'Security zone' scheme for southern Lebanon

AVIVIM - Israel will enforce a "security zone" in southern Lebanon until such time as a multinational force moves in to control the Lebanese border area, the minister directly responsible for the two-week-old military offensive said yesterday.

The remarks by the Israeli Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, appeared to set the seal on Israel's conversion to the idea of a Western-led international military deployment to keep armed Hizbollah guerrillas from threatening it, if and when the still slow-moving diplomatic efforts to broker a ceasefire finally succeed.

Beirut was heavily bombarded with new airstrikes yesterday after Israeli military aircraft killed six people in a pre-dawn raid on the southern Lebanon city of Nabatiyeh, and Israeli troops effectively sealedoff the town of Bint Jbeil, 25km further to the south, which it regards as a Hizbollah stronghold.

After meeting the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on a visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was at pains yesterday to say that any Lebanon ceasefire would have to be "enduring" as well as urgent, and that the US was seeking a "new Middle East".

Dr Rice, on her way to Rome to meet Arab, European and other leaders to thrash out terms of a putative ceasefire, said that there was "no desire" on the part of US officials to come back weeks or months after a ceasefire because, she implied, Hizbollah had again found a way to undermine it.

Her remarks came as Javier Solana, the EU's foreign affairs envoy, said he would be calling for a "ceasefire process" at the Rome summit, and added that unspecified European countries would have to take part.

"Without European, without some Europeans, the force will not exist," he said.

There have been suggestions in Israel that such a force, which it would prefer to be under the aegis of Nato, would require 20,000 troops - twice as many as the deployment currently being talked about in Western capitals.

While Mr Solana did not say so, France has been seen as a potential prime contributor.

Mr Solana refrained from saying he would call for an "immediate ceasefire" - apparently out of deference to Britain, which has joined the US in refraining from such a demand.

Israeli officials have suggested that the US has informally given licence to Israel to maintain its ground, air and sea assault in Lebanon until the beginning of next week at the earliest.

A 15-year-old girl, Da'aa Abbas - the fourth Arab Israeli to die in the conflict - was killed and over a dozen people wounded in the Galilee village of Maghar, as Hizbollah launched an estimated 90 rockets at northern Israel.

After several days of fighting by ground troops in southern Lebanon, Brigadier General Shuki Shahrur, the deputy head of the Israel Defence Forces' northern command, told reporters yesterday: "We have almost accomplished all our missions around Beit Jbeil and Maroun ar-Ras."

Israel said at the weekend it had taken the town of Maroun ar-Ras, after heavy fighting which cost the lives of seven Israeli soldiers.

Brigadier Shahrur indicated that troops had not occupied the town - where Hassan Nasrullah, Hizbollah's leader, launched his victory celebrations after Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 - but had taken the "high positions" round the town.

Billowing grey smoke was visible in the vicinity of the town from the Israeli side of the border.

Amid some Israeli media criticism of the losses sustained in ground fighting in southern Lebanon, Brigadier Shahrur added that the "balance of forces" had been changed, after days of air bombardment, when it was realised that Hizbollah had hundreds of well-hidden rocket launching sites and bunkers, installed in southern Lebanon over the last six years.

- INDEPENDENT