NYT: Israel Carries Out Raid Deep Into Lebanon

Israel Carries Out Raid Deep Into Lebanon

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: August 19, 2006

JERUSALEM, Aug. 19 — Israeli aircraft and commandos carried out a raid deep into Lebanon on Saturday, clashing with Hezbollah forces near Baalbek and killing three, Lebanese officials said. One Israeli officer died.

The Israeli army confirmed the raid some 60 miles north of the border and said it was aimed at disrupting the continuing shipment of weapons to Hezbollah guerrillas from Iran and Syria.

Hezbollah said its fighters repulsed the commandos, who were airlifted in together with two jeeps near the village of Bodai. Israel said that one officer was killed, another seriously wounded and a third lightly wounded.

Both any resupply of weapons and the raid itself appear to constitute violations of the cease-fire resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council.

The Israeli army said it would continue such raids until "proper monitoring bodies are established on the Lebanese borders," another task for the United Nations forces in Lebanon, or Unifil.

Hours before the raid, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed to European countries in particular to supply troops for the newly expanded Unifil, which is supposed to grow from about 1,990 troop to a maximum of 15,000 and help the Lebanese Army patrol southern Lebanon.

The appeal, the raid and the alleged renewal of arms supplies also underscore the fragility of this cease-fire, which appeared to conclude a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah with an international commitment to exclude the Hezbollah militia from Lebanon south of the Litani River and disarm it.

Those commitments already seem hollow, according to a senior Israeli commander with a well-placed view of the war and its planning, who was interviewed on Friday. The officer would only speak on background, given the sensitivity of his position, but he was explicit that Israel would continue to seek out and destroy any new arms shipments coming in for Hezbollah from Syria or Iran.

He also made it clear that the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, remains a target for Israel as the head of a group that Israel and the United States have labeled terrorist. At one point in the interview, he said simply: "This man must die."

The pro-Syrian president of Lebanon, however, Emile Lahoud, praised Mr. Nasrallah and Hezbollah for what he called their victory over Israel.

In a nationally televised speech, Mr. Lahoud said that Mr. Nasrallah "willed this victory to be a victory for all Lebanese and all the Arab peoples."

Israel and the United States, however, view Hezbollah as a tool of Shia, non-Arab Iran, which created it, and of Syria, which supports and helps to supply it, rather than being loyal to Lebanon and its multi-religious government.

Israel, the officer said, views Hezbollah as "Iran's western front," and regardless of how poorly the new United Nations forces may perform, he argued, Israel will benefit from new international support for the extension of Lebanese sovereignty to the Israeli border, made most visible in the deployment of the Lebanese Army.

"I don't care about the capability of the Lebanese Army," he said. "What is more important, and here I'm not speaking for the Israeli government, is the understanding that the Lebanese government took control of southern Lebanon. Now we can deal with them as a country and a government, and speak and compromise. This is the huge change this operation created."

Hezbollah, he said, is no longer just Israel's problem, and "the world understand that we are helping to stop the influence of Iran," at least in the longer term.

The army was planning on 15 days of air war before any ground forces were considered, he said. "We didn't want to do any ground assault and thought we could create the conditions for a cease-fire without a major ground assault."

But the army was wrong, and Hezbollah did not break. The air force failed to kill Mr. Nasrallah or to find and destroy the Hezbollah leadership. The army was also surprised, he said, by the sheer numbers of the advanced anti-tank missiles Hezbollah possessed, including top-of-the-range Russian Metis-M and Kornet missiles that were sold to Syria and then simply passed on to Hezbollah, he said, and which caused most of Israel's military casualties.


The United Nations was also "too soft and too late" in negotiating a cease-fire, and Israel then felt it had to act to stop the short-range Katyusha rockets that the army and the government knew, he insisted, could not be stopped with air power alone. "We tried to postpone it until we had no other choice," the officer said.

The army asked for a five-day ground operation to reach the Litani and was ready on Monday morning, the commander said. "The government asked us to wait because of the negotiations, and we waited Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and most of Friday," he said. Only then, when the negotiations at the United Nations were going against Israel did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz order the expanded ground operation, which had only been approved by the cabinet on Wednesday.

In the end, the army had two days of fighting, not five, before the cease-fire went into effect at 8 a.m. Monday morning. In those two days, 33 Israeli soldiers died — but only 14 of them attacking at the front, the officer said. Since then, Israel has pulled back its forces to more defensible positions and reduced the number inside Lebanon, in particular allowing reserve troops to return home.

Israelis, led by a sometimes heated and politically driven Israeli media, have been extremely critical of Mr. Olmert, Mr. Peretz and, to some degree, the army leadership. The lifeline of the government, only three months old, appears shortened, and the future of the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, is uncertain, especially after it emerged that he sold a stock portfolio on the day the war broke out.

Still, the Israeli army feels it fought well within the limits set for it, and the commander insisted that the Israelis won every battle with Hezbollah, despite their excellent training and equipment and the intricate infrastructure of underground tunnels, barracks and command posts they constructed with Iranian help.

"We believe it was important to stop the war with Hezbollah understanding that we can beat them any where, any time, and we did that," the commander said. "I believe it will change the situation for a long time."

Israelis are spoiled by the 1967 and 1973 wars, he said, but there is no decisive victory against terrorism, adding. "But we know the results of this war, and they do, too." In Washington, too, he said, "I believe the military and security professionals understand what we did, and they are not disappointed."

The Israeli army has two important achievements, he confirmed. First, because of decent intelligence, it was able to knock out up to 80 percent of Hezbollah's medium- and long-range missile launchers in the first two days of the air war, making it impossible for Mr. Nasrallah to fire a longer-range Iranian Zelzal on Tel Aviv.

More important, Israel was able to destroy a launcher in 45 seconds to a minute after it was used, which no other army in the world can do with regularity, he said. "We were able to shorten the circle," the officer said. Employing drones, radar, precision weapons and artillery, Israel could track a launch and bomb the launcher.

But it could not do that with the thousands of short-range Katyusha rockets, which do not require truck-borne launchers. They are small and easily portable, can be fired from buildings or simple metal tripods or even fired with a simple timer.

There are other lessons, the commander said: more armor plating underneath tanks, better supplies, more money to be spent on reserves and training.

"But in the long run, if we see Hezbollah rearming itself and running southern Lebanon, I believe the next round is coming."

After all, "this is the Middle East," the officer said. "One war ends, and the next one is already at the door."

In the occupied West Bank on Saturday, Israel arrested the Palestinian deputy prime minister, Nasser al-Shaer of Hamas, at his home. Israeli has arrested more than two dozen Hamas cabinet ministers and legislators in the West Bank, including the parliament's speaker, Abdel Aziz Dweik, since late June, when Hamas took part in the capture of an Israeli soldier.

Also on Saturday, an Israeli soldier was killed at a checkpoint east of Nablus by an armed Palestinian, who was killed in turn by other soldiers, the Israeli army said.