Israel decided on Wednesday to expand its ground offensive in Lebanon despite United Nations diplomacy to end the four-week-old war.
Israeli troops thrust deeper into Lebanon and 11 Israeli soldiers were reported killed in fierce clashes with Hezbollah.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s security cabinet ordered the move to send troops further into Lebanon, possibly as far as the Litani River, up to 20km from the border, to strike at Hezbollah and halt its rocket attacks into Israel.
”The security cabinet approved the recommendations of the defence establishment for the continuation of operations in Lebanon,” a statement from Olmert’s office said.
Defence Minister Amir Peretz had proposed the expansion. Israeli media had said Olmert feared it might entail heavy casualties. Nine ministers approved the move. Three abstained.
Israel already has about 10 000 troops in southern Lebanon, and it was not immediately clear how many more would join them. Olmert’s office said further details would be released later.
Israeli media reports said the army believed it would take another 30 days to accomplish its mission against Hezbollah. The security cabinet gave Olmert and Peretz the power to decide the parameters of the expanded offensive.
The Israeli move could complicate UN diplomacy to halt the fighting, though Western diplomats said Israeli officials had assured them the army was prepared to halt the wider campaign within days if an agreement was reached at the UN.
Diplomats are still working on a revised resolution and no Security Council vote was expected before Thursday.
United States Assistant Secretary of State David Welch held talks in Beirut as part of efforts to persuade Lebanon and Israel to agree on its terms, but appeared to have made little headway.
”All he is carrying is cosmetics for what remains a very ugly resolution,” Lebanon’s Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a key Shi’ite politician and Hezbollah ally, said after talks with Welch, who also met Prime Minister Fouad Siniora twice.
Hezbollah resists advance
Israeli forces pushed deeper into parts of Lebanon despite fierce Hezbollah resistance on Wednesday, Lebanese security sources said.
Al Arabiya television reported four Israeli soldiers had been killed in a rocket attack in the village of Aita al-Shaab.
The security sources said they believed several Israeli soldiers were also killed when Hezbollah blew up a booby-trapped house near the village of Debel, 5km from the border.
Al Jazeera television said a total of 11 Israeli soldiers had been killed. The Israeli army had no immediate comment.
The security sources said at least three Hezbollah fighters had been killed in the clashes. Israeli forces pushed west from Taibeh, about 5km from the border, towards the village of Qantara and north towards the village of Qlaiah villages, the sources said. Fighting also raged near Bint Jbeil and Aita al-Shaab.
Israeli planes bombed targets across Lebanon. Five people died in a raid that hit the home of a local Hezbollah official in the Bekaa Valley town of Mashghara, medics said.
Two people, including an 11-year-old boy, were killed in air strikes on the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near the coastal city of Sidon, a UN spokesperson said.
The death toll from an air raid on a south Beirut suburb on Monday rose to 41 from 30, police said. Sixty-one people were also wounded in the strike on the mainly Shi’ite Shiyah area.
More rockets hit northern Israel and four landed in the occupied West Bank. No casualties were reported.
At least 1, 05 people in Lebanon and 101 Israelis have been killed in four weeks of bloodshed sparked when Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
UN diplomacy
The UN has yet to act to halt the conflict.
Lebanon wants an immediate ceasefire and a quick pullout of Israeli troops from the south, where it says 15 000 Lebanese soldiers backed by UN peacekeepers can move in.
Israel says it will only withdraw out when a foreign force and the Lebanese army take over to keep Hezbollah at bay.
France and the US are now revising their draft. They are debating what kind of an international force should be formed to back the Lebanese army and when it should deploy.
US officials say the army is too weak to subdue Hezbollah.
French President Jacques Chirac said he believed US ”reservations” to an amended draft resolution, put forward by Paris to take Arab concerns into account, could be overcome.
”I can’t imagine that there would be no solution because that would mean, which would be the most immoral result, that we accept the current situation and that we abandon an immediate ceasefire,” Chirac told reporters. — Reuters