Re: Israel humiliated /Israel’s response (threads)
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/072706/NAT_BAGFUSAF.060.shtml
Hezbollah hammers Israelis
Hezbollah dealt Israel its heaviest losses in the Lebanon campaign Wednesday, killing nine soldiers in fierce firefights. With key Mideast players failing to agree on a formula for a cease-fire, an Israeli general said the operation could last weeks.
Israel said it intends to damage Hezbollah and establish a “security zone” that would be free of the guerrillas and extend 1.2 miles into Lebanon from the Israeli border. Such a zone would prevent Hezbollah from carrying out cross-border raids such as the one two weeks ago which triggered the Israeli military response. Israel said it would maintain such a zone, with firepower or other means, until the arrival of an international force with muscle to be deployed in a wider swath of southern Lebanon - as opposed to the U.N. force already there that has failed to prevent the violence. Top U.S. and European officials agreed Wednesday on the need for urgent action to halt the fighting in Lebanon and on the creation of a multinational force to keep the peace. But the two sides had starkly divergent views of what that means.
Most Europeans want Israel to stop its offensive against Hezbollah now - which would leave Hezbollah battered but defiant. The United States wants to give Israel more time to pound the militia into submission as part of the wider war on terror. The foreign ministers and other senior officials from 15 nations, as well as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and representatives from the European Union and the World Bank, agreed in Rome on a declaration that expressed “deep concern” for the high number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, where government officials say hundreds of people have been killed. Deep differences in an approach to the crisis, however, were abundantly clear. In the presence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema alluded to the discord in post-conference comments. He said many participants appealed for an immediate and unconditional truce “to reach, with utmost urgency, a cease-fire that puts an end to the current violence and hostilities.” Rice, for her part, deflected pressure to lean on Israel to end its 2-week-old offensive, insisting that any cease-fire must be “sustainable” and there could be “no return to the status quo ante.” Later, Rice briefed reporters, saying she told the conference: “The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires. … And every time there is a broken cease-fire, people die, there is destruction and there is misery.”
Hezbollah warfare
**The Israeli bombardment has failed to stop guerrilla rocket fire, even while killing hundreds, driving up to 750,000 people from their homes and causing billion of dollars in damage. Hezbollah fired another large barrage into northern Israel on Wednesday - 151 rockets that wounded at least 31 people and damaged property from the suburbs of the port on Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea to the Hula Valley above the Sea of Galilee. Over the past two weeks, the guerrillas have fired 1,436 rockets into Israel. **Pushing Hezbollah back with ground troops was proving to be bloody. Several thousand troops are in Lebanon, Israeli military officials said - mainly in a roughly 6-square-mile pocket around the town of Bint Jbail, a Hezbollah stronghold just over two miles from the border.
The Hezbollah fighters are heavily outnumbered, with some 100 in Bint Jbail and several hundred more in surrounding fields, bunkers and cave, according to the officials. But they use classic guerrilla tactics, choosing when to strike in the hilly territory they know well. They are dug in with extensive tunnel networks and stockpiling weapons, including rockets with which they pelted Israeli forces Wednesday.