Beirut Shelling Ends Overnight Lull in Lebanon Artillery Duels

Syrians and Christians traded shellfire along Beirut’s dividing Green Line at dawn Thursday after a lull that began at midnight following a cease-fire call by the United Nations.

The two sides lobbed artillery shells and mortar rounds into populated areas of Beirut’s Christian east and Muslim west sectors, police said. Pro-Syrian gunners also shelled the Christian-held coast north of the Lebanese capital.

The renewed fighting killed four people, one of them a 7-year-old girl, and wounded five others, all of them civilians. But the level of fighting did not approach the ferocious duels earlier this week.

Moreover, the overnight lull provided the first quiet night after seven days of fierce artillery and rocket barrages. The 20,000-member force of Christian army leader Michel Aoun and the 40,000 Syrian troops and their Muslim and leftist allies have been trading shellfire for the past five months. In that time, more than 750 people have died and 2,000 have been wounded.

The respite also gave Beirut’s beleaguered residents enough time to reinforce their shelters and replenish food supplies.

“It has been a long time since we had a chance to sleep. . . . I even dreamed,” said Samir Mansour who, like thousands of other Lebanese, spent the past week without sleep in a bomb shelter.

Motorists reappeared on the streets on both sides of the devastated city, and some shops and banks opened.

The big guns on both sides fell silent following the U.N. Security Council’s cease-fire resolution Tuesday night in New York, which Maj. Gen. Aoun on Wednesday said he would accept, but only as a package. There would be no cease-fire if Syria shelled Christian enclave’s harbors, he said.

In Washington on Thursday, the State Department urged “all parties to accept and observe the cease-fire immediately,” said spokesman Richard Boucher.

Vow to Keep Shelling Harbors

However, pro-Syrian leftist militias issued a statement saying they would keep shelling harbors north of Beirut to prevent arms from reaching Aoun’s forces.

In Paris, French Prime Minister Michel Rocard’s office announced it was sending the aircraft carrier Foch as a precautionary measure to beef up its forces in the eastern Mediterranean and to assist French citizens in Lebanon if necessary.

French envoy Alain Decaux arrived in Beirut on Thursday to try to prevent any escalation.

At the same time, an alliance of leftist and Muslim militias supported by Syria and Iran announced “conditional approval” of the resolution. A statement from the Nationalist Front said it “accepts the call for a cease-fire provided that an inter-Lebanese committee be formed to monitor the Lebanese coast and prevent the delivery of arms shipments to Aoun.”

In Iraq, Syria’s enemy and Aoun’s arms supplier, the government daily Baghdad Observer urged Arab countries to force Syria out of Lebanon. Syrian troops are in the country under an Arab League mandate issued in 1976, the year after the civil war began.

But Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt, Syria’s closest ally in the Nationalist Front, rejected the cease-fire. “Either Aoun goes or it is war to the end,” he said.