LCCC ENGLISH NEWS BULLETIN
JULY 29/2006

Latest New from The Daily Star for July 29/06
Bush and Blair resist pressure for immediate cease-fire, insist on waiting for right 'conditions'
Iran denies backing Hizbullah militarily, calls for cease-fire
Hizbullah hits back with longer-range rocket
Lack of pressure on Israel indicates a long haul toward peace
State Department orders embassy staff to evacuate
Cost of transport starts to skyrocket
Berri lashes out at Arab governments, expresses full support for Siniora
Lessons from wartime, to be applied on a better day
Hezbollah fires new type of missile at Israel
Lebanon's apocalypse may be hiding one in Iraq-David Ignatius
Saying no to being a 'disposable animal'-Rami G. Khouri
Latest New from Miscellaneous sources for July 29/06
Rice back to Middle East for fresh diplomatic bid-Washington Post
Harri Investigative Panel Transferred-AKI - Rome,Italy
Indyk: Keep Syria and Iran Out of Negotiations Over Lebanon-Council on Foreign Relations
Larijani Arrives in Syria to Discusses Mideast Developments-Fars News Agency
Lebanese Army Shuns Israel, Hezbollah Fight to Avert Civil War-Bloomberg - USA
Editorial: It is time for Iran to end the killing-The Australian
Between Hezbollah and hell-Sydney Morning Herald
Israel Hits 130 Hezbollah Targets in Southern Lebanon -loomberg
Bush Looks to Possible Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon-FOX News 
U.N. observers leave Israel-Lebanon border-AP
No timetable for Rice's return to Mideast-AP
Blair backs Israel bomb flights-Daily Mail
15,000 extra Israeli troops as al-Qaeda steps in-Scotsman
Morning Roundup: Israel Calls Up Thousands of Reservists in Case-Naharnet
Israel concentrates attacks in Lebanon's south-ABC Online
Israeli reservists prepare for war-Globe and Mail
Israel must deal with Syria says Haaretz newspaper analyst-ABC Online
Palestinians still stranded on Syrian-Lebanese- Reuters
Russian Base in Syria, a Symmetrical Strategic Move-Center for Research on
Aussie peacekeepers 'may go to Lebanon'-The Age
Recoiling From Punishing Incursion, Israel Warns All South Lebanon-New York Sun
On the Hopes for a Mideast Truce (6 Letters)-New York Times
Rice keeps close tabs on Middle East, may return there-Washington Post
Israel is justified in confronting the murderousHouston Chronicle
Israel won't expand offensive in Lebanon-AP
Iranian envoy, Hezbollah leader meet-Houston Chronicle
Lebanon 101: Behind the headlines-CNN - USA
Lebanon: Up to 600 civilians killed in IDF offensive-Ha'aretz
Israel to step up air strikes on south Lebanon-Irish Times
ANALYSIS-Lebanon's credit risk is up, but default unlikely-Reuters
An American in Beirut: Lebanon on a 'Helpless Walk Through Time'-FOX News
Australia pulls troops from southern Lebanon, NZ observers to stay-New Zealand Herald
Intense combat in Lebanon conference aftermath-Euronews.net
Israeli-Hezbollah Fighting Could Continue for Weeks-Voice of America
Israel Bolsters Campaign Against Hezbollah-Los Angeles Times
Is Mideast Conflict Causing Rift Between Al Qaeda and Hezbollah?FOX News

LEBANON-SYRIA: HARIRI INVESTIGATIVE PANEL TRANSFERRED
Beirut, 28 July (AKI) - The investigative panel on the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri has been transferred outside Lebanon for security reasons, a UN source says. "The inquiry commission was transferred outside Lebanon for security reasons, but the investigations are continuing as normal, as well as the questioning of suspects," a spokesman for the United Nations panel in Beirut told Adnkronos International (AKI), asking to remain anonymous. The source did not deny nor confirm that the commission was moved to Cyprus.
In the past few days, unconfirmed reports in Beirut claimed that part of the panel's archives had been destroyed in Israeli air raids, but the source denied such allegations, saying: "The data of investigators are in a secure place and are undamaged."
On Wednesday, UN secretary general Kofi Annan extended the term of the UN probe headed by Belgian judge Serge Brammertz until the end of the year.
According to another UN sorce contacted by AKI in Damascus, "the investigation was over even before the war in Lebanon started."
However, sources in Beirut say the investigation is far from over, and that "by September we will start to work on the creation of an international tribunal charged with judging suspects."
Hariri and 22 others were killed on 14 February last year following a massive car bomb attack in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Since his assassination, Damascus has been accused by many of being behind the plot to kill Haririr- an allegation it has always denied.
Germany's Detlev Mehlis led the probe before Brammertz from June-December 2005. UN investigators have so far presented four official reports - all implicating Syria directly.

Bush and Blair resist pressure for immediate cease-fire, insist on waiting for right 'conditions'
Compiled by Daily Star staff -Saturday, July 29, 2006
US President George W. Bush and British Premier Tony Blair shrugged off pressure Friday for a cease-fire in Lebanon, saying they want an international force dispatched but arguing that any plan to end the fighting must address long-running regional disputes to be effective.
Speaking in a joint news conference, Bush said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would return to the Middle East Saturday, adding that a multinational force should be deployed "quickly" in Lebanon. "We share the same urgency to stop the violence," said Bush, with Blair at his side in the White House East Room.
"We want to see it happen as quickly as possible but the conditions have to be in place to allow it to happen," Blair said. Bush said he and Blair agreed that an international force for Southern Lebanon should help facilitate shipments of humanitarian aid.
Bush and Blair met against a backdrop of attacks between Israel and Hizbullah that have killed hundreds of civilians in Lebanon and mor than a dozen in Israel. Arab leaders and European countries have called for an immediate cease-fire. "We agree that a multinational force must be dispatched to Lebanon quickly to augment the Lebanese Army as it moves to the South," Bush said. "An effective multinational force will help speed delivery of humanitarian relief, facilitate the return of displaced persons and support the Lebanese government as it asserts full sovereignty over its territory and guards its borders."
Bush said Rice would make her second visit to the Middle East on Saturday. "Tomorrow, Secretary Rice will return to the region. She will work with the leaders of Israel and Lebanon to seize this opportunity to achieve lasting peace and stability for both of their countries," Bush said.
"Her instructions are to work with Israel and Lebanon to come up with an acceptable UN Security Council resolution that we can table next week," he said.
A senior State Department official with Rice in Kuala Lumpur, where she has been attending Southeast Asia's top security forum, said she would return to Jerusalem on Saturday.There was no word on whether she would make any other stops before returning to Washington. "She will go where she needs to go to get progress," the US official said, adding: "This thing is evolving hour by hour."
It is Rice's second trip in less than a week to the region, which began with a surprise visit last Monday to bombed-out Beirut, followed by a diplomatic shuttle to Israel. "We hope to achieve an early end to this violence," Rice said in Malaysia earlier Friday. "That means we have to help the parties establish conditions that will make it possible for an early cease-fire," Rice added. US officials said there was still a lot of work to do to get the two sides to sign on to conditions for a cease-fire. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch and senior White House official Elliott Abrams have been in Israel working on a "political framework" for a deal, said one senior official. Issues on the table include the release of captured Israeli soldiers, creation of an international force on the border region between Southern Lebanon and Israel, a prisoner exchange, and the disarming of Hizbullah. Blair said he and Bush agreed a UN resolution is needed as soon as possible to stop hostilities in Lebanon. Blair said it was important not only to get a cessation of violence but to use the opportunity to set out and achieve a "different strategic direction for the whole of that region.""We've got to deal with the immediate situation" but also realize the violence in recent weeks is part of a bigger picture that must be addressed, Blair said, adding world powers would meet at the United Nations Monday to discuss the possible deployment of a UN "stabilization force" for Lebanon.
UN chief Kofi Annan is expected to chair Monday's meeting, according to UN and diplomatic sources. The goal is to begin discussions on the type of force to be deployed, its goals and rules of engagement. Rice flew to Malaysia for the ASEAN Regional Forum, a gathering of Southeast Asian nations and key security partners including the US, Russia and China, after a tour of Beirut, Jerusalem, the West Bank and a crisis meeting in Rome Wednesday.
The Rome conference gathered 15 nations but failed to produce a call for an immediate cease-fire, adding support to the US and British position that there must first be a sustainable solution to the conflict. - Agencies.

