Beirut Must Halt Guerrillas, Rabin Warns

As Israeli forces extended their bombardment of southern Lebanon, driving thousands more villagers from their homes, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared Wednesday that Israel will not allow them to return until the Lebanese government disbands pro-Iranian guerrillas operating in the area.

With an estimated 350,000 Lebanese pushed north by the Israeli offensive and more fleeing every hour, Rabin said southern Lebanon will remain “emptied” as long as the Hezbollah guerrillas pose any threat to his country.

“Only if the attacks against our communities in the north are stopped will you return to your homes in the south,” Rabin said, grim-faced, addressing the Lebanese from the rostrum of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. “We believe the prime minister of Lebanon, his army and his people are capable of doing this. We call on Syria to use its influence to prevent Hezbollah from acting against us.”

Brushing aside the sharpening criticism at home and abroad of the 4-day-old operation, Rabin again made clear Israel’s determination to create such a massive refugee crisis in Lebanon that the government in Beirut and its Syrian patron would have no choice but to hunt down the Hezbollah guerrillas.

“We are sorry for the suffering of the Lebanese population moving in these days, even as we speak, on the roads,” Rabin told the Knesset. “But as long as one resident of Kiryat Shemona (a northern Israeli town) is still sitting in the (bomb) shelter, the operation will go on.”

Israel launched its latest Lebanese offensive Sunday, saying it was retaliating for escalating, fatal Hezbollah attacks on Israeli forces in its “security zone,” a 440-square-mile enclave Israel established in 1985, and on Israel’s northern communities.

Rabin on Wednesday accused Syria, which maintains 40,000 combat troops in Lebanon and has long been the main powerbroker there, of having ignored the escalation of attacks by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces.

From dawn Wednesday, Israeli warplanes kept up their intense bombardment of a wide band of Lebanese villages north and west of the “security zone,” gunboats fired from offshore at coastal towns, including the cities of Tyre and Sidon, and the artillery continued its steady pounding of suspected Hezbollah bases.

Lebanese authorities said 24 people were killed, including seven guerrillas, and more than 100 were wounded. Since Sunday, 88 Lebanese, mostly civilians, have been killed, according to government figures; the Israeli army, however, estimated the deaths at 100 to 110, of whom 60 were civilians.

In northern Israel’s Galilee region, 14 Katyusha rockets struck Wednesday evening, according to military spokesmen; one woman was injured, and there was limited damage. Israeli casualties include one soldier and two civilians killed earlier this week.

With an almost unremitting bombardment from air, land and sea, the devastation in southern Lebanon is vast and all-encompassing, according to U.N. observers in the region, and the area of attack has grown each day with Israeli warnings to more residents to leave.

Whole villages, perhaps 70 in number, are being destroyed along a 30-mile arc that stretches from the Mediterranean coast to the foothills of Mt. Hermon, observers said.

The market town of Nabatiyeh, which had remained prosperous despite the prolonged civil war in Lebanon, was in smoking ruins on Wednesday, according to journalists who visited it, and the bombardment was continuing.

“What territory the Israelis do not control directly in their security zone, they are turning into a free-to-fire buffer where they can shoot at any conceivable target without warning,” a European officer commented after a quick survey of the region during a bombardment lull. “A sizable area is being forcibly depopulated, and virtually all habitation is being destroyed. These people will never be able to come back.”

Brig. Gen. Yehoshua Dorfman, the army’s chief artillery officer, acknowledged that Israel’s heavy guns were firing into the vacated villages to destroy the houses and other buildings believed to have been used by Hezbollah.

“Our first aim was to create a situation where the residents would leave the villages and go north,” Dorfman said on army radio. “The aim now is simply to damage the infrastructure, to destroy the houses of the activists and all the impromptu sites for launching rockets.”

While Lebanese officials put the number of refugees at 350,000, more than three times the number on Tuesday, U.N. officials estimated that as many as 500,000 of the 800,000 people living in the southern third of the country were now fleeing north to escape the bombardment. Lebanon has a population of about 3 million.

Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai, Israel’s northern commander, ordered a temporary halt of 2 1/2 hours in the bombardment Wednesday afternoon to allow remaining residents to get out of Nabatiyeh and half a dozen villages north of the Litani River.

Rabin was quoted by Israeli Army Radio on Wednesday as expressing “much satisfaction” to his commanders because more civilians had fled than they had expected.

Refugees are beginning to pour into Beirut, according to reports from the Lebanese capital, and there now be as many as 100,000 in and around the city. The coastal highway is jammed with traffic north to the capital, as are roads heading into eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

Lebanon called upon the world community to intervene immediately with Israel “through all their means to halt its flagrant aggression against the Lebanese people.”

“The Lebanese government puts the world community in front of its responsibilities regarding the crimes, killings destruction and collective displacement committed by Israel against the Lebanese,” Information Minister Michel Samaha said after an emergency Cabinet meeting.

Rabin’s tough line drew wide support in the Knesset, but leftist members of his Cabinet were clearly troubled by the operation.

“We think this harsh suffering of civilians escaping with their lives in such great numbers does not balance out the severe suffering of our citizens,” said Immigration Minister Yair Tsaban, a member of the left-wing Meretz Party. “Rather, it adds suffering to suffering.”

But Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the rightist opposition Likud Party, praised the campaign and expressed its hope that it would succeed. Israel, Netanyahu continued, should take political action against Syria to back up the military operation. “Syria should be forced to choose, either to hold peace talks or to wage war,” he told Parliament.

Rabin said the campaign should not endanger the peace process, since that would only serve the goals of Hezbollah and its backers in Tehran.

Targets in Lebanon, Israel

The Israeli bombardment is aimed at towns sheltering guerrillas. An estimated 350,000 people have fled southern Lebanon out of a population of 800,000, many of them heading into the Bekaa Valley and west to the ports of Tyre and Sidon. Guerrilla rockets hit northern Israel, but the number of such attacks has plunged.

Sources: Israeli Defense Force, Times Jerusalem Bureau