it’s the one thing nobody wants to talk about,” an affluent Maronite Christian businessman told me over dinner at a restaurant in a Maronite enclave in the hills above Beirut. I was there with two couples—the other man, also a Christian, was a well-known former government minister—on the restaurant’s terrace. Like many people with money, they had moved their families to the hills. The restaurant’s sound system was playing a song by Fairouz, Lebanon’s most famous singer and a national idol, whose beautiful laments evoke emotions in the Lebanese the same way that Edith Piaf once did for the French in wartime.

My hosts had been telling me, with a certain pride, how the monasteries and schools in the area had taken in thousands of Shiite refugees from the south. “This kind of thing has never happened before,” the former minister said. “Most of the people from these two communities have never had this sort of contact with each other. But they have been taken in, and they are getting along.” He saw it as a promising sign of “inter-communal solidarity.” After all, he said, the attacks had been directed not only against the Shiites but against Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Down the table, the businessman said that he wondered why, with all the resources Hezbollah had at its disposal—it receives an estimated hundred million dollars a year from Iran—it hadn’t done more to protect its civilian population. “Why didn’t Hezbollah prepare for this?” he said. “Where is the food, the medicines? Where are the shelters for the people? Maybe, out of this, people will begin to question why they had to suffer because of the will of one man.” He meant Nasrallah.

Speaking about the Shiite refugees, who were now dependent on aid handouts, his wife asked, “What will happen when October comes and winter begins? Will they stay? Will they have homes to return to? All through the civil war, I stayed in Lebanon—I never wanted to leave—but in just two weeks they have destroyed everything we have built in the fifteen years since the war ended, and now I don’t want to stay anymore. This time, I want to leave.”

A moment later, a distant rumble could be heard. “Are those bombs?” she said. “Is that what I am hearing? Here?” Neither her husband nor the ex-minister acknowledged her. But then there was another, louder explosion, and she asked again.

“We are hearing Fairouz,” the ex-minister said sternly, cocking a thumb toward the sound system. He said this as if to tell her, “Don’t spoil the evening,” but afterward he brooded, and everyone at the table sat silently, listening to the music and, unavoidably, to the explosions in the distance.



When I arrived at the Hezbollah stronghold of Haret Hreik, in Beirut’s predominantly Shiite southern suburbs, it had just been pummelled, as it had every day since the bombing began. Most of the residents, who lived in concrete apartment blocks, had left. It had been risky for reporters to go to the neighborhood, both because of the Israeli bombardment and because of the remaining Hezbollah sentinels, who were tense and suspicious. But now Hezbollah was conducting a press tour of its ruins.

I found my way to the rendezvous point, at a bombed-out highway interchange, where fifty or sixty journalists had gathered—reporters, photographers, and television cameramen. An energetic young man named Hussein Naboulsi, who runs Hezbollah’s press office, announced that the tour would be fast, and that no one should stray from the group. He then headed off so quickly that people had to sprint to keep up. Hezbollah men kept an eye on the sky, and on us.

We walked past entire apartment blocks that had been flattened. The streets were littered with chunks of concrete, insulation material, twisted aluminum shutters, broken glass, and dangling electrical wires, and it became difficult to walk. Naboulsi paused and waved his arms and said loudly, “You see? This is where ordinary people live. This is what the Israelis do.”

In front of a row of wrecked shop- fronts, he declared, “This is revenge against Lebanon, the only country that has shown itself able to defeat Israel.” We reached an open area where the buildings had been completely levelled. Naboulsi pointed to some rubble and said, “This is where the Hezbollah Media Relations office used be. Now there’s no place for me to work.” He claimed that, apart from this and a center for social charity, there hadn’t been any Hezbollah offices around there—only civilian targets. He then led the group away from the area where, I had heard, Hezbollah’s security headquarters had stood. In Beirut, many people believed that Sheikh Nasrallah was still in the neighborhood, in a bunker, although there were also rumors that he was in Damascus or at the Iranian Embassy.

Naboulsi suddenly yelled, “Jet fighters in the sky!” He urged the journalists to hurry to their cars; the tour was over.



One evening, on a rooftop balcony in the eastern-Beirut district of Ashrafieh, I met with Jamil Mroue, a secular Shiite and the editor of Beirut’s English-language newspaper, the Daily Star. Mroue, a big, handsome silver-haired man of fifty-six, nursed a glass of whiskey and looked out over the sea, where two gray American destroyers were prowling the Mediterranean. After staring at the ships for a minute, Mroue began to vent his frustration.

“Even after 9/11, there is this expectation in the U.S. and Israel that some unspoken middle class is just sitting there waiting to inherit the ruins of whatever country it is that they are obliterating. But there is no calculation that, if they flatten Lebanon and Nasrallah comes out of hiding and is given a microphone to deliver a speech, he can topple governments. He has been extraordinarily empowered by this. Israel and America are still obsessed with destroying hardware. But if you do this with Hezbollah you just propagate what you want to destroy”—that is, an unmoored fighting force. “Do I want to live under Hezbollah?,” he said. “No, I don’t. But the same errors that the Americans made in Iraq are the ones being made here. You get rid of Nasrallah not by destroying his guns but by helping to create a sustainable society.”

Mroue went on, “In the beginning, in the eighties, Hezbollah controlled the night, but by 2000 it controlled the day, even as the Israeli soldiers were huddled in their bunkers.” He said that it was unfair to ask Lebanon’s fragile government to do what the Israelis couldn’t in their eighteen-year occupation. “Do you want to use a sledgehammer? Well, do you remember the Israeli minister who compared Arabs to lice? Try hitting lice with a sledgehammer!”

Mroue sipped his whiskey and said, “Hezbollah will most likely come out of this with its infrastructure shattered, but then comes the soapbox with the highly cerebral underdog—Nasrallah—and there will be a camera crew there from CNN or Al Arabiya, and he will go on camera and say ‘Do this,’ and people will.”

Mroue’s point of view was common not only among secular Shiites but among Christians and Sunnis who normally had little use for Hezbollah yet despaired of the effect of Israel’s bombing and the Bush Administration’s refusal to rein in the Olmert government.

“Before the war, probably eighty or ninety per cent of Lebanese were against Hezbollah,” Mroue said despondently. “But now I’d say it’s around fifty, teetering on sixty per cent—in favor.” Those numbers were guesses; the breadth and depth of Hezbollah’s support is one of the great uncertainties in the crisis. Mroue cited an old Saudi tribal proverb: “If you know the price of a man’s ransom, kill him.” The ransom was the price that would be exacted by the slain man’s tribe in revenge for his death. “In other words, if you know what the costs will be for your actions, and you can afford them, go ahead,” Mroue said. “But here, who knows what the price of the ransom is?”



