During their assault Israeli forces killed nearly 1,100, wounded 3,700, and drove about 1 million people from their homes.

From the moment the cease-fire took effect August 14, however, thousands of refugees began to return to their homes in southern Lebanon, the center of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assault. This took place in spite of the IDF’s initial refusal to lift its threat to attack any vehicle on the road south of the Litani River, about 18 miles north of the Israeli border.

“There is a massive movement of tens of thousands if not more toward the south and toward the southern suburbs of Beirut, too,” Bashar Abu-Sayfan, a Palestinian refugee in Beirut, told the Militant. “People do not want to abandon their homes, their land, their villages. In reality this has meant that the Israeli siege of the south has been broken by the thousands of returning villagers.”

Israeli officials said IDF forces killed five men in southern Lebanon on the first day of the cease-fire, claiming they were approached by groups of armed men, the Washington Post reported.

The IDF assault began July 12 following the capture by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers. The group offered to release them in exchange for freedom for some of the thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners held by Tel Aviv.

The UN resolution demands the “unconditional release” of the Israeli soldiers, but only calls for “settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel.”

For the first two weeks the IDF carried out a murderous air war but was unable to prevent Hezbollah from firing thousands of rockets into Israeli territory. Tel Aviv reports that as of today 116 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians have died in the war.

The ink on the UN resolution had hardly dried when the Israeli government tripled the number of its troops in southern Lebanon. By pouring 30,000 soldiers into the area between the two countries’ border and the Litani, Tel Aviv planned to strike further blows at Hezbollah militias prior to the deployment of the Lebanese army and UN “peacekeepers.”

The Israeli air force also intensified its bombings. On August 12 it targeted the highway leading to the Arida border crossing in northern Lebanon, reported the Associated Press. AP described the crossing as “the last official border post open for humanitarian convoys and civilians fleeing the country.” In the southwest, Israeli jets hit power plants in the major coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre, knocking out power for the population.

The UN Security Council resolution, sponsored by Washington and Paris, legitimizes the Israeli invasion. While calling for “the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks,” it only calls on Tel Aviv to halt “offensive military operations.”

The resolution also authorizes 15,000 troops for UNIFIL, the UN force of 2,000 soldiers that has been present in southern Lebanon since 1978. Once a cease-fire takes hold, the resolution “calls upon the Government of Lebanon and UNIFIL…to deploy their forces together throughout the South and calls upon the Government of Israel, as that deployment begins, to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon in parallel.” The expanded UNIFIL—expected to include troops from France, Italy, Turkey, and elsewhere—is supposed to operate with 15,000 Lebanese soldiers.

The resolution calls for the establishment below the Litani of “an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL”; “no foreign forces in Lebanon without the consent of its Government”; “no sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorized by its Government”; and, “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon.”

Hezbollah officials joined with other members of Lebanon’s cabinet in approving the resolution on August 12. “We will not be an obstacle to any decision taken by the Lebanese government,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech. (See article below for background on Hezbollah.)  
 
Divisions in Lebanon, Israel
Although it has approved the UN resolution, the Lebanese cabinet is reportedly divided over Hezbollah’s militias in the south. Defense Minister Elias Murr announced that Lebanese troops would arrive at the Litani within days. He then, however, told Lebanese television, “The army is not going to the south to strip Hezbollah of weapons and do the work Israel did not.” Because of Hezbollah’s cooperation with the government, he said, “as soon as the Lebanese army arrives in the south there will be no weapons but those of the army.”

Debate has sharpened within Israeli ruling circles because of the IDF’s inability to deliver a knockout blow to Hezbollah.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert told parliament August 14 the “war on terrorism” was strengthened by the invasion of Lebanon. “No longer is a terror organization allowed to operate within Lebanon, as the long arm of the axis of evil, which reaches out from Tehran and Damascus,” he said.

Following Olmert, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked the government. “There were many failures, failures in identifying the threat, failures in preparing to meet the threat, failures in the management of the war, failures in the management of the home front,” said Netanyahu, who linked his charges to the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005.

Ari Shavit, a leading columnist in the Israeli daily Haaretz, described the UN Security Council resolution as “the French proposal for a cease-fire and unconditional surrender to Hezbollah.” Shavit fumed that “the day Nasrallah comes out of his bunker and declares victory to the whole world, Olmert must not be in the prime minister’s office.”

After Nasrallah said Hezbollah had emerged victorious from the war, U.S. president George Bush responded in an August 14 press conference, “How can you claim victory when at one time you were a state within a state, safe within southern Lebanon, and now you’re going to be replaced by a Lebanese army and an international force?”

In a sign of Tel Aviv’s uncertainty over the future and an indication the conflict may flare up again, Israeli jets dropped leaflets over Beirut in the last hours before the cease-fire took effect, saying: “Hezbollah has brought you many achievements: destruction, displacement, and death. Can you pay this price a second time? Know that the Israeli Defense Forces will return and work with the required force against any terrorist act that will be launched from Lebanon.”

Georges Mehrabian in Athens, Greece, contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Hezbollah: a bourgeois party modeled on Tehran
Toronto: Communist League candidates join protest, oppose Ottawa’s support of Israeli war
10,000 in D.C. protest Israeli attack on Lebanon
U.S. gov’t revokes visas for 100 Iranians  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home