TYRE, Lebanon, 2 August 2006 — Hezbollah fought pitched battles with advancing Israeli forces in Lebanon yesterday after Israel decided to widen its three-week-old offensive despite accelerating international efforts to broker peace.
Media reports said as many as 20,000 troops were pouring into Lebanon, where three soldiers were reported killed as clashes flared in several hotspots along the border zone where Israel wants to eradicate Hezbollah.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has rejected mounting pressure for a cease-fire despite an international outcry over an airstrike on a village on Sunday that killed 62 people, mainly women and children, in the bloodiest attack since Israel unleashed its war machine on Lebanon on July 12.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was due to hold talks with ambassadors from the five permanent Security Council members on proposals for a cease-fire that center on the deployment of an international buffer force.
EU foreign ministers were also meeting to hammer out a common stance but the bloc is divided over whether to call for an immediate cease-fire in a conflict that has killed hundreds of people, and created a humanitarian crisis with hundreds of thousands displaced and much of Lebanon’s infrastructure in ruins.
An Israeli official said troops were authorized to push up to 30 kilometers (19 miles) into Lebanon, an operation Defense Minister Amir Peretz said was aimed at creating “conditions on the ground for an international force.”
Lebanese television showed pictures of soldiers and tanks massed at the border, where Israeli bulldozers have already started flattening Hezbollah positions to create a buffer zone.
But an Israeli Cabinet minister conceded that the military, easily the strongest force in the Middle East, would not be able to completely wipe out Hezbollah’s rocket capabilities. “This option does not exist. Neither by airstrikes, nor by a military ground operation,” said Meir Sheetrit. “We can’t entirely destroy their capability to fire rockets.” And Hezbollah fired two salvos of rockets at northern Israel yesterday, causing no casualties but breaking a 36-hour lull, the army said.
Israel said the aim of its operation was to drive Hezbollah fighters out of territory south of the Litani River, which had roughly formed the border of a “security zone” that became a deadly quagmire for Israeli forces until they ended their 22-year occupation of Lebanon in 2000.
Yesterday, ground troops punched across the border in four separate incursions, according to Lebanese police and the United Nations which maintains a peacekeeping force in the area. Arabic television station Al-Arabiya said three soldiers were killed fighting around the central border village of Aita As-Shaab, where Milos Strugar, spokesman for the UN force reported heavy fighting.
Israel has not confirmed the deaths but claimed it had killed 20 Hezobllah fighters over the past two days.
Fighting was also reported around the former Hezbollah military stronghold of Bint Jbeil, scene of the deadliest ground combat since Israel’s offensive started, as well as the village of Taibe, where one soldier was reported wounded.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has ordered his forces to step up their state of alert.
“We must understand that every effort and each drop of sweat put into training now will save a drop of blood when the hour comes,” Assad said in remarks reported in the Syrian press.
“The fight will continue as long as our land is occupied and our rights are violated,” he added. “Victory will be ours, with the help of God.”
Syria, the former power broker in Lebanon, has come under fire from both Israel and the United States over its support for Hezbollah although Israel has said it does not want to widen the conflict.
Lebanon says 850 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the Israeli onslaught which was launched after Hezbollah seized two soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid on July 12. An AFP count has put the death toll at 548, while the United Nations has said around one-third of the casualties were children. A total of 51 Israelis have been confirmed killed, the majority of them soldiers.
Rescue workers also say dozens more civilians are still buried underneath the rubble of houses destroyed in Israeli airstrikes, while aid groups have complained about the continued difficulty of reaching the most afflicted areas.
Despite a promised 48-hour halt in air raids which allowed thousands of southern Lebanese to flee the war zone, warplanes also struck roads leading to Syria in the early hours of yesterday, police said.
Facing international outrage over the killings in Qana, Olmert defiantly declared Monday that “there is no cease-fire and there will be no cease-fire in the coming days.” Hostilities would end only “when the threat over our heads is removed, when our kidnapped soldiers return to their homes and when we can live in security,” he added.
As the fighting looked set to intensify, ambassadors of the five permanent UN Security Council members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — held their first official consultations Monday to prepare a resolution.
France has already distributed a draft UN resolution which calls for a cease-fire and political settlement while the United States is working on its own proposal and diplomats said others are possible.