Indyk: Keep Syria and Iran Out of Negotiations Over Lebanon
Interviewee: Martin S. Indyk
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor
July 27, 2006
Martin S. Indyk, an assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs in the Clinton administration, and twice ambassador to Israel, says it would be wrong to invite Iran and Syria, the major backers of Hezbollah, into negotiations to end the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.
"The idea that Syria or Iran should become the arbiters of Lebanon's fate is basically to reward the arsonists by giving them control of the place where the fire's burning," says Indyk, who directs the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Indyk says the Rome conference, which ended without an agreement on a ceasefire, nevertheless did achieve "a basic consensus on what elements would be necessary for a ceasefire package to be acceptable for the governments of Israel and Lebanon."
Clearly the meeting in Rome on Wednesday did not achieve a ceasefire even though nobody really expected an immediate halt to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Where do you think the various actors have to go from here?
I think what Rome did achieve is a basic consensus on what elements would be necessary for a ceasefire package to be acceptable for the governments of Israel and Lebanon. And those elements, as expressed in the Rome communiqué, were: extension of the Lebanese government's authority throughout Lebanon, which means the dispatch of the Lebanese army to the south backed by an effective international force; and a process for the implementation of UN Resolution 1559, which calls for the disbanding and disarming of all militias in Lebanon. As [UN Secretary General] Kofi Annan put it in the press conference: there can only be one gun and it should be in the hands of the government. I think those are the critical elements for a ceasefire, and the challenge now is to create the circumstances in which it then becomes implemented on the ground.
I think a lot of people have speculated that because of Hezbollah's close ties to both Syria and Iran, it is important to get those two countries involved as active players. Is the United States making a mistake in ignoring them directly?
There's no question Iran and Syria helped to light the fire that is now engulfing Lebanon and northern Israel, and if they want to be part of the solution, they could certainly help to douse the flames. But the question is: What is their price? If we were to ask Syria to help, that would be tantamount to an invitation to Syria to interfere again in Lebanon's affairs. And that would be tantamount to a betrayal of the millions of Lebanese who came out into the streets of Beirut and insisted that Syria stop interfering in Lebanon's affairs, that it takes its troops out of Lebanon. So talking is not the issue. The question is: What is the message to Syria? Is it is a message like [then Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger sent [then Syrian President] Hafez al-Assad in 1976, which was "Please intervene in Lebanon, it's a civil war"? If we invite his son [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] to intervene to stop Hezbollah, then we are essentially handing Lebanon over again to Syrian control. I think that's an unacceptable outcome. So the message, I think, to Syria and to Iran, which can be delivered by Kofi Annan, or Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, or anybody else who wants to take the message is: "Beware. If you don't stop Hezbollah, then don't be surprised if this conflict engulfs you."
Are you suggesting the United States might get involved militarily, or is this a threat from Israel?
I don't think it's a threat. It just should be a warning. The idea that Syria or Iran should become the arbiters of Lebanon's fate is basically to reward the arsonists by giving them control of the place where the fire's burning.
Why do you think Hezbollah actually started this whole round by abducting those soldiers, and thereby triggering this Israeli response?
Well, this is speculation of course, but I think their original intention was to take another ride on the Palestinian cause. Basically what they were doing was kidnapping soldiers so they could demand not only their own prisoners, of which Israel is holding three, they also demand that Palestinian prisoners be released too, showing that they're supporting Hamas, and that they were supporting the cause of getting Palestinian prisoners released. From [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's reactions and statements since, it's clear that he did not expect this would result in the kind of escalating conflict they are now engaged in. I suspect the Iranians had their own reasons for wanting to create a diversion from their nuclear program on the eve of the G8 Summit. So there was a confluence of interests here. And the Syrians would understand that his could make them players again since they would calculate exactly what's happened: That people would look to Damascus to calm the situation down just as previous American administrations have done every time Hezbollah clashes with Israel.
I was looking at [former Secretary of State] George Shultz's memoirs the other day, and he recalled how President Reagan had sent a note to Hafez al-Assad in 1985 asking him to resolve the TWA hijacking problem, which he did.
Yes, but the context was different. I was involved [in the Clinton administration] with Secretary of State [Warren] Christopher and [Special Middle East envoy] Dennis Ross in several efforts to deal with the situation in Lebanon after Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel. That was in 1994 and again in 1996. And we went to Damascus and got Syria to curb Hezbollah. But the context there was one in which we were engaged in promoting negotiations between Israel and Syria on a peace deal, and Syria had 15,000 troops in Lebanon. And we could go to them and say: If you want us to continue negotiating the peace deal with Israel, you have to stop Hezbollah. The context is very different now. Now, the Syrians have withdrawn their troops from Lebanon, not because of our demands but because of the demands of the Lebanese people. And to ask them now to help solve this problem is to invite them to play a role again in Lebanon, which would be a betrayal of the Lebanese.
In other words, the Syrians would not just simply get in touch with Hezbollah and say, "Stop what you're doing"?
There will be a price, as the Syrians are telling the interlocutors. It's clear that they would be prepared to do that, but there will be a price, and the price will be Lebanon.
You had a long meeting with Bashar Assad in 2004, which left you with the impression that something was possible. You've since changed your mind as a result of the subsequent assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Was Assad just spinning you when you met?
In fact, no. This was just an inexperienced leader who didn't have control of the institutions of his state, and so you say one thing, but other people would do other things, like supporting the insurgency in Iraq, or assassinating the former Lebanese prime minister. But what was clear was whatever he said to me, there was no follow through on any of the things. He said he was going to stop the support for the insurgency, he said he was going to make peace with Israel, and he didn't do any of those things. Instead, I believe the Syrians were directly involved in the assassination of former Prime Minister Hariri.
And there's something else that people who think the solution lies in Damascus should bear in mind. The relationship between the son and Hezbollah is different to the relationship that existed between the father and Hezbollah. For Hafez al-Assad, Hezbollah was a tool in his hand to remind Israel that if they didn't negotiate the return of the Golan Heights, he could hurt them in Lebanon. And he used that—it was like a tap that he could turn on and off.
The relationship between Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah is very different. He is dependent on Hezbollah to maintain Syrian influence in Lebanon because he no longer has the troop presence that gave him control of Lebanon. He is dependent on Hezbollah to defend against an Israeli ground attack through Lebanon's Bekaa Valley into Syria. And therefore, his ability to curb Hezbollah is much more limited, if it's there at all.
Did Israel make a mistake in pulling out of Lebanon in 2000?
No. Nor, in my view, did it make a mistake in pulling out of Gaza [in 2005], nor would it be a mistake for it to pull out of the West Bank. The mistake that we can see in retrospect is that when Israel withdraws, it needs to withdraw in favor of a capable, responsible, sovereign government that will exercise control and establish order in the territories from which Israel withdraws. In the case of the withdrawal in 2000 from Lebanon, there was a call by the United Nations for the Lebanese government to extend its authority to southern Lebanon, but it never happened. In the case of the withdrawal from Gaza, it was the hope that Abu Mazen (Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) would establish his authority in Gaza, but he wasn't capable of doing it. The fact that Israel is now prepared to accept an international force to back the Lebanese army is, I think, a recognition by [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert's government that if the Lebanese government can't do it on its own, it's going to have to have international intervention to back it up to give it that capability.
There is a very modest international force in the Sinai, but that's really more of an observer force, right?
You have an observer force in the Sinai, you have an observer force in the Golan, and you have an observer force in southern Lebanon. Now, observer forces work in the case of the Israeli-Syrian agreement—the disengagement agreement of 1974, which has basically never been violated by Assad—and it works in the Sinai in the case of the Israeli-Egypt peace treaty of 1979. But in those cases you have agreements between capable, responsible governments. In the case of the withdrawal from Lebanon and in the case of the withdrawal from Gaza, there were no agreements. It was unilateral, and on the other side, you didn't have capable and responsible governments who could control the territory. Instead, the vacuum that Israel left when it withdrew was filled by Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, or Hamas, another terrorist organization, or warlords and security chiefs in Gaza.
On another point, how important is international public opinion? Israel has taken a bad beating in the international media because of what critics charge is a disproportionate response to the kidnappings. Is this going to force Israel to accept a ceasefire sooner than it might want to?
As long as Israel's citizens are being barraged by rocket attacks from Lebanon, and Israel's third largest city is under constant attack, no government is going to respond to international censure, and its first responsibility is to defend its citizens. So I don't think that international censure is going to lead it to call off its military operations. What it does do, because Israel has come to understand that it needs to be concerned about international public opinion, is that it is taking measures now, in Lebanon and in Gaza for that matter as well, to make sure there is not a humanitarian disaster. So you've got humanitarian ships and planes, shipments coming in and humanitarian corridors established, and so on.
On the U.S. role, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finally got involved in this, but it does not seem like a very vigorous diplomacy right now. Do you think the American diplomatic effort should be beefed up somehow?
I think that American diplomacy is very necessary. This crisis will not come to an end without American intervention. I think that the administration was flat-footed in the way that it handled the crisis. It had good reason to want Israel to be able to achieve certain military objectives before it attempted to get a ceasefire. In particular, for a ceasefire to be effective, Israel's ground operations in southern Lebanon need to clear Hezbollah out so the Lebanese army, backed by an international force, can come into the south.
If Israel doesn't achieve that, then it's very hard to see how the Lebanese army and an international force are going to get Hezbollah to move out of the south. So I think the administration was right in its calculations. I think the administration was wrong in the way that it handled the imagery because the Bush administration managed to get itself into the position where it looked like it was in favor of the continuation of a war that was causing immense suffering to a lot of civilians on both sides. Instead of declaring that we weren't going to work for a ceasefire, or we were only going to work for a sustainable ceasefire, and waiting ten days to do anything, the administration should have sent an envoy out to demonstrate its interest in a ceasefire even if it wasn't going to be an immediate ceasefire.

Larijani Arrives in Syria to Discusses Mideast Developments
TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Secretary Ali Larijani was in Syria on Thursday for talks on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. Larijani was due to attend a closed session of the parliament on Wednesday, but he cancelled the meeting and left for Damascus instead.
Secretary-General of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Seyed Hassan Nasrollah is said to be in Syria to attend the said talks.
Kuwait's Al-Siyassah newspaper, known for its opposition to the Syrian ruling system said it learned from "well-informed Syrian sources" that Nasrallah and Larijani are to meet to discuss the recent developments. The paper also stated that Nasrallah was moving through Damascus with Syrian guards in an intelligence agency car and that he was dressed in civilian clothes, not his normal clerical garb. The Kuwaiti newspaper also added that the Iranian official would meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad too. On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadeinjad called for a cease-fire but gave no specifics on how it could be achieved. Larijani chosen for the SNSC post by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also serves as Iran's key negotiator in the standoff with the West over Tehran's nuclear program.

Lebanese Army Shuns Israel, Hezbollah Fight to Avert Civil War
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- Lebanon is keeping its army away from the battlefront between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters because it lacks the firepower to sway the conflict and fears it may spark a civil war by intervening.
The Lebanese army, which split when the country was plunged into civil war in 1975, was reunited in 1990 from religious factions including Christians and Muslims who previously fought one another. Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group, controls two of 24 cabinet posts and has 14 of the 128 seats in parliament.
``The Lebanese army won't disarm Hezbollah,'' President Emile Lahoud told reporters in Beirut yesterday. ``Disarming Hezbollah by force may lead to a civil war.'' Stripping the ``Party of God'' of its weapons is Israel's main condition for a cease-fire to end fighting that has left at least 405 Lebanese and 51 Israelis dead since July 12. Israel says it will keep pounding Hezbollah targets in Lebanon until the group is driven from the border to a distance at which it can no longer launch rocket attacks against Israeli cities.
Israel today struck as many as 130 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, using planes and artillery, a day after ruling out an increased land offensive.
``There's no force in Lebanon that can keep Hezbollah from throwing rockets into Israel,'' said Mahmoun Fandy, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, in a telephone interview. ``The government doesn't have the political will or strength to confront Hezbollah's militia, who could ransack the whole Lebanese state if they wanted to.'' U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week called for talks on a United Nations-mandated force to help the Lebanese army restore peace in south Lebanon. Israel says such a force should not be led by the UN. Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran and Syria, rejects a deployment replacing Israeli troops. Today she called for an early cease-fire.
Bush, Blair
U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair will press President George W. Bush to back an immediate cease-fire between Israel and the Shiite Islamist Hezbollah movement and to work on a United Nations resolution spelling out the terms of a peace plan, a spokesman said. The two will meet later today in Washington. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the 46-year old Hezbollah leader, is confident that Lebanese military forces, which include sympathetic Shiite Muslims, won't confront his militia. ``The army refuses to be part of the plot against the Hezbollah,'' Nasrallah said in a video message aired on the party's al-Manar television station July 26.
Aging Soviet Tanks
The Lebanese army, with about 40,000 troops, is larger yet weaker than Hezbollah's militia, which has several thousand fighters, said Brigadier General Walid Sukkarieh. Lebanon's ground forces have aging Soviet tanks and lack anti-aircraft or anti-ship weapons. It has an annual budget of about $500 million, according to the Central Intelligence Agency's Web site. Hezbollah has about 12,000 rockets and has improved its technology with guided missiles that were used to attack an Israeli ship off the coast in mid-July, according to military experts. The militia is better equipped than the army, said Sukkarieh.
Israel's Hezbollah targets, including rocket launchers, were hit during the night in the city of Tyre, the eastern Bekaa Valley, and in southern Lebanon, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman said, speaking anonymously by regulation. One of the raids destroyed Hezbollah's regional command center in Tyre that directed rocket attacks on Israeli towns, he said. Israel today warned residents of villages from Qlaile in the west, through Siddiqine, Sultaniye, Majdel Silim and up to a point west of the village of Houla, near the Israeli-Lebanese border, to flee their homes and move northward by 10:00 a.m. today.
Risk of Disintegration
The Lebanese army would ``likely disintegrate if it clashes with Hezbollah because it is made of soldiers and officers who belong to the different communities that make up Lebanon, and to a significant extent the Shiite community,'' said Sukkarieh. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, is aware of Lebanon's weakness, even as he pushes for implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559. The resolution, adopted in September 2004, calls for disarming Hezbollah and deploying the Lebanese army throughout the country. Israel plans to hold onto a chunk of southern Lebanon, recreating a ``security zone'' it occupied for 18 years, until an international force can ``strengthen the Lebanese army'' so it can reclaim the region from Hezbollah, the government said in a statement this week. ``Everybody who knows the Middle East knows Lebanon isn't a serious state and the Lebanese army isn't going to be serious and capable either,'' said Gerald Steinberg, political science professor at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. ``It has no combat capabilities, only the ability to police Lebanon's streets.''
Lebanon's Streets
Lebanon's streets are the government's biggest concern. The country of 3.8 million is made up of 17 different Christian and Muslim sects, and Nasrallah says his party represents the Shiites, the largest and poorest of the Mediterranean nation's communities. About 70 percent of the population is Muslim, half of which are Shiite, while the remainder are Christian. Confronting Hezbollah may split Lebanon's military along sectarian lines that triggered civil war between 1975 and 1980, the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, said in a July 20 report entitled `Lebanon's Weak Government'.
Hezbollah, formed in 1982, has been linked to scores of attacks on Israelis and Americans, including rocket attacks on Israeli towns, the 1983 bombing that killed 241 U.S. soldiers in Beirut, and the 1994 attack that killed 95 at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The U.S. and Israel have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
Shiite Personnel
In addition, about 7,000 Shiite members of the Lebanese army would probably immediately desert and join Hezbollah if the government sent troops into the action, said Fandy. That's one reason why Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's Future Tide coalition, which represents Sunni and Druze and has 72 of 128 seats in parliament, is pushing for a diplomatic solution  ``Since we can resolve this matter diplomatically then why should we go to war,'' Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general. said by telephone from Beirut. ``If you want the army to tackle Hezbollah then you have to take a political decision and Hezbollah is represented in this government. It's undoable.''
On the Sidelines
Standing on the sidelines while war rages is a familiar role for the Lebanese army. The military stood by as Israeli forces invaded the country in 1982 to attack Palestinian fighters led by Yasser Arafat. Lebanon failed to deploy its army along the southern border with Israel when Israeli troops ended their 22- year occupation of Lebanon in 2000. For almost 30 years, Syrian forces were the dominant power. Syria occupied Lebanon in 1976 and deployed as many as 40,000 forces throughout the country. It ended the occupation last year after the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005 sparked anti-Syrian protests in Beirut. Memories of the 15 year civil war that claimed an estimated 100,000 Lebanese lives are still raw. Mounting casualties in the current conflict with Israel, which has also cost the Lebanese economy $4 billion, make it even less likely that the government will risk a confrontation with Hezbollah.
``If you're asking the Lebanese army to fight Hezbollah then you're asking a Shiite to go and fight his brother,'' Hanna said. ``Israelis are bombing their homes, their families. There's sympathy with what Hezbollah is doing.''

