The first Israeli bomb hit after most troops at the base had gone to sleep. The captain rushed out of his barracks to help the wounded. An ambulance raced toward the burning buildings. Another bomb hit, and the ambulance exploded. When the attack ended, Harrfouche and 10 other soldiers had been killed.
Last week’s attack on Jamhour added bafflement to horror in Beirut. What sense could be made of this conflagration in which Israel, under merciless attack from Hizbullah rockets, demanded that the Lebanese Army take responsibility for disarming Hizbullah militias–then bombed the Army, too? The Lebanese government–supported by Washington as a promising democracy–is crumbling beneath an Israeli military assault–also supported by Washington. “What is the United States doing? What is Israel doing?” asks Saad Hariri, a Lebanese member of Parliament whose father was assassinated last year while trying to free the country from Syrian domination. “You promote democracy and then you allow it to be destroyed.”
Israel says it wants only to get rid of Hizbullah in the hope that democracy will grow in its place. “Our hope is that the Lebanese government will impose its sovereignty over the entire country of Lebanon,” Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told NEWSWEEK’s Lally Weymouth (interview). And the strike on Jamhour? “We certainly do not attack Lebanese Army bases,” said Israeli military spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal. He suggested, without further elaboration, that Hiz-bullah might have had some presence there. Any building where Hizbullah hides is “a legitimate target,” said Dallal. In effect, that definition also includes any building where Hizbullah is thought to hide. Lebanese Brig. Gen. Salih Suleiman told news-week that Israel’s planes had followed military firetrucks returning to the base from town.
By the weekend Hizbullah fighters and rocket attacks had killed 19 Israeli soldiers and 15 civilians, including several children. The Israeli bombardment had killed roughly 350 people, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Many were civilians, including dozens of children. Still, Dallal could not confirm claims in the Israeli press that 50 percent of Hizbullah’s fighting ability had been eliminated. There was no reliable baseline for such an estimate, he said. “We don’t even know what 100 percent is,” he said. “It’s a very, very nebulous thing.”
Whatever victories Israel has achieved, Washington has backed it all the way. On the diplomatic front, the administration blocked calls at the United Nations and elsewhere for an immediate end to the fighting. The White House was in no rush to see the Israeli offensive pulled back. “What a lot of people want to do is just say, ‘OK, cease fire’,” President George W. Bush told NEWSWEEK’s Richard Wolffe onboard Air Force One early last week. “But you haven’t really addressed the underlying cause of the problem”–meaning the power of Hizbullah and its backers in Iran and Syria. On the military front, the administration started rushing new shipments of precision-guided munitions to Israel from an inventory that includes 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs.
The initial reaction to the war had shown Hizbullah to be tremendously isolated in the Arab world. The Saudis openly blamed the Iranian-backed group for starting the fight by taking two Israeli soldiers hostage in a cross-border attack on July 12. “No party or militia in any country should be the arbiter of war or peace,” a senior Saudi official told NEWSWEEK late last week. But pictures that are coming out of the war, judged too gruesome to appear in the U.S. press, are being broadcast all over the region, generating an anger that America’s allies in the region can barely control. One especially horrible image, of a rescue worker holding up what appears to be the corpse of a child whose body is nothing but tatters of flesh below the waist, was shown on Hizbullah’s satellite television station and e-mailed around the globe.
“The country has been torn to shreds,” Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told the assembled diplomatic corps in Beirut. “Lebanon deserves life,” he pleaded. “I sincerely hope that you will not let us down.” With his voice mingling sadness and rage, Siniora appeared close to tears. And still the Israeli bombing continued, striking 1,800 targets by the end of last week, some of them many times. Israel also began massing troops on the Lebanese border for wider ground action. Incursion? Invasion? For an estimated 500,000 Lebanese residents ordered out of their homes onto roads turned into shooting galleries by Israel’s American-made F-15s, F-16s and Apache attack helicopters, the semantic distinctions were not important.
Yet the main target of Israel’s war, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, remained cool, confident, apparently unperturbed. A few hours after the Israelis dropped 23 tons of explosives on a bunker where they thought he was holed up, Nasrallah appeared on Al-Jazeera television, smiling affably as he chatted with the network’s Beirut correspondent. “The command structure of Hizbullah has not been harmed,” he said. The militia “has managed to absorb the strikes,” and it would still “offer some surprises.” Indeed, Hizbullah rockets continued soaring into northern Israel; 30 landed in and around Haifa in a single day.
While Israel’s casualties were nowhere near as high as Lebanon’s, there is a passion nonetheless to end this threat once and for all. It’s not only the present danger of rockets that fuels the anger, it’s the long and bloody past. When Nasrallah speaks of the prisoners he wants released in exchange for his two hostage soldiers, he names one in particular: Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druse who took part in a terrorist attack on the town of Nahariya 27 years ago, before Hizbullah even existed. Kuntar, then 16 years old, was with a group that shot an Israeli civilian named Danny Haran in front of his 4-year-old daughter, then smashed the little girl’s skull against a rock on the beach. Haran’s wife, hiding in a crawl space with their 2-year-old, tried so desperately to keep the infant from screaming that the little one smothered to death.