Hussein Rahal runs Hezbollah’s information bureau, and, like other Hezbollah officials, he had gone underground. I met him by prearrangement in a borrowed office in a government building. Rahal was a study in gray: he wore a gray suit, had cropped gray hair, and had a gray stubble beard. He was taking the long view. “We have lived in this situation before. All wars end, and when this one does we will be victorious, because we will stand fast, and the situation we have now will be changed. Right now, the neoconservatives, as part of their strategy to reshape the Middle East, are encouraging Israel to escalate its war against Lebanon, which means that the U.S. Administration is taking a leading part in a war, one that the American people have no say in.” Rahal paused, and added carefully, “But Hezbollah does not want to cause any harm to the American people.” He went on, “The U.S. runs the risk of bringing down the Lebanese state it says it wants to support. And if this happens it could take the whole region into a new stage of the conflict—and who benefits from that?

“War is always two-sided, and you must test both sides’ ability to stand fast. We have weapons that we did not have in 1996. The casualties for Israel in a ground war will be very high. And we have only one choice, and that is to survive.”

The broadcast facilities of Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar, were bombed––the Israelis consider it the group’s most powerful propaganda arm—but it somehow managed to stay on the air. When I asked Ibrahim Mussawi, the editor of foreign news at Al Manar, about the damage the country had sustained, he said, “We’ve managed with thirty-five billion dollars of national debt”—Lebanon’s current debt. “What will it cost to rebuild the new damage? Four, five billion? If we could manage thirty-five, then we can manage forty billion. Bad as it is, maybe some good can come out of this; maybe after this it will be the right time to settle all our problems in Lebanon, all of the ‘isms’ we are famous for: nepotism, corruptionism.” Mussawi seemed to be suggesting that the best solution for Lebanon’s ills, when the war was over, was a government led by the Party of God.

For now, it is not clear who is running Lebanon. Rice came to Beirut in part to express support for Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who came to power after the “Cedar revolution,” the mass protests against Syrian interference in Lebanon that followed Hariri’s murder. Siniora, a Sunni, had criticized Hezbollah, but was openly in despair about the lack of U.S. support for a ceasefire; in Rome, he called the air war “barbaric.”

One politician Rice pointedly snubbed during her visit was the country’s President, Émile Lahoud, a Maronite who is widely seen as a tool of Syria. I met with him at the Presidential palace a few hours before Rice arrived. He was deeply tanned, and looked like an older, fleshier version of Tony Blair.

Lahoud told me how pleased he was that I had come to Lebanon to see the “truth” of what was happening. “Unfortunately, Americans have a very erroneous picture,” he said. “It’s—you know, they have a very strong media. Israel is all over the world.”

He spoke vehemently about the “infamy” of the Israeli attacks. “The Israelis said it was because of the taking of two hostages. Well, it is not true. They want to break the infrastructure, because Lebanon is a very big competitor of Israel, from the touristic point of view and with anything—regional trade, finance. So the Israelis don’t want Lebanon to prosper.” He added, “But the most important reason is that they want to take revenge, because we liberated our land.”

I asked Lahoud if he believed, as I had heard other Lebanese say, that Israel wanted to spark a civil war in Lebanon. “Yes,” he said. “Israel is happy when Lebanese fight each other.” He added, “Washington wants whatever Israel wants, unfortunately. For many reasons. The main one, you know”—Lahoud gave me a knowing look—“the lobby, and elections.

“Look, you can see the bombs from here,” Lahoud said. He led me to the window, and we looked down at the southern suburbs. A plume of gray smoke was rising rapidly.



On July 27th—the morning after Israel lost nine soldiers in clashes with Hezbollah, and two days after its missiles hit a U.N. outpost, killing four observers—I met a Western diplomat in Beirut. He told me that, while both Hezbollah and Israel had miscalculated, Hezbollah, at this point, had the advantage. “The casualties inflicted by Israel’s air campaign play right into Hezbollah’s hands. Hezbollah certainly thinks it’s winning. Even if it loses popularity among Druze, Sunnis, and Christians, its popularity remains high among Shiites, and for Hezbollah that’s all that really counts.”

Pointing to his head, he said, “In the end, the battle is between the ears. If, as a result of this, the Lebanese people get sick of Hezbollah, and if they turn on it and disarm it, that would be great.” A less favorable scenario was for the fighting to end inconclusively, with Hezbollah allowed to return to its former status. Still, he said, that might at least “show the Lebanese that there are serious consequences for supporting Hezbollah.”

The diplomat said that if anyone had benefitted from the confrontation, it was the government in Tehran. “Iran’s role in this has been huge,” he said. “I don’t know what role, if any, it had in the abductions, but I think it does encourage Hezbollah’s fighting on the border, and its arms shipments have been impressive. Without any cost to Iran, Lebanon is getting devastated, Israel is taking hits, and the Iranians are getting distraction from the nuclear issue. They must be very happy right now.”

The degree to which Hezbollah, fortified by its sponsors in Iran and Syria, has constrained Lebanon’s political dialogue was brought home to me by Nayla Mouawad, Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs. Mouawad, a Maronite, is the widow of former President René Mouawad, who was assassinated in 1989, the main suspects being Syria or a domestic political opponent. When I asked about Hezbollah, Mouawad chose her words very carefully. “We thought we needed Hezbollah to be a part of the government, and we gave it ministries to give it confidence to join in the nation-building. We thought that we could not implement a settlement by force, but through national dialogue.” Mouawad said that she wanted a ceasefire, but that afterward the Lebanese Army should assume control of the entire country. She was worried about it, though. “Divisions still exist in this country,” she said. “If a comprehensive settlement is not implemented, we are going to have problems. There will be people counting their losses—and the losses are tremendous—and looking for someone to blame.” She added, “Lebanon is paying the price for Syrian and Iranian interests.”

She noted that the Lebanese government agreed with some of Hezbollah’s demands, including the return of Shebaa farms and prisoners. “We need to convince Hezbollah that only a strong Lebanese nation and state could preserve its future as a party, as a Lebanese party—not as an armed political faction.” Mouawad paused, and said, “I am very much aware that the moment we are living now may be better than the one we are going to live through.”



Despite its losses, Hezbollah remains conspicuously in control in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Outsiders are stopped and interrogated by men who seem to materialize out of nowhere, riding on motor scooters. A few days after the press tour, I returned to visit an underground refuge for displaced Shiite civilians; a Hezbollah official had approved the visit.

