Middle East: a month of fighting...Lebanon burns.

General Duke · August 6, 2006

Deadliest rocket barrage of war kills 15 in Israel

Sun Aug 6, 2006 5:54pm ET

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Hizbollah rockets killed 12 soldiers and at least three civilians in Israel on Sunday, the deadliest day of the war for Israel, as Lebanon rejected a draft U.N. resolution to end the 26-day-old conflict.

Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon killed at least 19 civilians and a Lebanese soldier.

In the Israeli village of Kfar Giladi, a rocket hit a group of Israeli reservists called up for the Lebanon offensive. Medics said 12 were killed and dozens were wounded.

Soldiers near the scene held their heads and one wept as a military ambulance pulled away. Helicopters landed nearby to fly the badly wounded to hospitals further from the war front.

"I don't recall so many dead ever. This is terrible," said Ron Valensi, head of the upper Galilee municipal council and a resident of Kfar Giladi, speaking on Channel 2 Television.

More Hizbollah rockets hit the northern city of Haifa, killing at least three people and wounding up to 121, medics said. A police commander told Israel Radio that a rocket slammed into two adjacent houses, causing them to partly collapse.

Lebanon's parliament speaker Nabih Berri said his country rejected the U.S.-French draft Security Council resolution because it would let Israeli forces stay on Lebanese soil.

Berri, a Shi'ite politician who has been the main channel between Hizbollah and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, said the draft ignored the Beirut government's seven-point plan calling for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the return of all displaced civilians among other things.

"All of Lebanon rejects any resolution that is outside these seven points," Berri told a news conference.

Lebanon submitted an amendment to the Security Council calling for an Israeli withdrawal to be added to the resolution.

The Syrian state news agency said President Bashar al-Assad had told U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan by telephone on Sunday that "any decision taken without a Lebanese consensus will complicate matters and deepen instability".

SKIRMISHES EXPECTED

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that agreeing on a resolution would not end all fighting. "I would hope that you would see very early on an end to large-scale violence," she said, but did not rule out "skirmishes for some time to come".

Hizbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, has killed 58 Israeli soldiers and 36 civilians in the conflict, sparked when its men seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.

The Israeli army said on Sunday it had captured one of the Hizbollah fighters who took part in the seizure of the soldiers.

At least 759 people have been killed in Lebanon during the war, including 16 overnight and on Sunday in the bombing of five southern villages.

Two civilians died when an Israeli air strike hit a pickup truck ahead of a U.N. aid convoy heading for the southern city of Tyre, U.N. source

s said. A Lebanese soldier was killed in an air raid near Tyre and another civilian in a strike inside it.

Hizbollah announced that three more of its fighters had been killed, bringing its declared toll of deaths to 52. Lebanese security sources estimate about 90 Hizbollah deaths in the war.

Beirut was rattled by an air raid in the Shi'ite-dominated southern suburbs, witnesses said. And the Bekaa Valley was hit by several air raids, one near a Lebanese army base.

U.N. peacekeepers in south Lebanon said a mortar round fired by Hizbollah wounded three Chinese members of the force.

Hizbollah said its rocket attack on Haifa, using Raad 2 missiles, was a response to continued Israeli bombing, particularly the strikes on Beirut.

ISRAEL FAVOURABLE TO DRAFT

Israel views the U.N. draft favourably, a senior government official and Israeli media said, noting that it allowed Israel to respond to Hizbollah attacks after a truce and did not order Israel to withdraw its 10,000 soldiers from southern Lebanon.

Israel wants its troops to remain until an international force can take over. Hizbollah says it will keep fighting until Israel stops bombing Lebanon and withdraws all its forces.

The draft was hammered out in negotiations between the United States, Israel's main ally, and France, touted as leader of the anticipated international force for Lebanon.

Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said Israel would keep attacking Hizbollah targets in Lebanon and its soldiers would stay there until the international force arrived.

We must continue the fighting, continue to hit whoever we can hit from Hizbollah," Ramon told Army Radio.

Lebanon will seek support for its position from Arab foreign ministers due to meet in Beirut on Monday. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, arriving by land a day early, reiterated that Syria would respond if Israel attacks it.

