Israel agrees to ceasefire; steps up fighting
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s cabinet on Sunday approved a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities with Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, a political source said. In the meantime, Israel tried to inflict as much damage as possible.
At least 15 Lebanese people, including a mother and her three children, were killed in Israeli attacks on Sunday, Lebanese officials said. Israeli emergency services reported that a Hezbollah rocket - one of some 250 fired during the day - had killed a civilian in northern Israel. And the Israeli military said that five of its soldiers had died in fighting on Sunday.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had said the prime ministers of Israel and Lebanon agreed the fighting would end on Monday at 8 a.m. The 24-0 Israeli Cabinet vote, with one abstention, came a day after the Lebanese government approved the agreement and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave his grudging consent, calling it ‘unjust and unfair.’
But questions as to the truce’s durability quickly arose Sunday, when the Lebanese Cabinet canceled a critical meeting that was supposed to discuss the deployment of 15,000 troops to southern Lebanon, a key part of the cease-fire deal. Published reports said the Cabinet had been sharply divided over demands that Hezbollah surrender its weapons. The postponement, amid reported divisions, seriously complicates the establishment of a stable ceasefire, the BBC’s Nick Childs in Beirut says.
Israel’s cabinet has backed the truce, but says its forces will not leave until peacekeepers are deployed.
Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s Deputy Secretary General, said it might take a month before a joint UN-Lebanese force was fully in place.
“It’s going to be weeks, not days and may even, before you hit the full total, be a month or so,”
he told the BBC’s Have Your Say programme.
A heated debate erupted during Israel’s Cabinet session, with minister Ofir Pines-Paz criticizing the government’s decision to order an expanded ground offensive in the days before the cease-fire is to take effect.
All but one of the cabinet voted for the resolution that was approved by the Security Council on Friday to end a month-old war that has killed over 1,060 people in Lebanon and 140 Israelis. Shaul Mofaz, the former defense minister, abstained.
The resolution envisages a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon when violence subsides and deployment of 15,000 Lebanese troops and 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers.
Ministers said after the meeting that a question mark hovered over the resolution’s implementation - a point made Sunday in the myriad of newspaper commentaries on the resolution.
‘This is the Middle East, and decisions are not always implemented here,’
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told reporters after the cabinet meeting.
Despite the resolution, Israel has expanded its offensive in south Lebanon, tripling its forces there on Saturday in a bid to wipe out Hizbollah rocket launch sites before the ceasefire takes effect.
Nearly 30,000 troops were operating against Hizbollah targets in southern Lebanon on Sunday. As the vote took place, Israeli shells slammed into the hard-hit Dahiyeh suburb, a Hezbollah stronghold just south of Beirut. Lebanese television reports said the strike destroyed a complex of eight residential buildings. TV footage panned across massive damage that appeared to stretch for several hundred yards in all directions.
Israel has asserted that it needs more time to ‘clean up’ Hizbollah. In spite of overwhelming military superiority, Israel has failed to stop Hizbollah firing rockets at Israel and failed to dislodge Hizbollah guerrillas from areas close to the Israeli border. As the fighting intensified, senior Israeli officials remained at odds over how long it would continue. The foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said she expected it to end on Monday, but the officer commanding the campaign, Major General Dan Halutz, said that he expected it to go on for another week.
Livni said the offensive had continued because the army requested an extension.
‘We said we would allow the army the time it needed and I think that will be until some time on Monday,’
she said.
For Hizbollah’s part, while it has said that it will abide by the ceasefire and co-operate with the deployment of the Lebanese Army in areas it controlled, Nasrallah said it reserved the right to resist Israeli troops on Lebanese soil.
‘We must not make a mistake - not in the resistance, the government or the people - and believe that the war has ended,’
added Nasrallah in a television interview.
‘The war has not ended. There have been continued strikes and continued casualties…Today nothing has changed and it appears tomorrow nothing will change.’
Annan seemed confident a breakthrough had been achieved when he said last night he was ‘very happy’ that a cessation of hostilities would come into force at 5am GMT tomorrow. But he said it would be preferable for the fighting to end immediately.
On Israeli television yesterday, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, appeared to condone the continued Israeli action, saying she hoped the shooting in the Israel-Lebanon war would end within ‘a day or so’.
Lebanon’s cabinet accepted the UN ceasefire unanimously and criticised Israel’s escalation of its offensive as a ‘flagrant challenge’ to the international community. The Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, said the cabinet would meet today to discuss implementation of the UN resolution. Siniora described the resolution as a triumph for Lebanese negotiators, compared to an initial draft. Nasrallah said the resolution had negative aspects but could have been worse.
More than 1,000 Lebanese have been killed in the conflict since Hezbollah militants captured two Israeli soldiers on 12 July in a cross-border raid. Israel’s official death toll stood at 163 on Sunday, including 43 civilians.
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