Israel Hits 130 Hezbollah Targets in Southern Lebanon
July 28 (Bloomberg) -- Israel struck as many as 130 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, using planes and artillery, a day after ruling out an increased land offensive. The targets, including rocket launchers, were hit during the night in the city of Tyre, the eastern Bekaa Valley, and in southern Lebanon, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman said, speaking anonymously by regulation. One of the raids destroyed Hezbollah's regional command center in Tyre that directed rocket attacks on Israeli towns, he said.
Israel is pursuing a ``policy of containment,'' Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Israel will continue ``intensive combat'' to strike at Hezbollah's commander centers and infrastructure, the Security Cabinet said in a statement.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today the U.S. will seek an early end to the crisis. The Israeli government yesterday called up reservists as the military fights Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip, in operations that began after three Israeli soldiers were captured. A total of 405 Lebanese and 51 Israelis, including 33 soldiers, have been killed since fighting in Lebanon began July 12.
``We hope to achieve an early end to this situation,'' Rice said at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur. The U.S. will consider ``conditions'' for an ``early cease-fire,'' she said.
U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair will press President George W. Bush to back an immediate cease-fire between Israel and the Shiite Islamist Hezbollah movement and to work on a United Nations resolution spelling out the terms of a peace plan, a spokesman said. The two will meet later today in Washington.
Three Divisions
As many as three divisions of reserves are being put on standby, Israel's military Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said. Any decision to activate the reserve forces will be taken by the full Cabinet, ministers decided yesterday. There are about 5,000 soldiers in each reserve division, Haaretz reported.
While the army doesn't release figures for manpower, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University estimates Israel's standing army at about 186,000 personnel. ``The military action has not come to an end and will continue as long as it's needed,'' Halutz said late yesterday. ``This battle may take time, and this is why we are not showing all of our cards immediately.'' Israel today warned residents of villages from Qlaile in the west, through Siddiqine, Sultaniye, Majdel Silim and up to a point west of the village of Houla, near the Israeli-Lebanese border, to flee their homes and move northward by 10:00 a.m. today.
`Safety at Risk'
``Any vehicle traveling in this area after 10:00 a.m. and any person who chooses not follow this warning is putting his and his family's safety at risk,'' the IDF said. A majority of Israelis say they are satisfied with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the conduct of military operations in Lebanon, a poll in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper showed today. The poll, conducted by the Dahaf Institute, found that 71 percent of 513 adults questioned late yesterday rated Olmert's performance as prime minister as either ``very good'' or ``pretty good.'' Eighty-two percent said the government was pursuing the ``right course'' in Lebanon, it said. A poll by the newspaper July 18, six days into the conflict, showed Olmert had the backing of 78 percent of Israelis. Today's survey had a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points, Yediot said.
Impasse Reached
Israel says it is targeting Hezbollah bases with air strikes while staging a limited land incursion into southern Lebanon to root out the Muslim group's strongholds near the Israeli border. The two sides are at an impasse, said Nadim Shehadi of London's independent international affairs institute, Chatham House, which advises European governments. ``We are in a kind of deadlock because what's happening on the military side is not yielding any results,'' he said in an interview yesterday. ``The more military operations go on, the more difficult it will be to justify stopping without showing any results for the Israeli army.'' Israeli army officials estimate that about 200 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in operations in southern Lebanon since hostilities began, said an army spokesman. Nawwar Sahili, one of 14 Hezbollah members of the Lebanese parliament, described the tally as lies in a telephone interview.
``Hezbollah is not hiding the number of its martyrs, Hezbollah is proud of its martyrs and when they fall, it announces their names.'' Some 32 Hezbollah members have died in the conflict, according to statements issued by the organization since July 12.
Security Strip
Olmert yesterday told members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that Israel will try to establish a two-kilometer (1.2-mile) strip from the border into southern Lebanon that is free of Hezbollah fighters so that light arms can't be used to hit Israeli towns, said a government official who asked not to be identified. Southern Lebanon, adjacent to Israel's northern border, is controlled by Hezbollah, which is sponsored by Syria and Iran. A United Nations resolution calls for its disarmament and for the Lebanese army to take over the area.
Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a July 12 cross- border raid, sparking the conflict. Israel hasn't mounted a full- scale military attack on Lebanon or Hezbollah since its troops were pulled out of a swath of southern Lebanon held for 18 years until May 2000.
Scores of Attacks
Hezbollah, formed in 1982, has been linked to scores of attacks on Israelis and Americans, including rocket attacks on Israeli towns, the 1983 bombing that killed 241 U.S. soldiers in Beirut, and the 1994 attack that killed 95 at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The U.S. and Israel have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Al-Qaeda's second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri warned in a tape broadcast yesterday by al-Jazeera television that the terrorist network won't stand idly by as Israel carries out its offensive in Lebanon.
``I'm not surprised people who use terrorist tactics would start speaking out,'' Bush told reporters at the White House yesterday. The U.S. is ``working hard'' to solve the conflict, Bush said. ``As soon as we can get this resolved, the better. But it must be real, and it can't be fake.''
The war that started July 12 has inflicted $2 billion in damage to Lebanese airports, ports, roads and bridges. Lebanon's economic losses from the aborted summer tourism season and stalled industrial production amount to an additional $2 billion, Riad Salameh, the governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon, said in an interview yesterday.
Gaza Deaths
Two Israeli civilians were lightly wounded today when rockets landed in Zikin, south of Ashkelon, a coastal city 40 kilometers south of Tel Aviv in central Israel. The rockets were fired from northern Gaza, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman said.
Earlier, the army said ground forces left Sajaiyah in the northern Gaza Strip, an area they have been operating in for the past 48 hours in a bid to destroy terrorist infrastructure and stop the launching of rockets at Israel.
Israel started its attack on Lebanon two weeks after it sent its forces into Gaza when a group led by the Islamic Hamas movement kidnapped a soldier in a cross-border raid on June 25. A total of 154 Palestinians have died in raids since then, the Palestinian Health Ministry said yesterday. Israel said it killed 140 gunmen during the same period.
Palestinians Killed
In the Gaza Strip, 22 Palestinians were killed and more than 50 wounded yesterday in air strikes and tank attacks on northeast Gaza City, said Mo'aweya Hassanein, chief of emergency at the Health Ministry. He said that among the dead were four children under the age of 10, eight adult civilians and 10 militants.
Hamas said yesterday there is no progress in negotiating the release of the soldier, 19-year-old Corporal Gilad Shalit. The group wants all female Palestinian prisoners under the age of 18 freed from Israeli jails in exchange for Shalit being released.
Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, razing Jewish settlements it established after seizing the area from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PRESS RELEASE
AI Index: MDE 01/002/2006 (Public)
News Service No: 197
27 July 2006
Lebanon/Israel: Urgent need for arms embargo on Israel and Hizbullah
As civilians continue to bear the brunt of the conflict in Israel and Lebanon, Amnesty International called for an immediate arms embargo on both Israel and Hizbullah.
Amnesty International is gravely concerned about the continuing transfer of weapons from the US, via the UK, as information emerged that a UK airport is being used by USA cargo planes on their way to deliver munitions to Israel.
"The pattern of attacks and the extent of civilian casualties show a blatant disregard of international humanitarian law by Israel and Hizbullah," said Irene Khan, Amnesty International Secretary General.
"Direct targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure and launching indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks amount to war crimes."
overnments supplying Israel and Hizbullah with arms and military equipment are fuelling their capacity to commit war crimes. All governments should impose an arms embargo on both sides and refuse permission for their territories to be used for the transfer of arms and military equipment."
UK media have reported that two chartered Airbus A310 cargo planes filled with GBU 28 laser-guided bombs containing depleted uranium (DU) warheads and destined for the Israeli airforce landed at Prestwick airport, near Glasgow. The planes landed for refuelling and crew rests after flying from the US this past weekend.
Other reports claimed that the USA has requested that two more planes be permitted to land in the UK en route to Israel in the next two weeks. The reports said the aircraft will be carrying other weapons, including bombs and missiles.
"The UK government should refuse permission for its sea and air ports to be used by planes or ships carrying arms and military equipment destined for Israel or Hizbullah," said Ms Khan as Amnesty International wrote to the UK's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett. The organization also called on the UK to suspend the sale or transfer of all arms and military equipment to Israel.
"It is ridiculous to talk about providing humanitarian aid on the one hand, and to provide arms on the other. In the face of such human suffering in Lebanon and Israel, it is imperative that all governments stop the supply of arms and weapons to both sides immediately," stated Ms Khan.
Public Document
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For more information please call Amnesty International's press office in London, UK, on +44 20 7413 5566
Amnesty International, 1 Easton St., London WC1X 0DW. web: http://www.amnesty.org
For latest human rights news view http://news.amnesty.org