The war coincides with an Israeli military offensive in the southern Gaza Strip to recover another captured soldier.

An air strike killed one Palestinian in the strip on Sunday, bringing to at least 167 the number of Palestinians killed in the campaign, more than half of them civilians.

General Duke · August 6, 2006

Weeks of bombing leave nation in ruins

By Thanassis Cambanis and Rana Fil, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent | August 5, 2006

TYRE, Lebanon -- Three-and-a-half weeks of war have undone Lebanon's renaissance.

The human toll has been catastrophic enough, with more than 900 Lebanese killed and 913,000 displaced, at the government's last count.

But Israel's bombing campaign has also reduced much of the nation's infrastructure to a shambles, setting back painstaking and costly reconstruction that had finally put Lebanon on a prosperous path after decades of civil war and economic stagnation. Bridges, seaports, fuel depots, and the nation's airports and ports, border crossings, and all the major national highways have been attacked, causing more than $2 billion in damage.

In the latest blow, Israeli warplanes yesterday destroyed four key bridges on the country's last major land route to Syria, raising a new obstacle to aid efforts and adding to the rebuilding burden.

``If there is a definitive solution to the crisis, it will take two to three years to get back to where we were on July 12," the day the war began, said Marwan Mikhael, an adviser to Lebanon's minister of economy and trade.

Lebanon's prime minister, Fuad Saniora, said at an Islamic conference in Malaysia on Thursday that Israel's offensive on Lebanon ``is taking an enormous toll on human life and infrastructure, and has totally ravaged our country and shattered our economy."

Another less visible cost is the virtual shutdown of the nation's tourism industry, which was projected before the Israeli offensive to generate 12 percent of the nation's gross domestic product this year. Many of the Mediterranean beachfront resorts, built with foreign investment along the 135-mile coast and developed with international grants, now serve as refugee clearinghouses.

Israel says it is fighting the Islamist Hezbollah militia, not Lebanon. But Israel has repeatedly struck targets that appear to have little to do with Hezbollah and plenty to do with the daily life of the Lebanese -- many of whom oppose Hezbollah.

The bombing campaign, according to Israel, aims to cut off Hezbollah's supply routes. But many Lebanese believe Israel is trying to inflict so much damage that political leaders will crack down on the Shi'ite militia, which hasn't happened yet.

Although the bombing continues, the existing damage from the war has already produced a daunting list of repairs for this small country of 3.9 million.

Bombs have devastated the country's brand-new network of superhighways -- the centerpiece of the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's long-term recovery blueprint for Lebanon.

The Israeli strikes have been particularly devastating in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's stronghold and home to about 10 percent of the country's population.

Almost every road in the south has been cratered by bombs. Villages near the Israeli border have been razed by shells and bombs.

Not a single bridge has been left standing over the Litani River, cutting off southern Lebanon from the rest of the country. Only four-wheel-drive vehicles strong enough to forge through the river can pass the Litani, except at a single point where the Lebanese Army has created a one-lane sand-berm bridge sturdy enough to withstand civilian traffic.

All commerce to the south flowed through the north-south arteries. And Lebanon's economy is highly centralized, with many people traveling regularly to Beirut for everything from work to government services to healthcare to shopping.

Fuel shortages have become epidemic, spawning long gas lines in Beirut, central Lebanon, and even the comparatively unscathed Christian and Sunni areas in northern Lebanon. Major cities have all suffered electricity shortages, and power supplies have been entirely cut in most of heavily bombed areas of the south.

Lebanon has more experience than most countries in coping with war. However, during the 1975-1991 civil war, no outside power imposed a crippling external blockade, as Israel is doing now. And although the civil war ravaged Lebanon much more deeply over 16 years, the sheer speed and scope of the current destruction in just over three weeks has been stark.

Lebanon's recovery, government officials said, depends on how much foreign aid flows into the country after a cease-fire. Saudi Arabia has pledged $500 million and Kuwait $300 million toward rebuilding infrastructure.

``The cost of the damage to the infrastructure exceeds $2 billion," the transportation and public works minister, Mohammad Safadi, said during a lull in the bombing early this week.