My car pulled up outside the Farms Superstore, a modern supermarket in a concrete-and-glass building. After a round of questioning, I was allowed to proceed but only in the company of a Hezbollah man, who carried a black portfolio. Like most Hezbollah men, he wore a light beard, in the Iranian fashion. He led the way down into the three-level parking garage beneath the store, a vast, clean space of rubberized gray floors and support columns. There were no vehicles in sight; instead, at every other column or so, there were Lebanese families sitting and reclining on reed mats and foam-rubber mattresses. Each family had neat bundles of blankets and plastic bags of clothing and food. A few had electric fans, and one group was gathered around a television. They were mostly women and children, with some older men and teen-age boys; I saw few men in their twenties or thirties. The Hezbollah man said that there were three hundred and sixty families in the garage—approximately two thousand people.

In one corner, children played on swings, a slide, and a small carrousel. Our escort said that Hezbollah had provided the equipment. He added that Hezbollah had set up a clinic and a pharmacy.

As we walked down to the next level, two teen-age boys, who had been squabbling, began throwing punches at one another. The escort grabbed them and sent them away with a reprimand. A few minutes later, we were approached by a young man named Ali. He held the hand of a wide-eyed girl of six or seven. He said he was from the southern town of Marjayoun. “I have been here six days,” he said. “I am tired, but I’m not scared.” He said that he had volunteered his services to Hezbollah, patrolling the refuge at night, “to see if anyone needs anything.” Speaking of the Hezbollah leader, who the night before had made a television appearance, he said, “Sheikh Nasrallah said last night that it will last a long time. So here I am.”

A middle-aged woman in a black chador came over. When I asked if she minded living underground, she smiled and said, in a gravelly voice, “It’s all the same to me. If Israel and America want to do this to us, all we can do is to bear the situation, so if we have to stay underground we will. We don’t mind staying here as long as the boys are O.K.”—a reference to Hezbollah’s fighters—“and as long as Sheikh Nasrallah is fine. We can bear anything. Death is normal to us, and, anyway, it means we’ll go to heaven.” She told us that four children had been born in the underground garage. Two were boys, and they had been named Waaed, which means “the promising one,” and Sadeq, which means “the truthful one,” “because Sheikh Nasrallah says, ‘We have the promise of liberating the south.’ ” She added, “We don’t think the Israelis will come to Beirut, but, if they do, we know what to do with them.” A young pregnant woman standing next to her laughed and made lunging, stabbing motions with her hand.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/conten.../060807fa_fact

http://www.islamonline.net/English/N...07/29/02.shtml

Lebanon Sunnis Fight Alongside Hizbullah

By Hadi Yahmid, IOL Correspondent

"The Sunni Islamic Group in Lebanon fighters are defending… southern Lebanon hand-in-hand with Hizbullah," Masri said.

BEIRUT — Rejecting calls banning support for the Shiite Hizbullah resistance group, Lebanese Sunnis are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hizbullah fighters in defending Lebanon against the relentless Israeli onslaught, the deputy head of Lebanon's Al-Jama Al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) said on Saturday, July 29.

"The Sunni Islamic Group in Lebanon fighters are defending southern Lebanon hand-in-hand with Hizbullah," Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Masri, the group's deputy chairman, said in an interview with IslamOnline.net.

"We have military combatant groups in the border areas to defend villages there."

Al-Jama Al-Islamiya in Lebanon was established early 1975 during the Lebanese civil war to defend the Sunni areas in southern Lebanon.

Declining to reveal the size of the group's military presence in the area, Masri said the Sunni fighters are mainly stationed in southern villages along borders between Lebanon and modern-day Israel, and around the city of Sidon.

"There are two mainly Sunni strongholds comprising the villages of Araqoub, Shabaa, Habariya and Kafr Shuba along with western villages like Marwahin and Al-Bustan," he elaborated.

He went on: ""We, in coordination with Hizbullah, took charge of these areas and agreed that Hizbullah would have the final say in a ceasefire."

Speaking to IOL over the phone, Hizbullah's media officer, Ghasan Darwish, neither confirmed nor denied the participation of Sunni fighters in military operations.

"Naturally, the Lebanese people, regardless of their sectarian affiliations, will take part in resisting the Israeli aggression," he told IOL.

Up to 600 Lebanese, mostly children and civilians, were killed and thousands injured when Israel launched a wide-scale offensive on Lebanon on the pretext of seeking the release of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hizbullah.

The hard-won infrastructure of the Arab country has been left in ruins, with Israel knocking out Beirut international airport, bombing ports, destroying bridges, setting power stations ablaze and reducing houses to rubble.

Legitimate Right

The Lebanese Sunni group has also rejected calls banning support for Shiite Hizbullah.

"Hizbullah is doing great efforts which we all strongly support," Masri said.

Last week, a Saudi scholar caused controversy when he issued a fatwa banning the Sunni support for Hizbullah on sectarian grounds.

"This raises big questions about the parties behind such opinions at that time," Masri said. "Opinions fueling sectarian division are meaningless, rather they cause to fuel Muslim division.

"Resistance against Israel is a national and a legitimate right. The whole Muslim nation including intellectuals and scholars has to support the Lebanese resistance," he averred.

The tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the Lebanese resistance movement with its head Hassan Nasrallah becoming a folk hero.

An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hizbullah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her "new Middle East" that they say has led only to violence and repression, The New York Times said in an editorial.

Respected Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi has said that support of the Lebanese resistance was a Muslim duty.

"When the enemy enters a country all the people there should unite to resist, be they Sunnis or Shiites, Muslims or Christians ... Such divisions hurt the resistance, which requires everyone to close ranks and speak in one voice," Qaradawi said.

"One is not allowed to instigate religious fanaticism which divides the people," he told the Doha-base Aljazeera television.

The International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS) also warned against calls fueling sectarian division between Sunnis and Shiites.

Egypt's mufti, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, also said Hizbullah resistance group was defending Lebanon against Israeli injustice.

"The attacks, killing and destruction that are taking place in Lebanon now by Israeli forces are injustice itself," Mufti Ali Gomaa told a meeting in southern Egypt.

"This gives the Lebanese the right to defend themselves. Hizbullah is defending its country and what it is doing is not terrorism," he added.

On Thursday Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Muslim political movement in the Arab world, also rejected the Saudi fatwa.

OP-ED


Why Do They Hate Us? Listen to Qana (Again)

Birth Pangs or Death Throes?

By JONATHAN COOK

Counterpunch

July 31, 2006

The crowds in Beirut last year demanding a Cedar Revolution, "the first shoots of democracy" supposedly planted by the United States, are a distant memory. Yesterday we saw in their place the fury of Lebanon directed against the capital's United Nations building -- an early "birth pang" in Condoleeza Rice's new Middle East.

If Israel wanted to widen its war, it could not have chosen a better way to achieve it than by sending its war planes back to the mixed Muslim and Christian village of Qana in south Lebanon to massacre civilians there, as if marking a morbid anniversary. A decade ago, Israeli shelling on the village killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians sheltering in a local UN post.