Lebanese natives fear for homeland
By Joshua Payne
27 July 2006
Though the bombs falling on Lebanon are half a world away, the shock waves reverberate on Independence Avenue here in Riverdale.
“I’m saddened to the core. We can’t get it off our minds for one minute,” said Riverdalian Paul Anid, who was born and raised in Lebanon and still has family there.For Mr. Anid and his wife Nada, also a Lebanese native, the Israeli military offensive laying waste to their homeland is a tragedy not only in the human terms of lives lost and homes destroyed, but also because it derails the country’s long march toward reinventing itself as a moderate, democratic state in the Middle East. Staunch supporters of reform in Lebanon, the Anids have been very active on behalf of Chibli Mallat, who is running a Western-style campaign for president on a platform of human rights and open government.  Earlier this year Mr. Anid even took a few weeks off from his job as an environmental engineer to manage Mr. Mallat’s campaign in Lebanon. On Sunday Mr. Mallat’s op-ed piece in The New York Times called for the United Nations to pass a resolution insisting that Hezbollah release the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers; that the Lebanese government take full control of its territory from Hezbollah; and that an international force be dispatched to help the Lebanese government assert its authority.
Ms. Anid, an engineering professor at Manhattan College, regularly works with Lebanese Abroad, a group devoted to securing the right to vote in Lebanese elections for expatriates living abroad. While Mr. Anid is distressed by the conflict, he is not surprised. “What’s happening is basically the result of a weak state,” he said. “In a normal government there’s no excuse for any other group to be armed” the way Hezbollah is armed, and waging its own, independent military campaign against a neighboring country. Mr. Anid described the Israeli reaction as “expected,” but he lamented the indiscriminate use of force and the breadth of devastation. “The country took 20 years to rebuild after the civil war, and it took less than 20 days to destroy it,” he said in a telephone interview, his voice weary with concern.
His father and brother live in Lebanon and have been updating him about the conflict. “They’re going after everything,” Mr. Anid said of the Israeli military strikes. “They destroyed a lot of bridges in Beirut and in the mountains leading to Syria, which is a shame because they are heavily traveled by civilians.”
Mr. Anid said Israel should be careful not to alienate Lebanese citizens, who are also victims of Hezbollah. “Hezbollah is claiming that their arsenal is untouched while the country is destroyed,” he said. Business and government leaders in Lebanon, with its eastern border on the Mediterranean Sea, had hoped that this summer would be the country’s most prosperous tourist season in 30 years.
The Anids usually spend a few weeks each summer vacationing there. It was only by chance that this summer they opted to visit friends and family in Sweden.
“Had we been in Lebanon right now we would have been repatriated to the U.S. And I doubt it would have been a pleasant experience,” Mr. Anid said.
The Anids’ eldest daughter Ingrid, a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, has a summer internship with ABC News in New York, where she has been posting reports on the network’s Web site about how the U.S. government bungled the effort to evacuate Americans from Lebanon during the conflict’s early days. Not one to wallow in negative thoughts, Mr. Anid is already looking toward the future. “The international community must help Lebanon rebuild fast.
It’s time for another Marshall Plan,” he said.If the world turns its back on Lebanon in the wake of this conflict, 2Mr. Anid said, “It will be absolutely heartbreaking.”

Truth always hurts
Andrew Bolt
July 28, 2006
There has been a parade of prejudice, but I will show that terrorists were shooting from the UN posts, counting on Israel to not dare shoot back.
THE furious critics agree: Israel is doing this all wrong. Oh, just hear them preach. Yes, Israel is killing too many civilians in its fight against Lebanon's Hezbollah terror group. Israel's bombing is "disproportionate" and careless -- even if not 500 people have died in two weeks of allegedly "intense" shelling.
But never mind the facts in that parade of prejudice. Take yesterday. Papers such as the The Age treated Israel's accidental shelling of a United Nations observer post as a deliberate war crime -- when, as I'll show below, terrorists were shooting from these very posts, thinking Israel would not dare shoot back. Meanwhile, newspaper cartoonists draw these wicked Jews as Nazis, gloating ambulance bombers and implacable baby-killers.
So ask these critics what Israel should do instead against an Islamist terror statelet next door that is astonishingly well-armed with missiles, and which hides among civilians. Ask, and these same critics shrug. Instead of fighting like this, Israel should ... No, it should ... Oh, I don't know.
Here's what they really think it should do. It should wait quietly in some no-trouble queue, as Jews did at the gates of Nazi camps, while their neighbours invent what they need to wipe out their country for ever. Oh, dear. At breakfast my wife warned me to write this coolly, as if the defence of a democracy against the new fascists -- of Jews against a Holocaust -- could be done by parsing here, trimming there, conceding elsewhere and drawing so many half-way lines in sand that when we look up Tel Aviv is gone.
BUT I shall try -- by filling in some facts too rarely reported, and without which Israel is made to look so very bad.
What you are too rarely told is that Hezbollah is a terror group created in part by Iran, funded by Iran and still armed by Iran. And Iran, an Islamist regime, has glowing, smoking plans for Israel. Its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has urged Iranians to prepare for martyrdom and has told them Israel must be "wiped off the map". Hezbollah would like that. As its former leader Hussein Massawi helpfully explained, as if to idiots: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
With what weapon might Iran -- or its Hezbollah proxies -- strike those Jews? Well, oil-soaked Iran has for nearly 20 years worked on a secret nuclear program, and Hezbollah provoked this war just as the UN Security Council was debating what sanctions, if any, to impose on Iran to force it to stop.
But as both Israel and Iran both know, the UN and Europe are so morally weak that no one will stop what everyone fully expects is a program to build a nuclear bomb. So tick, tick, tick... And bang! When Hezbollah fighters killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more in a cross-border raid a fortnight ago, Israel decided it would wait no longer in this quiet queue for destruction. It struck back with who knows what plan in mind. To get the soldiers released, it said first. Now its demand is that Hezbollah disarm so never again will it have thousands of rockets -- rockets which one short day may be tipped with worse than high explosives and ball bearings. It won't work, of course. Israel will buy some months, perhaps, but while Iran's ayatollahs rule and their jihadist creed prospers they will be back. And this oil-thirsty world -- with so many Western countries now with loud Muslim minorities -- will not block it.
Of course, Israel's desperate reaction isn't quite what Hezbollah was counting on. "The truth is -- let me say this clearly -- we didn't even expect (this) response ... That (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us," whined Mahmoud Komati, deputy chief of Hezbollah's politburo.
It thought that snatching Jewish soldiers -- to later trade their bodies for captured terrorists -- would get just the "proportionate" response it could ignore while it killed more Jews. But no, Mr Terrorist. Israel won't walk quietly to any grave. Not this time. Enough context there? Then let me add some to another story that is too often told you without it. Israel is now painted in the media as so cruel that it barely minds if it kills children with its careless bombs.
Perhaps Channel 9, taking Hezbollah-run tours of the damage in Beirut, has pushed this view hardest.
Said Nine producer Wes Hardman, in Beirut: "To me, a soldier should take every care not to hit civilians, but that's not happening in Lebanon. If Israel think they are precision bombing, then they should be congratulated on their ignorance."
But another newsman on the tour, CNN's Anderson Cooper, was not so ready to echo Hezbollah's talking points. He noted that the reporters on this "heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event" were allowed only to film what Hezbollah wanted them to, and added:
"Civilian casualties are clearly what Hezbollah wants foreign reporters to focus on. It keeps the attention off them..." And here's one thing Hezbollah doesn't want attention on: It hides its fighters and weapons among civilians so Israel cannot shoot back without risking killing a child. It shoots its missiles even from schools. Hear it from UN aid chief Jan Egeland. Egeland got huge TV coverage when he damned Israel's bombing of Beirut. But he got next to none when he added: "Hezbollah, stop this cowardly blending in among women and children... "I don't think you want to be proud of having many more children and women than armed men (killed)." But it is proud -- because its media dupes report on such deaths and call Israel, not Hezbollah, inhuman.
See how brilliantly that tactic this week, when Israel bombed a post of the UN International Force in Lebanon, killing four observers.
UN boss Kofi Annan instantly leaped to a conclusion that made no sense at all. "I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN observer post," he said.
Israel now wants to kill UN peacekeepers? In God's name, why? But such is the venom against Israel that this slur sped around the world, picked up by gleeful believers from Moscow's Pravda to Mebourne's Age. It was the disposition to believe the crazy worst of Israel that said so much.
True, we still need to know why Israel ignored warnings that its shells were landing on the UN post. But even brief research would have found more context -- that not only do Hezbollah fighters fire from behind screens of women and children, but shoot from behind UN observers, counting on Israel not daring to shoot back. Read for yourself the UNIFIL press releases that have warned how Hezbollah has exploited their posts, and even shot their observers.
Says the UNIFIL press release on the very day of this tragedy: "It was also reported that Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of four UN positions..." Says the UNIFIL report of 20 July: "Hezbollah firing was also reported from the immediate vicinity of the UN positions in Naquora and Maroun Al Ras areas..." And so on. Retired Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie said he recently received emails from the Canadian peacekeeper killed at the UN post on Wednesday, who'd told him Hezbollah was using his post as cover, too. "He was describing the fact that he was taking fire within, in one case, three metres of his position for tactical necessity, not being targeted," Mackenzie said. "Now that's veiled speech in the military. What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that's a favourite trick by people who don't have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can't be punished for it." So why had Annan left these posts there, where they helped only terrorists?
It's a metaphor for Israel's unwinnable war. Hezbollah and its allies hide behind the UN -- and civilians -- waging terror. And when Israel, a democracy, defends itself, the UN calls it evil. And our media chorus that never have they seen such cruelty.
Israel seems doomed, given this. I fear it is not alone.
Join Andrew's new blog at www.blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt
 

