NYT: Israel Presses Into Lebanon Ahead of Truce

Israel Presses Into Lebanon Ahead of Truce

By GREG MYRE and JOHN KIFNER | August 13, 2006

METULLA, Israel — Israeli forces pressed on with a ground and air offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon today and Hezbollah fired more than 200 rockets into northern Israel, as weeks of fighting intensified before a truce goes into effect on Monday morning.

The Israeli cabinet today voted 24 to 0, with one abstention, in favor of the truce approved by the United Nations Security Council on Friday. In a statement on Saturday, Secretary General Kofi Annan said that he had been in touch with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora of Lebanon and that both had agreed that the end of fighting would take effect at 8 a.m. on Monday in Lebanon and Israel (1 a.m. Eastern time).

“Preferably, the fighting should stop now to respect the spirit and intent of the council decision, the object of which was to save civilian lives, to spare the pain and suffering that the civilians on both sides are living through,” Mr. Annan said.

But on both sides there was little expectation that the fighting would completely stop.

In northern Israel, officials said today that there no signs residents would come out of shelters and return to their homes, while there were plans expected on Monday to evacuate those residents who wanted to leave the shelters and move them to locations further south.

In Beirut, there was little celebration at the possibility that a cease-fire could come soon, the people instead expressing mostly exhaustion from the war.

“All we have is 1,000 dead and widespread destruction,” said Jamal Ghosn, who runs an Internet store, on Saturday. “Hezbollah’s stature has grown. But the biggest losers are the people.”

Israeli forces carried out heavy shelling across the border today, while Hezbollah’s rockets killed at least one person in northern Israel. Earlier today, Israeli warplanes fired missiles into gasoline stations in the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre, killing at least 12 people in those and other attacks, The Associated Press reported.

On Saturday, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, went on television to charge that “nothing had changed” since the resolution, but conditionally pledged to abide by a cease-fire once it came into effect.

“The war did not end, because the aggression is still going on,” he said, but added that his forces would stop fighting “when the Israeli aggression stops” and Israel’s troops leave Lebanon.

It was still unclear when the major military thrust ordered by Mr. Olmert, apparently with American approval only hours after the Security Council vote on Friday, would end.

Israel poured troops into southern Lebanon on Saturday, making its deepest push yet toward the Litani River and suffering its highest daily losses, including having a helicopter shot down by Hezbollah guerrillas for the first time in the fighting.

The fighting, including dozens of Israeli airstrikes, has intensified since the United Nations Security Council approved the resolution for the truce.

For Israel on Saturday, at least 11 soldiers were killed and more than 70 wounded as fighting raged in at least a half-dozen places in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said Saturday night that it had killed about 50 Hezbollah fighters in the previous 24 hours. An Israeli Army spokeswoman said today that 19 Israeli soldiers had been killed, and five soldiers aboard the helicopter have been declared missing in action.

As expected, the Lebanese government approved the cease-fire plan after more than five hours of debate on Saturday. Two ministers representing Hezbollah went along with the decision, though they expressed “reservations” about the resolution because it blamed Hezbollah for the war and seemed to exonerate Israel, said one of the ministers, Mohammed Fneish.

In Lebanon, the government examined how it would deploy 15,000 soldiers to southern Lebanon, joining with an international peacekeeping force of similar size, once Israeli troops withdraw, as specified by the resolution.

France, New Zealand and Italy said Saturday that they were ready to contribute troops to the peacekeeping force, The Associated Press reported.

Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, said Saturday that he had tripled the number of his troops in Lebanon, though he did not give figures and expected the fighting to continue despite the resolution. Israel already had an estimated 10,000 soldiers in Lebanon.

“We will continue to operate until we achieve our aims,” he told reporters in northern Israel on Saturday, adding, “The fact that a U.N. resolution was accepted yesterday doesn’t apply immediately on the cease-fire arrangement. Once the agreement is completed in all its details, then we will be able to decide.”

In Washington, a senior Bush administration official confirmed in general terms the timetable described by Mr. Annan.

“At some point after midnight tomorrow, we expect a cessation from both sides,” the official said late Saturday, using a schedule based on Eastern time.

But, the official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the diplomacy, also cautioned, “We also assume a very uneasy interregnum before the multinational force and the Lebanese armed forces move into the south.”

On Saturday, the airstrikes ranged the length and breadth of Lebanon, from Tyre in the southwest to the Bekaa Valley in the northeast. Among the targets that were hit were an electric power plant near Sidon and another at Tyre, and the last remaining official border-crossing point from Syria at Arida, near the coast north of Tripoli, open for aid convoys and civilians fleeing the fighting. The highway was impassable, but drivers tried to maneuver around it through ruts and ditches.

On Saturday, incomplete casualty figures flowed in through the day: at least 15 dead in the village of Rachef, 8 near the ports of Sidon and Tripoli, 3 in airstrikes on Kharayeb, and a Lebanese soldier in an airstrike near a military base in the Bekaa Valley.

The Israelis used dozens of helicopters to take hundreds of commandos into southern Lebanon, and the Israeli news media called it the biggest such operation since 1973.

Hezbollah shot down one Israeli helicopter near the village of Yater, the first time the group has shot down an aircraft since the fighting began a month ago.

Over the weekend, Israeli troops moved deeper into southern Lebanon than at any point in the current fighting.

Greg Myre reported from Metulla, Israel, for this article, and John Kifner from Beirut. Reporting was contributed by Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem, Christine Hauser from New York, and Jad Mouawad from Beirut.