To the Lebanese, and most in the Arab world, the United Nations now symbolises everything that is corrupt about the international community and its "conscience". The world body, it has become clearer by the day, is a mere plaything of the United States and, by default, of Israel too. It is nothing more than a talking shop, one so enfeebled that it lacks the moral backbone even to denouce unequivocally the murder of four of its unarmed observers by the Israeli army last week. How can Lebanon expect protection for its civilians from an international body as emasculated as this?

The rage we saw directed against the United Nations building in Beirut, as if we needed reminding, will be converted in time into more violence against the West, to more 9/11s and to more London and Madrid bombings. Will these attacks wake up the slumbering Western publics to stop their leaders engineering a global war, or will more of us simply be persuaded that the Arab world is fundamentally irrational and savage?

Why do they hate us? Qana provides the answers but it appears few in the West are really listening.

All morning when Arab channels were showing the crushed building in Qana, and the Red Crescent workers extracting from under it more than 60 bodies, mostly children, embalmed in blood and dust, Israel was showing family movies on its main television networks.

Foreign channels were hardly better. It is in the first responses of the Western broadcasters -- before they have had time to hone and polish their scripts and cover all the bases -- that their partisan agenda is at its most transparent. So all morning their attention was directed less at the new Qana massacre than at the destruction of the UN building in Beirut, as though it was our last rampart against the rampaging hordes of Islam. In this framing of the world, our provocative acts appear so much less significant than the mystifying response, the Other's delusional anger.

Noticeably, our news anchors were careful to avoid referring to the massacre of Lebanese children at Qana as "an escalation" by Israel. That word, intoned so solemnly when eight Israeli railway workers were killed by a Hizbullah rocket in Haifa a fortnight ago, was not uttered on this occasion. According to our media, when we suffer, it is an escalation demanding retaliation; when they suffer, maybe it is time to begin talks about talks about a ceasefire.

BBC World's presenter in Beirut, Lyse Doucet, personifies this moral blindness. She chided Lebanese speaker after speaker for the crowds attacking the UN building. "Why are they doing this when the UN is trying to broker a ceasefire?" she demanded in bafflement of each. The headlines at 11am GMT even began with her quoting an expression of regret she had extracted from a Hizbullah MP for the attack on the Beirut building, as though amid all that morning's carnage the destruction of UN property was the real issue.

This presumably is what our media mean when they talk about "balance".

Jim Muir, the BBC's fine reporter in Tyre, observed in the same broadcast that it was non-combatants who were paying the price in this war, and that the majority of the dead on both sides were civilian. Where did he get that idea? In Israel, the great majority of dead are soldiers, but you would hardly know it listening to our media. In the same spirit, Jonathan Charles in Haifa observed that it had been "a difficult day" for both countries, adding -- in case we could not fathom what he meant -- that Israel had faced a hard day on the diplomatic front. What lengths our broadcasters must go to to remain even-handed when we massacre innocence.

Israel, as usual, can be relied on to defend the indefensible. A government spokeswoman told the BBC in another easy-ride interview that the army would never target an area if it knew Lebanese civilians were there. Then she performed a somersault of logic several times by arguing in her country's defence that the army knows Hizbullah hides behind civilians. If she is right, then even as the pilot fired on the Hizbullah fighters he assumed were inside the building he knew civilians would pay the price too. But, of course, Hizbullah fighters were not in the building.

This endless sophistry is designed to lull us into acquiescence. Only vigilance keeps us asking the right questions. How, for example, after its reconnaissance planes and spy drones have been hovering over south Lebanon for the best part of three weeks, was Israel not aware that hundreds of civilians were still in Qana? But no one raised that question.

Cut through the apology, both from Israel and our media, and the aerial strike on Qana looks, at the very best interpretation, recklessly ambivalent about the likely civilian death toll. A cynic might go further. Was the attack meant as a warning to other civilians still in south Lebanon to get out -- and fast? After its clear failure to win a conventional war, does the Israeli army want a freer hand to begin the job of incinerating Hizbullah, using its cluster and incendiary bombs, the Middle East's napalm? Was the answer to be found in the statement of Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, yesterday that, generously, he was giving civilians 24 hours safe passage to get out of the south.



Or was the massacre crafted as punishment for Qana's villagers, for those living among Hizbullah, for those who are related to Hizbullah, for those who believe that Hizbullah is their best hope of preventing another Israeli occupation? Did Israel's Justice Minister Haim Ramon not make precisely this point last week when he announced in a cabinet meeting: "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah."?



Moshe Marzouk, a former senior Israeli army officer who has turned his hand to being a "counter-terrorism expert" in one of the country's leading academic institutions, told the American Jewish weekly The Forward that one of Israel's goal in this war is to teach Lebanon's Shiite community that it will pay a tremendous price for Hizbullah's actions. Maybe Qana was part of the price he was talking about.



Israel offers a second excuse for the massacre: it says it dropped leaflets on Qana warning civilians to leave the area. Again, our cynic could point out that those leaflets were dropped 10 days ago, as they were across most of south Lebanon. Qana had no reason to expect worse than anywhere else -- and possibly it expected better, assuming that Israel would not dare to stage a war crime here for a second time after it troops massacred more than 100 civilians in 1996.



Our cynic could also note that Israel has bombed the escape roads from the south and is shooting at anything that moves on what is left of them. And he could point out that many of Qana's families have no cars to leave in, that they can find no petrol to fill the cars that remain after Israel bombed all the petrol stations, and that in any case they have nowhere else to go.



Though these things are all true, they distract us from the real issue: that Israel has no right to empty south Lebanon of its population, to make a million people homeless, just because its leaflets say they must leave. Jim Muir let us and himself down when he observed that south Lebanon is "not an area which can become depopulated overnight". No it isn't, but the deeper question is why should it be depopulated? At what point did the international broadcasters fall unnoticed behind an agenda that demands south Lebanon be ethnically cleansed to satisfy Israel?



Our media are oblivious to the double standards. Did Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah not publicly warn that he would attack Haifa days before he did so, if Israel continued its aggression and refused to negotiate over a prisoner swap? Were Israelis not warned to leave too? And would we allow Hizbulllah to use that as a justification for its rocket fire on Israel?



On Friday Hizbullah fired its first khaibar missile, packed with 100kg of explosives, close by Nazareth -- we could feel the earth tremble from the impact. The Shiite militia waited more than two weeks before launching a warhead of that size, after it made repeated threats to do so if Israel continued its onslaught. Who will point out that had Hizbullah wanted to, if Israel's destruction was the real aim, it could have fired those khaibar rockets from day one?