Little Relief
Humanitarian supplies finally begin to trickle into southern Lebanon, but local leaders say they’d rather have peace.
By Kevin Sites, Thu Jul 27, 9:06 PM ETEmail Story IM Story
TYRE, Lebanon - Abed al-Muhsen looks like a man under fire, which, if anything, understates his current predicament.
As the President of the Union of Municipalities he is a kind of super-mayor, helping to oversee the governance of cities and villages throughout southern Lebanon. Today and every day since the Israeli offensive in south Lebanon began over two weeks ago, he has engaged in an unending cycle of crisis triage in which he must maintain some level of services for the portion of the population that hasn't fled north to escape the fighting.
"The situation is simple," he says, taking a few minutes to speak with me while people swirl in and out of his office like so many gusts of wind. "We don't have anything to eat and we don't have anything to drink and we don't want to eat anything or drink anything. We only want an end to the fighting."
Al-Muhsen says as many as 50,000 have fled the Tyre region, but 20,000 more can't or won't flee, some of them because they're simply too poor.
Roda Kassab, a fisherman, is one of those. He's come with his ten-year-old son, Hussein, to pick up a meager box of relief supplies being distributed by the municipality at an empty building in town. "Some people are ashamed to come here," says Kassab. "But what can we do? The shops are closed. There's nothing."He says he was captured by Israel during the 1982 invasion and held in an Israeli prison for one year, and he's not eager to experience that again.
He says if he could take his family to safety in the north he would, but he just can't afford to pay for the $10 per head many drivers are charging to take people to Beirut, nor could he afford to pay for a place to stay once they got there.
"Why don't they (the Israelis) fight the soldiers," he says, "instead of the civilians?"
The humanitarian situation in Tyre » View
Often the fighting has split families apart. Naj Ahwada drove a minibus filled with people fleeing the fighting from the southern village of Nakoura, but left his mother and sister behind because they wouldn't leave. "They're older," he says, smoking a cigarette on the grounds of the Rest House Hotel, a place where IDPs (internally displaced persons) can take temporary refuge before continuing their journey. "They didn't want to leave their homes and I couldn't argue with them." The Palestinians living in their own section of Tyre, already refugees, don't want to be displaced again in the country that gave them refuge. Despite the sounds of shelling a few kilometers to the south, most of them continue their lives in the Palestinian Quarter as if nothing was happening.
"We're just waiting," says one, who doesn't want to be identified. "If Sheik Hassan (Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah) calls us, we'll be ready go," he says, referring to the border with Israel where Hezbollah and the Israeli military are engaged in a limited, but fierce, ground fight.
With food, water and fuel supplies in the region running short, so are tempers. Some people are lashing out at foreign media who have come to the region to cover the fighting. Today, a German freelance photographer was punched repeatedly in the face by a group of men when he tried to photograph the aftermath of an explosion in the city. Anger at Israel is rising, too. The fighting was sparked by a cross-border raid in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed several others. But the ferocity of Israel's response took many by surprise, and now many in Lebanon are saying that Israel is targeting civilian homes and vehicles. Missile strikes on non-military vehicles and structures only fuel that perception. Earlier this week, a pair of ambulances were struck. Six medics were wounded, none seriously, but one of the injured being transported lost a leg in the attack (Watch video of the aftermath.).
An Israeli Defense Forces press officer could not give specific details about the incident, but repeated assertions that the area is used by Hezbollah for military activities, and that Israel has warned against civilian travel in the region. One of the medics, Hussein Farhad, 21, says the attack won't stop him from doing his work. "I went out the very next day," says Farhad. "We're not soldiers, we're not from Hezbollah, we only do our job."
Israeli missiles flattened a seven-story building in Tyre on Wednesday, enraging residents in the area, who said Hezbollah had no presence there. But the target reportedly was the office of Hezbollah's southern Lebanon commander, Sheik Nabil Kaouk. Some of the frustration for those still left in the south may be beginning to ease somewhat, at least as far as food and water is concerned.  The first U.N. aid shipment arrives in Tyre » View
The United Nations brought its first shipment of relief supplies to the area late yesterday afternoon, ten trucks filled with food and medical supplies.
"The importance of this shipment is not what we have," says United Nations spokesman Khaled Manosour. "The importance of this convoy is that it arrived safely. It's the first convoy after we reached a communications system telling each faction — the Israelis and Hezbollah — what we are doing here, when we are leaving, when we are arriving, how many trucks."
Mansour says the convoy brought 90 tons of wheat flour and enough basic medical supplies to take care of 50,000 people for three months. He says the U.N. will also be taking other convoys of relief deeper into the south, even closer to the fighting. The convoy has already generated a little bit of hope in the area where the supplies are being unloaded. Sadi Essa, who has fled the fighting further south and is sleeping in a house temporarily abandoned by another family, has come to ask if her two sons, Ali and Hassan, might get jobs unloading the sacks of flour. They aren't needed now, the local coordinator tells her, but there will be more trucks coming later in the week. Meanwhile, back at the municipality office, Abed al-Muhsen knows his crisis is spinning out of control and that only a political solution, not humanitarian relief, can stop it.  He voices an opinion that is widely shared in Lebanon — that the U.S. is to blame.
"America sells bombs to the Israelis," he says, "so they can drop them here. And tell me, what did (U.S. Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice do? There is something more important than food and water now, and that is peace."

U.N. observers leave Israel-Lebanon border
By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer
BEIRUT, Lebanon - The United Nations has decided to remove 50 unarmed observers from posts along the Israeli-Lebanese border and relocate them with lightly armed U.N. peacekeepers, a spokesman said Friday. The decision came three days after an Israeli airstrike destroyed one of the posts earlier this week, killing four observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said Israel appeared to have struck the site deliberately — an accusation Israel vehemently denies. But a U.N. Security Council statement Thursday expressed shock and distress at the killing of the observers, but avoided any condemnation.
"These are unarmed people and this is for their protection," said Milos Struger, a spokesman for U.N. peacekeepers. He said the 2,000 peacekeepers in Lebanon have light weapons for self-defense.
The observer mission, known as UNTSO, had kept about 50 observers in four posts along the border. Two posts have already been abandoned: the one destroyed at Khiam on July 25, and a second near the village of Maroun al-Ras, where Hezbollah guerrilla gunfire wounded an observer on July 23.
Staff from the two remaining posts would be relocated at border posts of the peacekeeping mission, known as UNIFIL, Struger said. He would not say whether the move had been completed.
UNTSO — the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization — was established in 1948 to observe the cease-fire following the war that followed Israel's creation.
UNIFIL — the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon — was created to confirm Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 1978. It has over 30 observation posts and bases along the border, monitoring and reporting on violence in the region. The two organizations generally work together now.
The recent bloodshed erupted July 12 after Hezbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese border into Israel and captured two Israeli soldiers. Israel retaliated with its massive assault on Lebanon, now in its 17th day.
Rescue workers have recovered the bodies of three of the observers killed in Khiam, but the fourth body remains buried in the rubble of the destroyed building. Heavy equipment cannot reach the site due to continued Israeli bombardment, UNIFIL said in a statement.
In the drafting of the Security Council statement, the United States — Israel's closest ally — insisted on dropping any condemnation or allusion to the possibility that Israel deliberately targeted the U.N. post.
The statement made only one reference to the wider Israeli-Hezbollah fighting, expressing the council's "deep concern for Lebanese and Israeli civilian casualties and sufferings, the destruction of civil infrastructures and the rising number of internally displaced people in Lebanon."
It dropped a call for a joint investigation into the observer post bombing but called on Israel to take into account "any relevant material from U.N. authorities, and to make the results public as soon as possible."
Israel has expressed regret for the bombing and stressed that it would never target U.N. personnel.
Speaking to the Security Council on Wednesday, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Jane Lute said the observer post came under close Israeli fire 21 times, including 12 hits within 100 yards and four direct hits. U.N. officials in New York and Lebanon repeatedly protested to Israel in the hours before a bomb leveled the building and killed the four observers, she said.
On July 17, a civilian staff member for UNIFIL and his wife, both Nigerian, were killed in their home by airstrikes in the southern port city of Tyre, according to the peacekeeping force.
In other developments, Israeli warplanes fired missiles at dozens of targets across southern Lebanon overnight, including buildings that were reduced to rubble and a Hezbollah base where long-range rockets were stored, the military said.
Israeli defense forces said aircraft hit a total of 130 targets in Lebanon on Thursday and early Friday, including a Hezbollah base in the Bekaa Valley, where long-range rockets were stored, and 57 Hezbollah structures, six missile launching sites and six communication facilities.
Israeli jets fired missiles at a three-story building near the southern Lebanon market town of Nabatiyeh, destroying the building and killing a Jordanian man who was hit by shrapnel in a nearby home, Lebanese security officials.
The building housed a construction company believed to be owned by a Hezbollah activist, the officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the media. The strike also wounded four children nearby, they said.
Israel also destroyed two buildings in the village of Kfar Jouz near Nabatiyeh, and civil defense teams were struggling to rescue people believed buried in the rubble, witnesses said. Warplanes pounded roads in southeastern Lebanon, a Lebanese army checkpoint in Ansar village and a castle in Arnoun village near the Lebanon-Israel border. In addition, Israeli jets fired more than 30 missiles at suspected Hezbollah hideouts in hills and mountainous areas in the southern part of the country, security officials said. Israeli artillery hit a convoy evacuating villagers from southern Lebanon, slightly wounding a journalist and a driver.
Mohammed Naghawi, a Jordanian cameraman working for German TV channel N24, told The Associated Press by telephone that he and his driver Mohammed Haddad were rushed to U.N. peacekeeping headquarters at the border town of Naqoura for treatment of superficial injuries at hospital there.
An AP photographer in the convoy, who was unhurt, said the explosion occurred as the ambulances, evacuees and journalists were returning from the village of Rmeish, where it had picked up residents trapped by the fighting.
The convoy was driving on a border road about 2 1/2 miles east of the coastal town of Naqoura, when the strike hit.
Meanwhile, the guerrillas continued to launch rockets into northern Israel on Friday, with 10 fired at the towns of Ma'alot, Karmiel and Safed by midmorning, the army said. No casualties were reported.
At least 438 people have been reported killed in Lebanon since fighting broke out between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas, most of them Lebanese civilians. But Lebanon's health minister estimated Thursday that as many as 600 civilians have been killed so far in the offensive.
Thirty-three Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting and 19 civilians have been killed in Hezbollah's unyielding rocket attacks on Israel's northern towns, the army said. The army said Friday that Israeli troops have killed about 200 Hezbollah guerrillas since fighting began more than two weeks ago. Hezbollah has reported far fewer casualties. Israel launched its offensive in Lebanon on July 12, after Hezbollah guerrillas overran the border, killing eight soldiers and capturing two others. Israeli forces opened an earlier offensive in the Gaza Strip on June 28, three days after Hamas militants attacked Israeli army post in southern Israeli, killing two soldiers and capturing another one.
Hezbollah and Hamas have both demanded the release of Hezbollah and Palestinian prisoners in return for freedom for the three Israeli captives, but Israel's government has refused. Israel decided on Thursday not to expand its ground battle with Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon for now, but the Cabinet authorized the army to call up 30,000 reserve soldiers in case the fighting intensified. In Geneva, the international Red Cross appealed for $81 million to help victims of the fighting in Lebanon. Life is becoming "unbearably dangerous" for civilians who have been trapped by the violence, the International Committee of the Red Cross said. Resources and access to water and basic services are also very limited, the ICRC said in a statement, while medical evacuations and aid operations are very difficult and cannot meet the population's needs. "In southern Lebanon, the No. 1 issue today is ensuring the safety of civilians and securing safe access for those engaged in medical and other humanitarian activities," said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's director of operations.
"At the same time, the damage to civilian infrastructure and the country's economy, coupled with the large-scale displacement of civilians, requires an emergency response that is likely to extend into next year," Kraehenbuehl said.

