Word: hizballah
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Just surgical strikes, Israel's army commanders proudly proclaimed as they showed off video images of smart bombs intersecting cross hairs. This little war against Hizballah guerrillas in Lebanon was only a high-tech blitz on a bunch of terrorists, targeting specific buildings and vehicles hiding the enemy, avoiding nasty civilian casualties. In fact, two ambulances had been hit, three power plants had been damaged, and several hundred Lebanese, most of them noncombatants, had been killed or wounded. Still, for the first seven days, Israelis applauded the offensive, and much of the world tolerated it. But even the vaunted Israeli...
...artillery was, to be sure, directed by modern U.S.-made counterbattery radar, which artfully tracked the trajectory of Hizballah's Katyusha rockets raining onto the soil of northern Israel and spotted the exact place in Lebanon from which they had been fired. But in this case, by the time the Israelis had aimed their guns and let fly from less than six miles away, the Shi'ite guerrillas and the Katyusha launcher had gone. Instead the shells slammed down across the area and exploded inside the compound of a battalion of Fijian peacekeepers, where more than 600 refugees had been...
...firing from both sides went on into the weekend, as the diplomats labored to work out a halt. Christopher headed for Damascus on Saturday to talk with Hafez Assad, considered the linchpin to any solution: if he wants to, U.S. and Israeli officials believe, Assad can persuade Hizballah to stop shooting. But why should Assad play ball? His main objective is to regain possession of the Golan Heights, the portion of southwestern Syria that Israel captured in 1967. But exactly how he intends to get it back is unclear. "The Katyushas are a means of putting pressure on Israel," says...
...necessarily. Western and Arab observers agree that it is not certain how well Assad controls Hizballah, even though it operates on his turf in Lebanon. The Shi'ite guerrilla force was founded in the early 1980s by radical Iranians. Assad, a secular politician who crushed his homegrown fundamentalists, did not publicly embrace Hizballah; he entrusted relations to his intelligence chiefs. The group has grown less extreme in recent years, sending delegates to the Lebanese parliament, but Hizballah is still closely tied to Tehran and remains as determined as ever to fight Israel. Yet it also seems to pay attention...
JERUSALEM: Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres announced a cease-fire in Israeli's deadly conflict with Hizballah. The announcement comes after Christopher conducted an intense week of diplomatic shuttle missions with Peres, Syrian President Hafez Assad and Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Christopher said that the today's agreement goes beyond the 1993 verbal agreement between Hizballah and Israel not to shell civilians on either side of the Lebanese-Israeli border. Under the deal, Hizballah will halt attacks into northern Israel, while Israel will not target civilian areas in Lebanon. A sticking point...