And on Saturday Nasrallah promised to strike "beyond Haifa" with even more lethal rockets if Israel refused to countenance a ceasefire. Who on the BBC, or CNN or any of our other channels will quote that warning as justification if Hizbullah extends its fire to Hadera, Netanya or Tel Aviv in the coming days?



This is not a war of two narratives, nor even of two worldviews. It is a war in which we, the West, speak for both sides. Where we define the meaning of suffering and death, and of victory and peace. Where our humanity alone counts because we feel only our own pain as the birth pangs take hold.



Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net



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Jonathan Cook News Archive, last updated on Tuesday, 01 August 2006

Hezbollah's Fight Impresses Supporters
By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI
AP
BEIRUT, Lebanon (Aug. 2) - Hezbollah can claim at least one victory in its fight with Israel - a growing reputation in the Arab world as one of the few forces to successfully stand up to the powerful Israeli army.

"What they've achieved is very symbolic and of a gigantic value," said Abbas Baydoun, a columnist for Beirut's leftist As Safir newspaper. "It may not be a military victory, but its value is more important than that."

Hezbollah's task could get tougher, though, if Israel launches a major ground offensive. Israel poured up to 10,000 armored troops into south Lebanon on Tuesday, including an operation in Baalbek, where they fought with militants at a Hezbollah-run hospital.

Even if Hezbollah suffers losses, though, winning or losing a war that's fought between a nation state and a guerrilla group requires an entirely different kind of assessment than a conventional war, said retired Gen. Elias Hanna of the Lebanese army.

"Hezbollah wins if it doesn't lose. And Israel loses if it doesn't win," he added. "What's more important to the non-state actor is survival than to achieve victory."

Hezbollah's ability to survive so far has brought it many admirers.

Shiite Hezbollah derives much of its support from both Syrian and Iranian backers and Lebanese Shiites in southern Lebanon. It initially drew criticism in Lebanon for sparking the conflict July 12 when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

But after Israel launched what many people in the region see as a disproportionate response - more than 500 Lebanese have been killed so far - many people here who opposed Hezbollah, and who still oppose its fundamentalist ideology, now support it in the war.

"At the start of the war, Hezbollah felt uneasy - many were against our capture of the Israeli soldiers," said Hassan Fadlallah, a Hezbollah deputy in the Lebanese parliament.

"Now the Israeli war is an open war on all of Lebanon. Militarily, Israel has not been able to achieve anything. On the contrary, it loses when its soldiers enter Lebanese soil."

Israel's stated goal at the beginning of the fighting was to decimate Hezbollah and force it to move back from the Israel-Lebanon border and return the two soldiers. Since then, talk by the United States and others has focused on the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon to protect Israel from attacks.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted Tuesday that no cease fire was likely soon. And the Israeli cabinet approved a broader ground offensive into southern Lebanon to secure the area until a multinational force can deploy there.

Many here say Israel has not yet gained the upper hand in the fighting. It has been unable to kill Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who many Arabs are now comparing to former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. At a recent anti-Israel rally in Cairo, many demonstrators carried pictures of both Nasrallah and Nasser, known for his vigorous promotion of Arab nationalism.

In addition, Hezbollah met an Israeli ground offensive with fierce resistance last week, and Israel announced a "tactical withdrawal" from the area of Bint Jbail and Maroun al-Ras.

Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, head of Israel's northern command, said Israel never intended to occupy Bint Jbail or to get "stuck in one place." He insisted the real mission -- "to destroy infrastructure and kill terrorists" -- had been a success.

Nasrallah emerged from the fight saying his guerrillas had dealt Israel a "serious defeat" in the town. But the guerrillas' losses remained unclear.

"They thought when they came in with tanks, the fighters would run away," said Ibrahim Amin, a columnist for Al-Akhbar, a daily that is close to Hezbollah. "This didn't happen."

However, Hanna, the Lebanese general, said the Israeli ground forays into south Lebanon's border towns - known as the triangle of Bint Jbail, Maroun Ras and Taibeh - may have in fact been a calculated strategy.

"The operation there was like probing ... trying to create a certain pattern ...to see how the (Hezbollah) network is established. It will be easier to destroy it later," said Hanna.

He said that as Israel launches its broad offensive, Hezbollah may first resist. But if it is forced to retreat to the Litani River - about 18 miles north of the Israel-Lebanon border - it will regroup over time and wage a "mobile insurgency" against Israel, as it did before 2000.

That prospect has many worried. And even as many admire Hezbollah's resilience, there are still many in Lebanon who oppose and fear the group.

Waddah Charara, professor of sociology and a well-known critic of the group, said he thinks it has so far made a "sweeping victory" on the battlefield. But the group's newfound strength does not bode well for the future.


"It's a defeat for Lebanon," he said.

http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles...02063909990007

MARJAAYOUN: “Any Hezbullah in the town?” I asked the Lebanese soldier who had hitched a lift outside this mixed Christian and Shia area just five miles north of the Israeli border. “A few,” he replied, as his right eye creased into a cheerful wink. We dropped him in Marjaayoun’s cobbled main square, where three other soldiers in the green camouflage of the Lebanese army were leaning against a wall in the shade. Nearby, outside a shuttered cafe in the otherwise deserted hub of what was obviously once an attractive hillside town, four men were chatting.

Two sported beards and wore black trousers and military-style boots. The younger and tougher-looking man had a walkie-talkie on his belt. His dark and calloused hands were stained with grease and oil. After inquiring who we were, they revealed they were indeed some of our soldier’s “few”. It was also obvious that the two groups, Hezbollah and the army, had a comfortable relationship, each with its own mission to perform, untroubled by the presence of the other. In Washington, Jerusalem and London there is much talk of the need to get the Lebanese army to move into southern Lebanon and disarm Hezbollah. On the ground there is little to suggest any antagonism. It looks more like mutual sympathy. The notion that the army could forcibly remove Hezbollah’s weapons seems fanciful.

All the evidence suggests that in the current conflict it is Hezbollah which is taking the lead; it is Hezbollah which has won popular admiration for its actions. The army’s role is marginal. As we drove south down the Bekaa valley in eastern Lebanon, we came across regular army checkpoints. Sentry boxes painted red and white, with the green symbol of the cedar of Lebanon, stood in the centre of the road with a slalom arrangement of barbed wire on the approaches, forcing drivers to slow down. It looked neat and efficient, except that they were all unmanned. If Hezbollah is hiding rockets in vehicles going towards the border, the Lebanese army is not checking.

The Bekaa valley used to be Lebanon’s breadbasket, as well as the source of its wine. Rows of vines stretch across the gently sloping terrain around estate houses with names such as Chateau Ksara and Chateau Nakad. South of an artificial lake on the Litani river the road skirts a dam and climbs into rougher, less fertile, boulder-strewn country.