No timetable for Rice's return to Mideast
 By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday she will return to the Middle East to work with others on trying to bring an end to the Israeli-Hezbollah fighting, but did not say when.
"I do think it is important that groundwork be laid so I can make the most of whatever time I can spend there," Rice told a news conference here, where she has been attending a conference on Asian issues. Rice didn't provide a precise time for her return to the Middle East, where diplomats are working to reach a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militia. She had been expected to return to the region this weekend.
"Let me be very clear. I am going to return to the Middle East. The question is when is it right for me to return," Rice said.
Rice's spokesman, Adam Ereli, took strong issue with an assertion by Israel's Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who said the failure of world leaders to call for an immediate cease-fire at a summit in Rome gave Israel a green light to carry on with its campaign to crush Hezbollah.
"Any such statement is outrageous," Ereli said. "The United States is sparing no effort to bring a durable and lasting end to this conflict."
The United States, adopting a diplomatic stance that has not been embraced by allies, has been insisting that any cease-fire to the violence over the last three weeks must come with conditions to address long-standing regional disputes. That, she has said, will ensure a durable solution.
Nearly every U.S. ally has called for a quick truce to end the bloodshed and efforts to smooth needed humanitarian supplies to the Lebanese. They believe the difficult work solving of old grievances between Hezbollah and Israel can come later.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said the administration would "push back" against criticism of the United States.
Rice has spent three days dashing to high-stakes meetings in Beirut, Jerusalem, the West Bank and Rome, and then traveled to Malaysia on Thursday for the long-planned conference of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Her comments did not make clear if she was returning to the region this weekend, while she is her current trip, although it is clearly the hope of her diplomatic entourage.
At her news conference Friday, Rice said that before returning to the region, she wanted to confer with Elliot Abrams and David Welch, her U.S. envoys who arrived in Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon. Because of the time zone disparity, she said, they were just beginning their day's work.
Rice got an exceptional — but not unusual — welcome during her stop in Israel this week. But she has faced a series of difficult sessions with world leaders elsewhere who take exception with the course the U.S. is charting in the conflict on the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Sitting beside Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar at the news conference, Rice said, "I recognize the tremendous concern that the Malaysian government and other governments here have about the unfolding situation in the Middle East."
"We all are concerned about the humanitarian situation there and want to see as early an end to the conflict as possible," she added. "Whole generations have grown up there without the prospect for peace." Asked what she hoped to accomplish when she does return to the region, Rice said, "We hope to achieve an early end to this violence, that's what we hope to achieve." "That means that we have to help the parties establish conditions that will make it possible for an early cease-fire that, nonetheless, does not return us to the status quo."She said the terms and conditions of a such a cease-fire would involve "a multinational force under U.N. supervision" that would have a mandate to enforce a peace agreement.  "So, many of the elements are there" for such an arrangement, Rice added. "There is no doubt in my mind that we want to achieve this and achieve it as soon as possible."
As the death toll and devastation rise, world attention has increasingly focused on the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri weighed in Thursday, calling for Muslims to unite in a holy war against Israel and to join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza until Islam reigns from "Spain to Iraq." Asked by reporters traveling with Rice about why she delayed her trip to the Middle East, her spokesman noted that diplomacy is an evolving process. "It is not something that is set in stone from the beginning and follows a prewritten script," Ereli said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, en route to Washington to meet Friday with Bush, said he will seek a U.N. resolution to resolve the crisis by early next week, his spokesman told reporters on customary condition of anonymity. The European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana said, "Everybody wants a cease-fire, everybody. We want the cease-fire to be durable and to be as soon as possible." Crucial to any agreement, he said, is a legal package from the U.N. Security Council that would potentially deploy an international force to help the Lebanese government secure its entire territory.

Editorial: It is time for Iran to end the killing
July 29, 2006The Australian - Sydney,Australia
In Lebanon and Israel, Ahmadinejad has blood on his hands
IS the value of human life less in Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we children of a lesser God?" asked Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora this week in Rome. "Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?" It's a good question and one that drips with as much anger and poignancy as Shylock's famous soliloquy in The Merchant of Venice. But it is also, sadly, the wrong question. For, in the present conflict, there is no difference between Lebanese and Israeli blood. Both nations are being made to pay the price for policies set by thuggish theocrats in Tehran and, to a lesser extent, Damascus. Those are the men to whom Mr Siniora's question needs to be directed. Hezbollah, aka the Party of God, touched off the current conflagration by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing three others in a cross-border raid just over two weeks ago. That attack was only the latest in a long series of often fatal harassment actions conducted by the terrorist group since it filled the void left by Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Through it all, Hezbollah has been a puppet of the Iranian theocracy, which created it more than 20 years ago with the purpose of using terrorism to expand the Shia regime's influence throughout the Middle East. In retaliating against Hezbollah and pressuring Lebanon to control its territories and kick out the organisation, Israel is taking a logical step against an Iranian regime whose leaders routinely vow to "wipe Israel from the face of the map". Every one of the nearly 500 deaths of the past two weeks, whether Lebanese or Israeli, is tragic. But those who complain Arab blood is cheap must realise that the price is being set in Tehran, not Jerusalem. And the power to stop the bloodshed lies most of all with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who at a stroke could get Hezbollah to lay down its arms and quit a country in which it does not belong.
When one strips away all the emotional and political baggage from the situation in the Middle East, the present conflict is at its heart a battle between a liberal democracy and a fascist dictatorship. It should be no trouble to figure out which side is in the right. Yet events in the Middle East are seen through one's individual political prejudices. In the West, too many on the Left are unable to put aside their reflexive anti-Americanism and romantic beliefs that Islamic radicals are simply freedom fighters to judge the situation fairly. Thus groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas that use terror as the means to spread their own political and religious obsessions are not seen as the bad guys; rather, Israel is. This view has poisoned the debate in many sectors of the media, where Israel's defensive actions are routinely cast in an aggressive light, and in the streets, where at so-called peace rallies Stars of David appear on banners next to swastikas separated by a "=" sign. But if those who blame Israel were to put away their anti-American prejudices and forget for a moment the half-baked postmodern narrative of colonisers and liberators, they would see in Hezbollah something that could just as easily be called the Nazi Party of Tehran. Today all Israel wants in the present conflict is for the Nazis to go home. Hezbollah was created by a regime every bit as totalitarian and anti-Semitic as the Third Reich. The values of the Iranian theocracy, which executes homosexuals, oppresses ethnic and religious minorities and treats women as property, should be offensive most of all to the progressive Left. Although there have been some heartening and worthwhile efforts on the left, such as the Euston Manifesto, to come to terms with these facts, it is the liberal democracy of Israel that is all too often cast by progressives as the villain. Were a similarly fascist group to emerge in the Arafura Sea and lob missiles into Darwin on a daily basis, Canberra would likewise have no choice but to respond militarily.
The questions Mr Siniora – and indeed the whole civilised world – should be asking are: "Why won't Iran bring Hezbollah to heel? Are Tehran's lunatic ambitions worth the life of even one Lebanese or Israeli?" Lebanese and Israelis alike suffer from Hezbollah's presence. The region's Sunni Muslims would likewise not fare well under a resurgent Shia Iran that would turn back the clock on democratisation and reform. World outrage should be directed not at Israel but at Iran and Syria. The Australian wishes, along with all Australians, that there was no violence in the Middle East and that the bombs of Hezbollah and Israel did not have to take so many lives – especially those of children. But we also recognise that a ceasefire for its own sake will do nothing to prevent future bloodshed. For the moment, then, our wish would be for more pressure, both from within the Arab world and without, to be brought to bear on Tehran to halt this madness.
Damming the nation
Recycling alone won't solve Australia's water shortage
THE Queensland city of Toowoomba will decide today whether to give the go-ahead to a plan to use recycled sewage to supplement its rapidly dwindling water supply. Without serious rain or drastic measures such as the effluent project, the Darling Downs economic hub with a population of more than 90,000 will run out of water in 18 months. As Roy Eccleston writes in The Weekend Australian Magazine today, the yuck factor – squeamishness about drinking the treated contents of someone else's loo – and concerns about Toowoomba's reputation and economy have dominated the debate and divided the city's residents leading up to today's water futures poll. In combination with an irresponsible scare campaign about cancer-causing molecules passing into the treatment process, these quibbles have the potential to defeat the referendum. If it fails, much more will be lost than the federal Government's share of $68 million in public funds promised to back the Toowoomba scheme. Along much of Australia's east coast is a string of drying dams. Town and city water authorities are desperately juggling supplies and seeking new water sources. They are variously drilling bores, piping water from other catchments, recycling grey water, building desalination plants, planning dams and praying for rain.
A vote against the treated effluent plan today would be a backward, immature step in the face of irrefutable facts. The mix of rising temperatures, decreasing rainfall and fast population growth in many drought-affected regions requires a new way of thinking about Australia's most fundamental resource. Perth and Brisbane are in water strife, and Sydney is not far behind. Like it or not, the problem requires a range of solutions and one of them will have to be recycling treated sewage. Sound science is behind the Toowoomba plan to turn effluent into clean drinking water. It involves the use of reverse osmosmis membranes to trap bacteria, viruses, chemicals and salts in the waste, at the same time allowing water molecules to pass through to other treatment phases before clean water is eventually pumped into a dam. The technology is already in use in Singapore. Goulburn in NSW, where the main dam is already empty, is heading in the same direction, as is Bendigo in Victoria. The alternatives to treating effluent, such as piping desalinated water from a new plant under construction on the Gold Coast, may not be as difficult to swallow, but they will be much more costly and consumers will pay the price.
The campaign against recycling sewage is based on a myth – that tap and toilet never meet in Australia. This is certainly not the story along the slow-flowing Murray-Darling system, where treated effluent and cow manure wash across the country from northwest NSW, ending up in Adelaide. Responsibility for the mess rests largely with the nation's green lobby, part of whose legacy has been removing from the political agenda the building of new dams to service urban populations, beginning with the blocking of plans to dam Tasmania's Franklin River in 1982. It's almost 30 years since a dam was built in Sydney, and no new one is planned in the next 25 years. The result is that in 2030 a city of more than 5 million people will be struggling to survive on a water supply designed for 3 million. The ferocious public response to the Beattie Government's overdue plan to dam the Mary River is another expression of the way the debate has stayed still while reality has moved on. It's time for a an injection of political courage in the debate over how to solve Australia's water shortage. Like treating sewage, building new dams to serve our cities must be part of the mix.
And another thing...
WANT an even more archaic, ill-informed attitude than opposition to recycled water in a drought-stricken city? Try the old arguments against uranium mining, which have more to do with prejudice than policy. Thirty years ago, people were told that nuclear power was dangerous and that Australia was wrong to mine uranium. And plenty of people still believe it. Never mind that nuclear power is safe and clean – like recycled water. Or that the world is as short of energy as Toowoomba is of water. People who made up their minds on both issues decades ago are just not interested in all the evidence and so they stick with erroneous ideas for no better reason than they acquired them in the first (ahem) flush of youth.