Hizbullah managed to negotiate the freedom of 400 other Lebanese prisoners two years ago in exchange for one Israeli businessman it had taken hostage. But the Israeli government would not release Kuntar then, and it’s not about to now. Polls in Israel show 95 percent support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s campaign to obliterate Hizbullah’s threat permanently. Support for a prisoner exchange is low. Yet Israeli officials are well aware that even with unreserved backing from Washington and massive approval from the Israeli public, this is a war that could come to an unplanned halt.
The history of earlier drives into Lebanon shows that even as the Israeli war machine gains momentum, so do the chances of terrible accidents and atrocities. In 1982, under the protection of Israeli forces, Christian Lebanese militias carried out the now infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Ten years ago, during a campaign against Hizbullah similar to the one now underway, Israeli gunners blasted a United Nations monitoring post at the South Leba-nese town of Qana, where terrified locals had taken refuge. More than 100 civilians were killed in a barrage that lasted only a few ghastly seconds. International outrage quickly forced Israel to end its offensive.
The Israelis say they are being more careful this time around, not least because they don’t want to be forced to stop. “The presidential approval by Bush, the surprising level of support he’s giving Israel, the patience he’s giving Israel–it looks as if there’s a great amount of slack being cut to us,” says a senior Israeli security source, who did not want to be identified by name because he is not authorized to speak on the record. “Absent a Qana, it might go on.”
It might. Movement toward a diplomatic resolution has been slow. This week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Israel, then meet with envoys from the Lebanon Contact Group, originally set up last year to support the country’s drive toward democracy and freedom from Syrian occupation. Rice had proposed holding the meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, but the government in Cairo, wary of the way Washington is stalling on Israel’s behalf, said no. Rice will meet with the group in Rome instead.
On some issues there’s already a lot of agreement. Although European and U.S. officials describe all talks at this stage as “preliminary,” a general picture of the diplomatic endgame did begin to take shape at the G8 meeting in Russia last week, and continues to evolve. What’s wanted, said a senior European diplomat involved with the negotiations, who asked not to be named because of their sensitivity, might be called a “ceasefire plus.” Not only the Israelis and the Americans, but friendly Arab governments and many top Lebanese officials privately say they want an end to Hizbullah’s power over Lebanon’s future. “It shouldn’t be a reshuffling of the cards, it should be an end to the conflict,” says a senior Leb-anese official who asked to remain anonymous because of diplomatic sensitivities.
One idea on the table, according to American, European and Arab diplomatic sources, would be for deployment of a large, well-armed multinational force under United Nations auspices to enforce whatever ceasefire is ultimately agreed upon. European officials say it would most likely be led by the French, who have developed a very close relationship with Washington in the effort to stabilize Lebanon. An-other significant contingent might come from Turkey. (Rice has downplayed any possibility that U.S. troops would be directly involved on the ground.)
The U.N. soldiers who have been stationed in South Lebanon as monitors under the name UNIFIL for more than 20 years are “worse than useless,” says a top European diplomat, speaking frankly but privately. The fact that their mandate runs out at the end of this month is an added incentive to create a new force, and early discussions have raised the possibility that 10,000 or more soldiers could be deployed. Part of their mandate would be to work closely with Lebanon’s regular army, if possible, to secure the whole of the country’s territory and the disarmament of its militias, in line with last year’s U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559. But the difficulties in negotiating the initial ceasefire remain enormous, starting with the question of whether the captured soldiers will be released un-conditionally, as Israel insists, or exchanged for prisoners, as Hizbullah demands.
The problem is both dangerous and complex. When Nasrallah started his war, he claimed he was supporting the people of Gaza, who had been under siege since the June 25 kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Hamas operatives. The Hizbullah leader makes no secret of his ambitions to speak not only for his Lebanese Shiite followers, but for the Palestinians as well–indeed, for Muslims all over the world. At the same time, Egypt, Jordan and others have been working behind the scenes to arrange an end to the Gaza fighting and the Israeli soldier’s release, and they’ve done their best to keep Nasrallah from stealing any credit.
So far, however, he seems to be prospering no matter what happens. While moderate Arab governments have lined up against Hizbullah and its provocations, many of their people have been pouring into the streets to cheer for Nasrallah’s war. Tehran is gloating over the way its client has held out against the Israeli onslaught–and crowing at the seeming contradictions of U.S. policy. “America has spent millions of dollars on satellite TV and radio programming trying to promote the Greater Middle East Plan and in 10 days Israel has destroyed all of that,” says Mohamad Ali Mohtadi of Tehran’s Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies.
If Bush is worried about such things, he doesn’t show it. In fact, he’s looking ahead to building pressure for sanctions against both Syria and Iran. “Terrorist groups don’t fear isolation, but nation-states do fear isolation,” he told NEWSWEEK. “A leader may appear to be immune from the desires of his people, but nevertheless isn’t … The United States, admittedly, has thus far been the leader when it comes to using economics on Iran and Syria. As the problem has become clear in people’s minds, we have an opportunity to convince others to join us.” Unless–until–the sight of Lebanon’s carnage grows too horrible to bear.