Every small town has a welcome arch at the entrance with the yellow flags of Hezbollah, and pictures of its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, often flanked by Iran’s two ayatollahs, the Islamic Republic’s founder Ruhollah Khomeini and its current leader, Ali Khamenei. At Yogmor the arch has two plywood rockets, a reminder that Hezbollah spreads its message not by word alone. About 10 miles north of Marjaayoun we found half a dozen soldiers lying on the grass by the road. They made no effort to check us, but we decided to stop and ask whether any risk lay ahead. A few cars with white flags were driving north and town after town was almost completely deserted. Bombs had gouged three craters along a 20-mile stretch of road but traffic could negotiate a narrow strip beside each one.

Identity-checking was in the hands of civilians. No one flagged us down, but when we stopped to buy water at one of the last shops still open a middle-aged man asked to see our press cards and wrote down our names. In Marjaayoun itself, as well as the lounging soldiers, we saw two jeeps with about 20 troops in the back racing into the square and up a sidestreet. They came from over a brow, where a few minutes later the crump of Israeli artillery fire sounded. We heard at least 20 shells, apparently hitting the south-facing slopes beyond Marjaayoun.

From another vantage point we could see the roofs of the Israeli border town of Metulla on a ridge six miles away. Two miles to our left was the town of Khiyam, where Israeli bombs hit scores of houses as well as a UN building last week, killing four observers.

“People who’ve been down there say the whole town stinks of bodies trapped in the ruins,” said Simon Diab, a guard at Marjaayoun’s Orthodox church. Windows in the church and its outbuildings were shattered by the blast from an Israeli bomb which demolished a suspected Hezbollah house the day before. Marjaayoun had been enjoying a revival in fortunes after the last Israeli occupation ended in 2000. A sign in English and Arabic from the US charity Mercy Corps advertises its project for restoring the ancient souk. In the school 200 refugees are sheltering. They are not totally cut off. Two white Toyotas from the International Committee of the Red Cross raced in as we were leaving.

The Lebanese army has grown from 35,000 to 70,000 since the civil war ended in 1990, far outnumbering Hezbollah’s estimated 6,000 fighters. But half the troops are thought to be Shia, which means their loyalty could be uncertain in the unlikely event they were ordered to confront Hezbollah.

In spite of its numbers the army is thinly spread in the section of southern Lebanon we visited, offering little more than symbolic defence. Hezbollah, by contrast, is active. “Israel came in too easily in 1982,” said the Hezbollah unit leader in Marjaayoun. At that time Hezbollah didn’t exist. He gave his name as Hussein Bitar. “Either we are here or they are here. We are not leaving this land, it is ours, not theirs. Israel thinks the United States is with them, but we have God,” he said.

The grease on his hands could have been a sign that his mission was launching rockets. It might have a more innocent explanation. Either way, the Lebanese army troops we witnessed clearly did not mind a Hezbollah commander in their midst. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service

http://www.dawn.com/2006/08/02/int13.htm

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topic...6&parent_id=26

Hezbollah crushes air power theory
Published: Thursday, 3 August, 2006, 11:36 AM Doha Time

By Dan Williams

TEL AVIV: Israel’s failure so far to curb Hezbollah rocket attacks using its arsenal of jets, helicopter gunships and unmanned drones has cast doubt on the theory that heavy reliance on air power is the best way to win a modern war.

Air force failures in the face of the militarily far less advanced Lebanese guerrilla group could also hurt Israeli exports of weapons systems whose main selling point is that they have been tested in battle.

And the reputations of Israeli pilots and planners have been tarnished by the heavy civilian toll in Lebanon.

For now, Israel’s top brass have avoided a public reckoning, noting the air force has carried out 7,000-odd sorties - a scale that must inevitably mean some mistakes.

But eyebrows are already being raised abroad, especially in arms markets dominated by Israeli exports worth more than $3bn a year and among strategists who long thought air power the most precise and reliable means of besting any enemy.

"We are talking about the holy grail of future combat, and Israel did a great job of building sophisticated, world-leading systems based on the understanding they were born in battle," said Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons.

"This is certainly going to make people question the salesmen a bit more, because it appears that in the hour of need this stuff is not working as advertised," he said.

Barbara Opall-Rome of the Defense News journal predicted upsets to Israel’s major export deals, including a recent multibillion-dollar package ordered by its top client, India.

She described Israel as one of a club of militarily advanced countries whose air forces take pride of place in war planning.

"Air power enthusiasts will be licking their wounds and they will surely have to go back and revise their arguments," she said. "I’m sure there will be a lot more humility now." The air force chief of staff, who has in the past extolled the hi-tech capabilities of his corps, struck a different tone when trying to explain the bombing of Qana village this week, when 54 civilians were killed.

"The ability to handle this arena in a homogenous manner, to hit the terrorists alone and at one go, is limited," said Brigadier-General Amir Eshel, who blamed Hezbollah for hiding its personnel in heavily populated areas.

Using air forces to carry a campaign goes back at least to World War II.

But with the emphasis in more recent conflicts being on reducing civilian casualties and establishing quick control of conquered foes, many Western military planners are increasingly loth to dispense with ground forces.

Serbian forces largely managed to hunker down and survive the Nato bombing of Kosovo in 1999. The hundreds of innocents killed by the air strikes also meant a backlash later in Europe.

US forces, having mainly relied on air power during the first Gulf War of 1991, brought in far more tanks and troops during the 2003 push that toppled Saddam Hussain.

But with an Iraqi insurgency raging since, the Pentagon was still criticised for not putting enough "boots on the ground".

"There is a growing realisation that, after the air campaign, you need men in body armour and tanks to finish the job," Hewson said.

Air power is perceived as a means of reducing the risk to ground forces - a major domestic concern in Israel given its dependence on teenaged conscripts.

Israeli military planners also say advanced aerial surveillance systems and precision-guided weapons mean that Hezbollah guerrillas can be targeted while civilians in the vicinity are largely spared. But most of some 750 Lebanese killed have been civilians.

"What matters in such situations is not killing the people you are trying to liberate," said Hewson. "This is the big strategic failure of the Israeli campaign." Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week ordered an expanded ground sweep of Lebanon. It remains to be seen how the troops will fare against Hezbollah guerrillas emboldened by what they see as the enemy’s reluctance to fight face-to-face.

Setbacks in quelling Hezbollah could cost Olmert diplomatically as well and bolster the group’s backers, Iran and Syria, which are viewed by Israel’s US ally as shared foes.