Between Hezbollah and hell
July 29, 2006-Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia
Page 1 of 6 | Single page
The organisation Israel has sworn to destroy has political and popular support but could lose it all unless it makes a hard choice fast, writes Paul McGeough.
MOUNTAINS and rivers follow her voice, they say. Mosques and churches lean in and oil jars and even the loaves of bread respond when Fairuz strokes the emotional fabric of Arab life. This revered Lebanese singer became a symbol of national unity by refusing to sing in her homeland during 15 bloody years of civil war. This week, her haunting laments crowd the airwaves again as radio programmers offer solace in terrible times.
But there's another quite insistent beat. This is a mesmeric mix of Arabic anthems - nationalist and martial. It is all slickly packaged with images of precision militia parades, heavy weapons being fired in battle, bruising encounters with the enemy and dying or dead Israelis. This is Al-Manar, a satellite TV channel - the voice of Hezbollah.
The thinking of people like Ali Saleem, 30, is shaped by Al-Manar. In Houla, a border village being bombed by the Israelis, his home was hit during an Israeli air strike last weekend and he is being treated at Beirut's Rafiq Hariri Hospital for broken limbs and burns.
But despite the injuries, he calls for help. Saleem demands to be propped up in bed so that he can make the V-for-victory sign. Invoking the names of Shiite saints and Gandhi, he declares: "If Israel agrees to a ceasefire, it is a victory for us; but if [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah lays down his weapons, we're defeated."
Fervour like Saleem's is hardly surprising in the war zones. But the man on the banquette in Beirut's Commodore Hotel is from a different mould.
The breast pocket of his fine cotton shirt is monogrammed and he chomps a fat cigar. As he juggles two mobile telephones and two cigarette lighters, Dr Ali Fayyad explains he has recently presented Hezbollah's submission on urgently needed electoral reform to the Lebanese Government.
Hezbollah is a key part of that Government - it has three ministries; it has 14 seats in the national parliament; and it controls more than a third of the country's municipal councils. Fayyad is a senior member of Hezbollah's executive committee.
At the modern Al-Rassoul Hospital, Ahmad Talal, 33, enters a small office wearing theatre scrubs. Al-Rassoul was built and is run by Hezbollah. Talal is on stand-by to receive the latest victims of Israeli attacks but, digressing, he reveals his pride in the hospital's No. 2 rating on Lebanon's accreditation of health institutions. And, God willing, he vows, next year it will be No. 1.
Across town Ibrahim al-Mussawi guides the Herald to a dark corner in the lobby of another hotel. Urbane and intense, his languid frame folds into an armchair and he proceeds to analyse Hezbollah's split personality in the global media - in the West, they are terrorists; in the Arab and Islamic worlds, freedom fighters. Mussawi is circumspect, but others observe he has to be close to the centre of Hezbollah power to be trusted as the face of the militia for foreign TV audiences.
All three attend to their tasks in the capital with all the aplomb of lobbyists, technocrats and spin doctors the world over. At the same time their leader, the bearded and turbaned Nasrallah, choreographs the Lebanon end of a brutal war with Israel.
It's a conflict which Washington has seized upon as an opportunity to step over the carcass of so many failed diplomatic efforts to stabilise the Middle East, hoping that allowing Israel to bomb Hezbollah out of the equation might shift the region towards reform and democracy.
This chapter of the Lebanon story starts in February last year, when the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated in a massive car-bomb explosion amid the art-deco and French-mandate grandeur of downtown Beirut. Hariri was the father of the $US50-billion resurrection of the city from the rubble of the civil war and the outpourings of anger at his murder gave rise to what became known as the Cedar Revolution.
Urged on by the US and France, demonstrators demanded that neighbouring Syria dismantle its vice-like military and intelligence apparatus in Lebanon. Damascus caved in and withdrew abruptly, a spectacular outcome that kindled Washington's hope that here was a new Middle East candidate for democracy which, along with liberated Iraq, could be a force for change in the region.
But those who marched for genuine democracy and for a voice in their nation's affairs were cheated. At the time, much of the diplomatic and media analysis split the big Lebanese players into democrats and non-democrats, pro-Syrians versus anti-Syrians. But other forces were - and still are - at work.
Just as they did in the old days, tight circles of powerbrokers from the different religious sects and Mafia-like clans keep a tight rein on the numbers and the money in Lebanon - political and corporate. Despite a Muslim majority, seats in the parliament are shared evenly between the Muslim and Christian communities. Key positions are reserved accordingly - the President is a Christian; the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim; and the Parliamentary Speaker a Shiite Muslim.
But fuelled by the tortured Shiite ascendancy in Iraq and manipulation by Shiite Iran and its allies in Syria, sectarian divisions are deepening.
Amid rising tension between Shiites and Sunnis, there are complaints of an influx into the country of Salafist clergy and militants, adherents to the Islamic creed that underpinned the Taliban in Afghanistan and which still fires much of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. There is an air of Sunni triumphalism and Lebanon's Maronite Christians are being warned of Muslim encirclement.
The US might have grave difficulties with the Sunnis of Iraq. But its warm relationship with the Sunni-dominated Hariri power bloc in Beirut prompted an early warning from General Michel Aoun, a powerful Christian leader who aspires to be president: "The Americans don't understand the complexity of relations between Sunnis and Shiites. The lesson of centuries of experience in Lebanon and Arab history [is] Sunnis and Shiites cannot live together. Christians are needed."
IF LEBANON finds itself at a geopolitical crossroads, the same can be said of Hezbollah, which, faced with intense US-led pressure to disarm, is confronted by hard choice - become a conventional political party and stay in the open; or go underground for a purely guerilla-war campaign.
Inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran, Hezbollah has become one of the most powerful and complex militia and political operations in the Middle East. It takes spiritual guidance, money and weapons from Tehran; it remains close to Damascus.
In Lebanon's political gridlock it has built itself into such a formidable machine that the efficiency of its service delivery is as much of an embarrassment to the Government as its ruthless military prowess is to Israel.
Hezbollah built and runs six hospitals and dozens of health centres; it subsidises the education of thousands. It operates agricultural advice centres and runs a quasi-bank that provides micro-credit for small businesses.
Like all the other services it provides, its housing projects are for the most deprived section of the Lebanese population - the Shiite underclasses who congregate in the south of the country and in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Apart from Al-Manar, which is beamed around the world, the Hezbollah business empire also includes four radio stations and a stable of print publications. A senior Hezbollah figure declines to identify any of the organisation's businesses because he feared they would become Israeli targets in the war.
Hezbollah builds grand mosques and it has insinuated itself into legal, medical and other professional groups; into trade unions and student groups; and into the public service. Its finances are tightly guarded. But in his book In the Path of Hezbollah, the American University of Beirut politics professor Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh estimates Iran's contribution to be as much as $US1 billion ($1.3 billion) a year.
Hezbollah has also been sanctioned by Iran's spiritual leadership to collect what are called khums or "the fifths" - a 20 per cent tithe of a Shiite believer's earnings after he has covered his family and living expenses.
The organisation also receives generous donations from the Shiite diaspora. But Fayyad says the anti-terrorism monitoring of financial transactions after the September 11 attacks has stemmed a healthy tide of money that flowed from Shiite expatriates in the US, Canada and Australia.
Last week Hezbollah took over the parking station beneath a new city shopping centre and moved hundreds made homeless by the war into its colour co-ordinated parking bays.
Among them was Nehnat Ali Bahreddine, 65, a widow who was the last to be evacuated from her southern suburbs apartment block between two Israeli bombing runs - the first of which, she said, split the nine-storey building vertically; before the second strike collapsed what remained.
Urging all around her to pray for Hassan Nasrallah, the seamstress says: "I've signed all my property over to Nasrallah and Hezbollah. I have, or I had, an apartment and a good sum of money in the bank."
Ibrahim Bayram, an analyst with Beirut's An-Nahar newspaper, was to the point in his response to questions on Lebanon's national security. Can the existing Lebanese security forces defend the country - no. Can Hezbollah do the job - yes.
"All the Arab armies could not fight Israel - even together," he says. "Hezbollah can't prevent an invasion, but it has proved itself as a resistance force and it broke the Israelis' reputation as the undefeated army. That makes the Lebanese people feel better about themselves.
"But this may be Hezbollah's last battle - the time for them to disarm and drop the resistance-fighter role is closer than it has ever been. Israel and the US have been laying the ground for this outcome - that is why Hezbollah was so surprised by the ferocity of the Israeli attack."
That transition is Nasrallah's choice. The 46-year-old cleric has already proved to be a deft player in the brinkmanship of Lebanese politics. Playing the unwritten rules like a violin, he has manipulated myriad alliances, even with elements of the Christian establishment, to build a strong bloc in the parliament.
But Talal Salman, the founder of As Safir newspaper, can't believe we're mentioning "Hezbollah" and "disarmament" in the same sentence. "It's impossible. Hezbollah has 1 million supporters - Nasrallah cannot let them down. The people have never complained about his weapons because he has never turned his guns on them."
HISTORY professor Fawaz Trabulsi sketches the breadth of Hezbollah's volatile power base. "It is the strongest Shiite party. It has the backing of Iran and Syria. It has good representation in the Bekaa Valley, in the south and in Beirut's southern suburbs. It represents the lower classes, marginalised village families and the new, Iran-trained clergy. But is also has strong support from private business.
"That's a big shift in the status quo. The Maronite Christians who used to monopolise political power are uneasy because the Shiites are the biggest numerical group. Also, rising Shiite-Sunni tension in the region has the Sunnis here on edge - especially because Shiite Hezbollah is armed."
HEZBOLLAH'S legitimacy in the West is under challenge. Despite - or because of - its refusal to accede to a UN Security Council resolution demanding its disarmament, it remains a respected and powerful player in Lebanon. But its political opponents reveal edginess.
Hezbollah's huge support is built on the militia's relentless drive to oust Israel from southern Lebanon after an 18-year occupation. Nawwar al-Saheli, the Bekaa Valley MP, says: "But we are still occupied - Israel did not give back the Shebaa Farms [a disputed area of about 25 square kilometres] and they still have our prisoners."
The Hezbollah associates adopt an "and-your-problem-is" attitude when questions turn to the abduction of Israeli soldiers and/or the firing of Iranian-supplied missiles into northern Israel. One of them demands: "If Israel can use American-supplied F-16s to bomb Lebanon why shouldn't we use Iranian rockets? And if they are holding our fighters as prisoners, why shouldn't we capture their fighters to swap them for our men?"
As a state within the state, Hezbollah operated in a sphere of its own while Syria controlled Lebanon. It had been contesting - and winning - elections but it was not until after the Syrian retreat to Damascus last year that it decided to accept government ministries.
Bayram, the An-Nahar analyst, says without the protection of Syria, Hezbollah was obliged to enter the political mainstream if it was to have a forum in which to defend its military campaign against Israel. But, he says, without arms it stands to become even stronger politically. By his reckoning, Hezbollah has about 60 per cent popular support. "They have virtually all the Shiites and a good portion of the Christian support," he says. "And they live here - they can't be shipped off to Tunis the way the PLO was in 1982."
The anxiety of others was evident when the Herald was invited to the palatial home of the minority Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, in the chalky Shouf Mountains, south of the capital. Surrounded by trellised grapes and terraced olive groves, he lashes out at Hezbollah's unilateral decision to go to war against Israel.
It was Jumblatt's enthusiastic endorsement of Washington after last year's Syrian retreat from Lebanon that encouraged analysts to speculate that Bush might have launched a so-called Arab spring. But Bush's allies in the region - Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - only pay lip-service to calls for reform and it seems Jumblatt, too, is wary of genuine change.
Asked about the Hezbollah push for electoral reform, he defers to the status quo: "Hezbollah can't impose its will on the people of Lebanon - we have a very delicate equilibrium here and to change it would lead to the unknown."
One of the seemingly inexplicable alliances in the new Lebanon is that between Nasrallah's Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement of the Christian leader, General Michel Aoun. The general went into exile in 1990 after turning his weapons on the Syrians - but how he has returned and is in coalition with Hezbollah, Damascus's best Lebanese friend.
One of his advisers, Ziad Abs, explains it all quite matter-of-factly: "The Syrians have left - so that is not a problem any more. And both Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement are territorial extremists."
Abs claims that the two parties have been in months of discussion on the future of Hezbollah and disarmament, and he sees a way forward in dealing with the disarmament question after the territorial and prisoner-exchanges issues with Israel have been dealt with.
In Rome this week, Lebanon's Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, implied that the right time to deal with the disarmament question was after a resolution of Hezbollah's demands on Israel, which were also Beirut's demands - that Israel withdraw from the disputed Shebaa Farms; that it release Lebanese prisoners; and that it turn over a map showing the locations of landmines it placed in southern Lebanon.
Siniora is from the Washington-friendly Future Bloc in the Lebanese parliament. Walid Aido is one of the founders of the group, which was set up to continue the work of the murdered former prime minister.
As Aido surveys the Beirut carnage, there is bitterness in his observation that Washington seems to have opted to sacrifice its Lebanese democracy on the fires of a bigger geopolitical strategy.
As a few brave, bikini-clad souls take the sun near the beachside cafe in which he speaks, Aido warns of grim times if the US has effectively contracted out the forced disarmament of Hezbollah to the Israeli Defence Forces: "Disarming Hezbollah by force will create an internal struggle and maybe a new civil war."



