An Israeli Raid that Violated the Cease-fire

Disguised as Lebanese soldiers, but speaking Arabic with an accent foreign to the region, an Israeli commando landed, Saturday at dawn near Baalbek, to prevent, as the official version goes, a delivery of arms from Syria to the Hezbollah. It was a child who gave the alert, before the arrival of the Hezbollah. The commando squad was rescued only with the intervention of Israeli fighter aircraft and combat helicopters, which bombed the area. Upshot of this unsuccessful raid : an Israeli colonel killed, and two other officers wounded. While denying they lost three soldiers, as Israel affirms, a spokesman for the Hezbollah condemns the operation, but also reaffirms their intention to continue to abide by the cease-fire.

On the Israeli side, the most one can say is that the government was not convincing in trying to explain an operation that had received a green light from Ehud Olmert and from his defense minister Amir Peretz. "I don’t understand why Israel would launch such an operation, given that they had accepted the cease fire", opined Yossi Beilin, head of the opposition party, the Meretz. Just so. If the delivery of arms to the Hezbollah is the argument advanced by the Israeli government to justify this act of war, the Israeli public radio lets it be believed that this operation aimed at liberating the two soldiers captured by the Hezbollah on 12 July. The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, also characterized this military operation as a "violation" of the cease fire. As for the Lebanese government, it threatened to suspend the deployment of its army in the southern region of the country.

Coming just five days after quiet on the front, at a moment when the Lebanese army continued its deployment, and that a first detachment of French soldiers arrived in Lebanon, this Israeli intervention shows, if such is still necessary, that Israel has not stomached the fact of not having achieved any of its objectives in the war of aggression against Lebanon. The Hezbollah was not broken, the country did not fall into an inter-religious war, the destruction caused in Lebanon, 6 billion dollars, did not isolate the "Party of God", when one knows that the Israeli attempted to convince the Lebanese that their arrival was due to the Hezbollah, a party, as they say, manipulated by Syria and Iran. Finally, the Lebanese, all religious groups combined, were instead convinced that the capture of the two Israeli soldiers was nothing but a pretext to destroy what had been laboriously rebuilt after nearly fifteen years of civil war. Moreover, when this military offensive came only days after the signature of a "national agreement" between the Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement (CPL), the main Christian party of General Michel Aoun, a document stipulating that the disarmament of the Party of God be the object of a national dialogue.

With the support of the United States, this war should only have lasted two weeks at most. But in face of the resistance of the Hezbollah, supported by other Lebanese political movements, the Hebrew state, in connivance with the United States, demanded more time. At the United Nations Security Council, but also in Rome at the meeting of the "control group" on Lebanon, all diplomatic initiatives aimed at an immediate cessation of combat met with a veto by Washington. What is worse, Condoleeza Rice, who never slowed down in her shuttle between Washington and Tel Aviv, qualified the war as "creative chaos", "the New Middle East is on the march", and this before George Bush affirmed that with Afghanistan and Iraq, Lebanon is "the third front in the war on terror". The upshot is that, today, the Lebanese people pay the price.

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