"Israeli Defence Forces clearly underestimated Hezbollah’s capabilities and overestimated their ability to degrade them from the air," editorialised the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

"American support for Israel’s strategy is far from cost-free for (US President George W) Bush, and Mr Olmert has to understand that it won’t continue if he lacks the will to prevail as rapidly as militarily possible." – Reuters

Tactics of insurgency

Amyas Godfrey
Thursday August 3, 2006
The Guardian


By expanding ground operations into southern Lebanon the Israeli military is taking on a challenge which has troubled armies for generations: how to successfully wage war against an insurgent enemy.
The difficulty inherent with asymmetric warfare - the military term for fighting irregular forces with conventional forces - is that your enemy is able to "move among the people like a fish in water". This description of the nature of revolutionary war by Mao Zedong in the 1920s does well to define the aim of counter-insurgency as the need to "separate the fish from the water" or the insurgent from the people. Israel is now facing this problem in southern Lebanon.

What insurgents lack in military capability they make up for in different ways. Good insurgent leaders balance their advantages against their disadvantages in what is often an unequal fight. They have three distinct advantages over the conventional military.

Firstly, they have a chameleon-like ability to shift back and forth across the divide from insurgent to civilian; recognising when it is best to fight and when to walk away, downing tools when continued resistance would result in their own futile destruction.

The insurgent's second advantage is propaganda. The media, when used skillfully by the insurgent, can have far greater effect than any amount of bullets or bombs. The current conflict in Lebanon is not militarily equal, but Hizbullah abides by no laws or treaties, nor is it burdened by accountability. Well managed, an insurgent group can portray itself as "freedom fighters". Additionally, Hizbullah can turn every dead fighter into a hero, and every civilian death into a recruiting tool. It is unlikely to run out of recruits for the foreseeable future.

The final area where any insurgent campaign is likely to have an advantage is in its knowledge and use of the ground. It is reported that Hizbullah has been preparing for this conflict for six years. It has constructed a network of tunnels, selected its ambushes, and prepared the local population.

Israel, for its part, is pursuing a conventional, straightforward approach. It can do little else. The Israeli army is a mixture of professionals, national service conscripts and reservists. The last two categories by their very nature have limited military training and are less capable of complex operations.

Once the decision had been made to destroy Hizbullah, a four-phased operation was put into action. Phase one called for widespread air strikes against Lebanese infrastructure, crippling the country and dishing out collective punishment on the people for supporting Hizbullah. It was presumably hoped that an early settlement could be achieved through pressure on Hizbullah. This did not work.

Phase two has seen more direct targeting of Hizbullah fighters and its capabilities, by disrupting communications and supplies and safe houses.

The Israeli forces are now moving into phase three: the land offensive. The aim is to "mop up" pockets of resistance and seize ground from rocket teams. It is potentially the bloodiest phase for Israel - and the one Hizbullah has been waiting for.

Phase four would be the occupation of Hizbullah's ground, southern Lebanon. However it is too early to say whether this will be done by the Israeli army or a UN force. Whichever way it ends up, this most recent conflict in the Middle East is following a now recognisable pattern: insurgent conflicts are never short, nor benign in destructive power.

· Amyas Godfrey is Associate Fellow of Royal United Services Institute

Hezbollah's arsenal cut above guerrillas

Thu, August 3, 2006

It's had six years to reinforce its positions in southern Lebanon since Israel's pullout.

By AP



CAIRO, EGYPT -- Hezbollah has fired rockets as far as the West Bank, knocked out Israeli tanks and damaged a warship -- and had plenty of time to booby-trap all of southern Lebanon. It is hardly a typical guerrilla group, equipped only with bravado and AK-47 rifles.

Still, it faces a high-tech and well-outfitted Israeli army more than capable of adapting to new threats.

The outcome of the conflict may depend on whether Hezbollah can hold out long enough for the international community to impose a ceasefire before the Israelis have time to inflict serious damage.

Either way, Israel faces a bitter and bloody conflict against a well-trained force equipped with modern weapons, military experts say.

Hezbollah has had six years to ready its defences, set deadly traps and store munitions in tunnels and bunkers hewn into the rocky, mountainous terrain of southern Lebanon -- preparations started when Israel pulled out its troops in 2000 after 18 years of occupation.

It also had time to get "some good tough training" and fill its ranks with fighters who are "not just hoods picked up off the streets of Gaza City," said Robin Hughes of Jane's Defense Weekly.

Already, Hezbollah has proven more formidable than Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. In eight days of bitter fighting in the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbail, Israel lost 18 soldiers -- its heaviest casualties since the conflict began in Lebanon. Israel then withdrew, saying it never intended to capture the town.

"The engagement with Hezbollah will be different than the type of stuff the Israelis have met with Hamas. It's a different type of animal," Hughes said by telephone from London.

In addition to fighting skills, Hezbollah has a system for resupplying its fighters at the front, plus missiles to hit targets in Israel and tanks in Lebanon, as well as communications sophisticated enough to monitor Israeli military communications, Hughes and others said.

It also benefits from the fact that the fighting has been the type where "guerrillas have the advantage," said Bruce Hoffman, a counterinsurgency expert at Washington's RAND Corp.

"They know the area, they've had the opportunity to lay traps and ambushes," he said. "There's no way (for Israel) to do it except to root forces out on the ground. And it certainly can be done, but there's going to be a lot of bloodshed."

Israeli forces were doing just that yesterday -- going from village to village clearing them of guerrillas. Hezbollah was putting up resistance, but Israeli officials said they were confident they would reach positions about seven kilometres into Lebanon by tomorrow as planned.

Despite such Israeli claims, Hezbollah fighters appear resolute and confident.

Hezbollah projects confidence through its skill in manipulating public opinion, keeping its Al-Mansar television station running throughout the conflict.

Most of Hezbollah's equipment is believed to have been supplied by Syria and Iran, with Iran also providing training through its Revolutionary Guards, Hughes and others said. Tehran denies providing either.

Yesterday, a Hezbollah Khaibar-1 missile hit Beit Shean and the nearby West Bank, about 70 kilometres from the Lebanon border -- the deepest strike so far.

Hezbollah's most important hardware could be a variety of anti-tank weapons.

HEZBOLLAH'S WAR-MAKING CAPACITY

MANPOWER

Analysts estimate Hezbollah has a core of 500-600 highly trained fighters, with reserve militia perhaps five times that number.

SURFACE-TO-SURFACE MISSILES

- Fajr-5: Range of about 74 kilometres, 200-kilogram warhead.

- Fajr-3: Range of 34 kilometres, 90-kilogram payload.

- Katyusha: Range of 19 kilometres. Most numerous missile in Hezbollah's arsenal -- about 10,000.

- Ahead of the conflict, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said his group had more than 12,000 rockets. Experts estimate group has about 2,000 now after Israeli air strikes on stockpiles and Hezbollah firings of about 2,000 into Israel.

