Guerrillas Halt Rocket Fire Into Israel

Shiite Muslim guerrillas in Lebanon called off their rocket attacks on Israel on Saturday but vowed unspecified revenge for the assassination of the leader of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movement that sparked five days of violence in Lebanon north of Israel’s frontier.

Israel could claim a victory, although its armored thrust into two Shiite villages last week failed to immediately silence the firing of the Katyusha rockets that had bedeviled frontier communities. A rocket fired from Lebanon after the pullback Friday killed a 5-year-old girl in front of her rural home.

“I hope, although I can’t say this for sure, that we are on the downhill side of this wave of Katyushas,” said Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, the Israeli chief of staff.

Barak warned of more reprisal raids if the rocket assaults are resumed. “The army will continue to do all it can to halt this wave of Katyushas and ensure that anyone who tries to hit Israel and its citizens, especially in this area, will pay a very high price,” he said in a radio broadcast.

Israeli troops back from the incursion into Lebanon expressed disappointment about cutting short the offensive, which lasted only a day. “I understand that it’s our duty, but it wasn’t enough to stop the Katyushas,” a young lieutenant posted at a base near Metulla in north Israel told reporters.

There were no reports of rockets falling in Israel on Saturday, although before the decision to stop firing them went into effect at 6 a.m. PST, a few apparently landed inside the Israeli-controlled buffer zone in Lebanon, north of the frontier. Israeli artillery units fired back.

Hezbollah guerrillas claimed victory by virtue of the unwillingness of Israel to prolong the fighting. “Now that the enemy was defeated and forced to retreat, there is no need to resume the firing of Katyusha rockets,” Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, said at a prayer service in Beirut.

The decision to halt the rocket fire was made jointly by Hezbollah and Amal, another militant Shiite Muslim group, which is supported by Syria. Hezbollah stepped up its rocket attacks on Israel and the Israeli security zone in Lebanon after last Sunday’s assassination of its leader, Sheik Abbas Moussawi. Moussawi, his wife and youngest son were killed when an Israeli helicopter fired on their Mercedes-Benz sedan on a rural Lebanese road.

Israel then began to shell south Lebanese villages and finally, on Thursday, attacked two Hezbollah strongholds, Kafra and Yater. Hezbollah has also decided to pull its guerrillas out of the battered villages.

The fighting resulted in the northward flight of an estimated 10,000 refugees, some of whom will return to homes in ruins. The Syrian-enforced calm that has prevailed in much of Lebanon since 1990 has not yet penetrated southern Lebanon. And the Lebanese government has yet to disarm Hezbollah, which maintains one of the last remaining autonomous militias in the country and has encouraged the Shiite attacks on the Israeli security zone.

The future of southern Lebanon is a topic of negotiation in Middle East peace talks set to resume in Washington this week. Israel refuses to give up its control in the narrow buffer zone inside Lebanon until that country has fully disarmed anti-Israeli militias and Syria has removed its troops from Lebanese territory.

The week’s violence has also contributed to a well of bitterness between Israel and U.N. peacekeeping forces that operate north of the buffer area. U.N. officials have complained that the Israelis brushed aside U.N. roadblocks in their drive to Kafra and Yater. Fistfights broke out between the blue-helmeted U.N. troops and Israelis as the Israelis bulldozed aside U.N. vehicles that were blocking their path.

On Saturday, Israeli troops complained to reporters that a U.N. roadblock slowed their progress into one village and forced them to enter on foot rather than blast in by tank. An Israeli officer was killed when entering a house where Shiite guerrillas were waiting in ambush. “We normally would have blown up the house with tank fire and then searched,” said the Israeli lieutenant as a pair of colleagues nodded in agreement. “Why doesn’t the U.N. do anything about the Katyusha rockets?”