General Duke · August 6, 2006

Robert Fisk: A Nato-led force would be in Israel's interests, but not Lebanon's

Published: 01 August 2006

Every foreign army - including the Israelis - comes to grief in Lebanon.

So, how come George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - after their inevitable disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq - believe that a Nato-led force is going to survive on the south Lebanese border? The Israelis would obviously enjoy watching its deployment - it will be time for the West to take the casualties - but Hizbollah is likely to view its arrival as a proxy Israeli army. It is, after all, supposed to be a "buffer" force to protect Israel - not, as the Lebanese have quickly noted, to protect Lebanon - and the last Nato army that came to this country was literally blasted out of its mission by suicide bombers.

How blithely the US and British governments have erased the narrative of the old Multinational Force - the MNF - which arrived in Beirut to escort Palestinian guerrillas out of Lebanon in August of 1982 and then, after the massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinian guerrillas at the Sabra and Chatila camps by Israel's proxy Lebanese militia, returned to protect the survivors and extend the sovereignty of the Lebanese government.

Does that sound familiar? And they also came to train the Lebanese army - one of the missions being foisted on the new Bush-Blair army - and they failed. Blown up by suicide bombers at their Beirut headquarters with the loss of 241 American lives, the US Marines retreated into the ground, digging earthworks beneath Beirut airport.

And there they lived until the newly-trained Lebanese army broke apart in February 1984 - at which point, President Ronald Reagan decided to "redeploy" his troops offshore. Like other famous historical redeployments - Napoleon's redeployment from Moscow, for example, or Custer's last redeployment - it represented a national disaster, a colossal blow to US prestige in the region and a warning that such Lebanese adventures always end in tears. The French left shortly afterwards. So did the Italians. A company of British troops had been the first to scuttle out.

So, how come anyone believes that the next foreign army to arrive in the Lebanese meat-grinder is going to be any more successful? True, the MNF was not backed by a UN Security Council resolution. But since when were Hizbollah susceptible to the UN? They have already failed to disarm - as they were required to under UN resolution 1559 - and one of the world's toughest guerrilla armies is not going to hand over its guns to Nato generals. But most of the force will be Muslim, we are told. This may be true, and the Turks are already unwisely agreeing to participate. But are the Lebanese going to accept the descendants of the hated Ottoman empire? Will the the Shia south of Lebanon accept Sunni Muslim soldiers?

Indeed, how come the people of southern Lebanon have not been consulted about the army which is supposed to live in their lands? Because, of course, it is not coming for them. It will come because the Israelis and the Americans want it there to help reshape the Middle East. This no doubt makes sense in Washington - where self-delusion rules diplomacy almost as much as it does in Israel - but America's dreams usually become the Middle East's nightmares.

And this time, we will watch a Nato-led army's disintegration at close quarters. South-west Afghan-istan and Iraq are now so dangerous that no reporters can witness the carnage being perpetrated as a result of our hopeless projects. But, in Lebanon, it's going to be live-time coverage of a disaster that can only be avoided by the one diplomatic step Messrs Bush and Blair refuse to take: by talking to Damascus.

So when this latest foreign army arrives, count the days - or hours - to the first attack upon it. Then we'll hear all over again that we are fighting evil, that "they" - Hizbollah or Palestinian guerrillas, or anyone else planning to destroy "our" army - hate our values; and then, of course, we'll be told that this is all part of the "War on Terror" - the nonsense which Israel has been peddling. And then perhaps we'll remember what George Bush senior said after Hizbollah's allies suicide-bombed the Marines in 1982, that American policy would not be swayed by a bunch of "insidious terrorist cowards".

And we all know what happened then. Or have we forgotten?

Day 20

* Lebanese dead - at least 577 confirmed, could be up to 750. Israeli dead - 51.

* Israel bombs and shells southern Lebanon despite announced halt in air raids.

* Rescue workers find 28 bodies buried for days in destroyed buildings in three Lebanese villages.

* UN postpones a meeting on Lebanon peacekeeping force indefinitely.

* Bush says he will seek UN action this week to end the fighting.

* Clashes near Aita Al-Shaab leave four Hizbollah fighters dead and three Israelis wounded.