Associated Press
Bush, Blair Back Multinational Force
By JENNIFER LOVEN , 07.28.2006, 01:11 PM
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday they want an international force dispatched quickly to the Mideast but said any plan to end the fighting must address long-running regional disputes to be effective.
The leaders, standing side by side in the White House's East Room after meeting in the Oval Office, said they want to see a U.N. resolution introduced next week. Bush announced he was sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice back to the region on Saturday to negotiate the terms.
Bush said they envisioned a resolution providing "a framework for the cessation of hostilities on an urgent basis and mandating the multinational force."
"This is a moment of intense conflict in the Middle East," Bush said. "Yet our aim is to turn it into a moment of opportunity and a chance for broader change in the region."
Bush and Blair remained united against many other European and Arab nations, by resisting calls for an immediate, unconditional end to Israel's campaign against Hezbollah militants that effectively control southern Lebanon.
This stance has been interpreted by Israel as a green light to continue its offensive as long as it takes to cripple the Shiite Muslim militant group.
"In Lebanon, Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian sponsors are willing to kill and use violence to stop the spread of peace and democracy," Bush said. " They're not going to succeed."
Bush said the plan developed by he and Blair would "make every effort to achieve a lasting peace out of this process."
"Nothing will work, unless, as well as an end to the immediate crisis, we put in place the measures necessary to prevent it from occurring again," Blair said. "We take this opportunity to set out and achieve a different strategic direction for the whole of that region."
Bush and Blair came together at the White House as consultations continue on the makeup and mandate of a possible international peacekeeping force to stabilize the more than 2-week-old situation along the Israeli-Lebanese border and help the Lebanese army establish control in the south where Hezbollah has near-autonomy.
A senior State Department aide was in Europe. And U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan made plans to invite nations that might contribute troops to meet on Monday in New York, according to a United Nations official who spoke on condition of anonymity because no announcement had been made.

Harper may yet be drawn into UN Lebanon force
Font: * * * * Norma Greenaway, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, July 28, 2006
OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been blunt about his lack of enthusiasm for committing Canadian troops to a still undefined international force to secure the Lebanese-Israeli border.
He argues it's a task better performed by soldiers from neighboring countries, and that Canada's contribution will come in the form of financial and humanitarian assistance to areas devastated by the more than two weeks of bombing.
Harper's pre-emptive stance has not, however, deterred opposition Liberal and NDP MPs from arguing in favour of committing Canadian military personnel and equipment. Nor has it eliminated the prospect of Canada being pressed by other countries to pitch in.
"If this gets up a head of steam, the Americans would be very interested in having Canada participate," said Michael Bell, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt and Jordan.
"Given the (Harper) inclination toward Israel, I would think the Israelis would feel more comfortable with that than they would with a number of other countries."
At this stage, the discussion is hypothetical. There is no ceasefire, and no official agreement to strike an international force to enforce it. A group of 15 countries, among them Canada, merely agreed in Rome on Wednesday that an international force should be authorized under a UN mandate to support the Lebanese Army's challenge to take control of Hezbollah-dominated southern Lebanon.
Discussions are continuing at the UN Security Council in New York, but there is a growing assumption a multinational force with the mandate and military muscle to help disarm Hezbollah and prevent it from rebuilding will eventually be approved and dispatched.
Harper will make his first official appearance at the UN in September when he joins other world leaders for the annual General Assembly.
Even before Harper made clear earlier this week he was reluctant to commit Canadian troops to Lebanon, significant Canadian participation was considered extremely unlikely because the country is so heavily involved in the "war on terror" in Afghanistan.
New Democrat Alexa McDonough, her party's foreign affairs critic, and her Liberal counterpart Keith Martin agree Canada's commitment in Afghanistan is big, but they contend it should not preclude a contribution to the UN force."We have lots of expertise in this area," McDonough said in an interview.
"We need to make that contribution on the ground," added Martin. "We have superb military personnel. We have the equipment."
McDonough said, however, she fears the Conservative government's unapologetic echoing of the pro-Israeli stance of the Bush administration in the current conflict has damaged the country's reputation as a fair-minded participant in peacekeeping missions.
"The longer that Canada is somewhere between a non-player and an uncritical cheerleader for one party to the hostilities, the less credibility we would have as a credible participant," she said. Bell, a visiting international scholar at the University of Windsor, says the bombing deaths earlier this week of four UN observers in south Lebanon will strengthen the hands of those who oppose participation, whether they are from Canada or any of the countries mentioned as possible contributors to a UN force.The UN post was hit Tuesday by Israeli defence forces battling Hezbollah fighters. Israel has apologized and promised an investigation, but the incident has raised temperatures in the international community.
"If I was sitting in a position of influence in Ottawa, or wherever in Rome, in Ankara, in Paris, I would start to think twice about this," Bell said. "This is a very, very worrying sign." Paul Heinbecker, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, said the UN hit demonstrates why it will be so crucial for the international community to get as part of any ceasefire agreement firmer undertakings from the Israelis and Hezbollah that they will hold fire against each other, and the forces in between. "The lessons from the UN bombing is that you can't count on those assurances when the crap hits the fan," Heinbecker said. "Whether it was deliberate or not, whether it was accidental, or whether it was negligent, the Israelis have an obligation under international law to protect non-combatants. "I'm not absolving Hezbollah, who were probably around there (the UN post). But in the end of the day that does not absolve Israel of its obligation to protect UN personnel and not do anything that jeopardizes their safety."
He also said Harper should not contribute any military might to the force unless the government is guaranteed a voice in the ensuing political and diplomatic negotiations. "I wouldn't just be signing up to provide soldiers and say, that's fine someone else can do the diplomacy," Heinbecker said, "Because diplomacy for the last 35 years has been dominated by the United States and fundamentally it has failed. Diplomacy needs to be broadened out."

Ottawa Citizen
Harper's risky Lebanon stand
By: PETER BLACK
Chronically Canadien
July 28, 2006
Canada has a long history of involvement in conflicts in the Middle East. Indeed, in 1947, Lester Pearson, the diplomat who would become prime minister, led a United Nations committee studying the Palestinian question. Another Canadian, Justice Ivan Rand, drafted the report for the U.N. that recommended the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.
Pearson also played a key role in defusing the Suez canal crisis of 1956, winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The truce in that crisis, however, set the stage for the Six Day War of 1967 and the subsequent Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Following those outbreaks, Canada became a leading member of the U.N. peace-keeping force in the Golan Heights, separating Syria and Israel.
Only this spring did Canada pull its remaining contingent out of the zone, redirecting resources to the major anti-terrorism commitment in Afghanistan.
So, in a small but significant way, Canada has been a player in the region, a witness to the conditions that, several wars and countless terrorist attacks later, bring the world the latest hope-sucking outbreak in Lebanon.
For the Canadian government, the Lebanese situation poses several challenges on the domestic front, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper tries to balance traditional support for Israel with the humanitarian impact of attacks on Lebanon.
Harper has taken a great deal of criticism for his government's handling of the crisis, much of it aimed at matters out of his control. For example, Canadian citizens in Lebanon and their relatives back home were angry about the relatively long time it took for Canada to send ships to Lebanon to remove refugees.
The prime minister also took heat for his view that the Israeli response to the kidnapping of its soldiers and rocket attacks on its soil was "measured." To be fair to Harper, he made this observation before the conflict had escalated to what amounts to a war — although there is no suggestion, echoing Condoleezza Rice, that Harper believes the Israelis have gone too far.
Unfortunately, the death of eight Canadians who happened to be in a Hezbollah-controlled village targeted by the Israelis, has clouded the issue. It immediately made Harper's definition of "measured" the subject of ridicule and anger.
Regardless, Harper appears to be holding firm in his support of Israel's response to Hamas and Hezbollah's mounting attacks, egged on and financed by the fanatical regime in Iran. Harper has taken the same view as the United States in that there can be no stability in the region with the government of Lebanon unwilling or unable to oust foreign-backed Hezbollah forces.
Much media reaction to Harper's statements and actions on the Israel-Lebanon conflict conclude that there's been a "shift" in Canada's policy in the Middle East. Presumably that shift was away from an "honest broker" role in global conflicts, to becoming an unquestioning supporter of Israeli aggression.
The so-called shift in policy may be attributed to the understandably emotional reaction from the Lebanese community in Canada and its sympathizers, rather than any decision taken at the Foreign Affairs office in Ottawa. Canada has always been a stalwart supporter of Israel and its right to defend itself; the current situation is just another example of that.
Nevertheless, there is the inevitable speculation Harper's "measured" support of Israel may cost his Conservative Party hoped-for gains in heavily ethnic urban areas like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Montreal, in particular, with its large Lebanese population - many of whom fled the civil war — may pose problems for Harper, though they hardly have the numbers to influence a vote one way or the other.
As is the case with several issues on the Conservative government's plate, how Quebec is reacting plays into strategies for the next election. The Middle East conflict reveals, once again, how Quebec and the rest of Canada part company. A poll this week shows strong support for Harper and Israel outside Quebec; whereas within the province, views run very much counter to Israeli action.
The reasons for this are both obvious and subtle. The fact a Montreal family suffered an unimaginable tragedy at the hands of Israeli forces certainly colors coverage. Beyond that, though, there is a long-standing identification with the Palestinian cause amongst many Quebecers who also long for a separate homeland.
Put in crass political terms, Harper's unflinching support of Israel is likely to win him more votes than he loses; indeed, in some Montreal and Toronto ridings, where the Jewish population can swing the vote, Harper may stand to reap a measured gain for his stand.
Peter Black is a syndicated columnist writing about Quebec and the producer of a daily current-affairs program for Canada's public-radio broadcaster (CBC), based in Quebec City. His column appears every Friday. He can be reached by e-mail: pmblack@sympatico.ca