ANTI-TANK WEAPONS

- RPG-29 grenade launchers.

- AT-3 Sagger wire-guided missiles.

- AT-4 Spigot wire guided missiles.

- TOW missiles.

OTHER WEAPONS

- NUR anti-ship, radar-guided cruise missile (Iranian version of China's C-802 missile). Believed to have been used in July 14 attack on Israeli Saar 5-class missile ship.

- Anti-aircraft missiles. Quantity and details unknown.

http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/Int...16322-sun.html

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...d/15191950.htm

Israel admits air war has failed to end the Hezbollah rocket threat
By Dion Nissenbaum and Matthew Schofield
McClatchy Newspapers

TEL AVIV, Israel - The Israeli military began preparing to reoccupy southern Lebanon on Thursday, and Israeli officials conceded that their three-week bombing campaign has had no significant impact on Hezbollah's ability to fire short-range rockets into northern Israel.


The dispatch of thousands of Israeli soldiers to retake as much as one-fifth of Lebanon - the operation must still be approved by the Israeli Cabinet - would mark a major expansion in Israel's Lebanon campaign and would reverse Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon six years ago after a troubled 18-year occupation.


It also would complicate efforts in the United Nations to arrange a cease-fire and the creation of an international peacekeeping force to police southern Lebanon.


Senior military officials suggest that Israel may have little choice, however. On Thursday, one official admitted that the air war had failed to cripple Hezbollah's ability to fire the short-range Katyusha rockets, which form the bulk of the militant Islamic group's aerial arsenal.


"They are still in full capacity to attack our villages," said the official, who briefed a small group of reporters about the military campaign against Hezbollah on the condition of anonymity. "In order to stop the firing, we need a major ground offensive against the short-range rockets."


To prove the point, Hezbollah fired at least 200 rockets, killing eight people across northern Israel. Four Israeli soldiers also were killed while fighting in southern Lebanon, making Thursday the deadliest day for Israel since fighting began July 12, after Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in northern Israel.


The military plans came as Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to strike Tel Aviv if Israel continues bombarding Beirut.


"If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity. ... We will bomb Tel Aviv," Nasrallah said in a taped address played on Hezbollah's television news station, Al-Manar.


Threats of a dramatic escalation from both sides added urgency to negotiations at the United Nations to force a quick cease-fire to end a conflict that's taken nearly 1,000 lives, created 900,000 Lebanese refugees and raised fears of a further destabilized Middle East.


Since Hezbollah sparked the conflict, 68 Israelis have been killed. Nearly two-thirds of those killed have been Israeli soldiers. In response, Israel unleashed a massive air campaign that's killed some 900 Lebanese, most of them civilians.


Until now, Israel has used a relatively limited number of artillery batteries, tanks and soldiers to push Hezbollah back from the border.


Maj. Zvika Golan, with the Israeli military's Northern Command, said Thursday that Israel has taken control of 20 Lebanese villages along four miles of border and is planning to send more troops into Lebanon to create a "buffer zone" nine miles deep.


"We need another two brigades, and with them we hope that within two days we could create a 15-kilometer (nine-mile) buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah," Golan said. "Without additional brigades, we will still be able to create the zone, but it will take longer, a week, maybe more."


On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz directed the military to prepare for an even more aggressive push that would reach 18 miles into southern Lebanon in a bid to drive Hezbollah north of the Litani River. That would put Israeli soldiers in control of 200 square miles of Lebanon where about 1 million people, many of them Shiite Muslims loyal or sympathetic to Hezbollah, live.


It remains unclear if the Israeli government, which earlier this week shelved one military plan for a wider ground operation, will approve this step. And the move could simply be saber-rattling intended to enhance Israel's bargaining position as diplomats at the United Nations try to reach a cease-fire deal that could be approved by early next week.




But the plan is a direct acknowledgement that the air campaign has failed to end the Hezbollah rocket threat.


After more than 2,000 airstrikes on Lebanese towns and Beirut neighborhoods, Israeli officials said they've inflicted serious damage only on Hezbollah's ability to fire its small stocks of medium- and long-range missiles, while its much larger stocks of shorter-range Katyushas remain largely untouched.


At the start of the campaign, Hezbollah was believed to have at least 1,000 advanced, deadlier rockets, some of which could soar more than 60 miles and hit Tel Aviv. But Hezbollah has launched only one of its most sophisticated rockets and only a handful of other longer-range missiles.


The vast majority have been shorter-range Katyushas, of which Hezbollah still has thousands. Hezbollah is believed to have had 12,000 Katyushas when the conflict started. In three weeks, Israel estimates that it has destroyed as many as 1,500 while Hezbollah has fired about 2,000.




Nasrallah's latest speech suggested that Hezbollah still has the ability to strike deeper into Israel. So far in the campaign, Nasrallah has made good on every threat he's made, from hitting an Israeli naval vessel with a surprise missile attack off the Lebanese coast to striking Haifa, Israel's third-largest city.


Nasrallah issued his latest warning after Israel resumed bombing Hezbollah's southern Beirut stronghold following a short lull in such strikes. But he also offered to halt the attacks if Israel ends its strikes on Lebanon.


"Any time you decide to stop your campaign against our cities, villages, civilians and infrastructure, we will not fire rockets on any Israeli settlement or city," he said in the taped television speech


Earlier this week, Hezbollah sharply reduced its rocket attacks for two days after Israel declared a temporary 48-hour lull in airstrikes following a deadly attack in Qana that killed at least 28 people, most of them children.


Inside a fresh gaping crater from the latest Israeli strike on Beirut, two floors of a bank were plunged into the ground and an office chair was mixed with rubble and twisted metal. No one was killed, said a neighbor who only gave his first name, Ali.


"Why are they attacking the streets, the bridges?" Ali asked a visitor examining the rubble. "Is Hezbollah a bank? Why is Israel hitting them? Why are they killing children?"


He didn't wait for an answer.


"They just want to kill," he said.


Israel is unlikely to halt its bombing campaign in light of Nasrallah's threat, and government officials warned that a strike on Tel Aviv would lead to even stronger retaliatory attacks across Lebanon.




Faced with its inability to do anything about the short-range rockets, Israeli military leaders say the wider ground operation is essential.


But the battles with Hezbollah could prove challenging.


"The work is very hard, village to village, house to house," Golan said. "It's very difficult to even see the enemy."


That assessment was echoed by the senior military official backing the ground operation.


"They are well prepared for this kind of invasion," he said, but added: "I think we are much stronger than they are."


Nissenbaum reported from Tel Aviv, Schofield from the Israel-Lebanon border. Contributing to this report were Leila Fadel of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Beirut and Warren P. Strobel and Tish Wells in Washington.