Lebanese Mark Day of Mourning

At precisely noon Monday, this city of 1.2 million came to a halt. Cars stopped in the road. People stood outside shuttered stores. Church bells rang.

A nation that is hardly a nation felt a unity it has rarely known--Christian and Muslim alike shared grief and anger at the hostilities with Israel that have claimed about 150 lives in 12 days.

The national day of mourning proclaimed by the government was a catharsis for Lebanon’s 4 million people, who otherwise feel they have very little control over the conflict on their soil between pro-Iranian Hezbollah guerrillas and a powerful Israeli army.

The two sides did not miss a beat Monday even as U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher shuttled between Jerusalem and the Syrian capital, Damascus, in search of a cease-fire agreement.

Israeli gunboats fired at traffic on the main coastal highway for a fifth day, in effect cutting the country in two.

The use of gunboats, which Israel says is to prevent supply convoys from reaching Hezbollah guerrillas, kept families separated and impeded the movement of food and other humanitarian supplies.

Late in the day, Israeli warplanes staged a lightning raid against a stronghold of Palestinian militants 10 miles south of Beirut. The fighter-bombers fired eight rockets into bases belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in the coastal hills of Naame, in the first bombing raid in the Beirut area in five days.

Israeli ships offshore at Naame also fired against the Palestinian militants, who, according to Lebanese news reports, had recently given some Katyusha rockets to Hezbollah.

In southern Lebanon, the main arena of the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, U.N. observers counted 12 Israeli air raids against targets in Lebanon, 1,000 artillery rounds landing and 40 Katyusha missile launches by Hezbollah into northern Israel, U.N. spokesman Mikael Lindvall said.

For this country racked by 15 years of civil war and the Israeli invasion of the early 1980s, the fighting that broke out April 11 has been a resumption of its worst nightmares.

“You want the truth? We don’t really want a cease-fire. We want a complete solution,” said Hussein Miske, 24, angered at being prevented from traveling to his home village in southern Lebanon because of the naval firing on the road.

As part of the national mourning observances, scenes of violence and destruction--devastated houses, an ambulance rocketed by a helicopter gunship, wailing survivors and the mangled bodies left by the artillery bombardment of a U.N. compound in Qana, where Lebanese media estimate about 100 people were killed--played all day on television.

Amid their sorrow, many Lebanese were asking, Why us?

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“It’s not Lebanon’s war. It is somebody else’s--but it’s on our land. It could be Israel’s and Syria’s war. It could be the American and the French war. It could even be Iranian--but it is not ours,” said Zein Kleib, 35, whose late father’s house in Rmaile was hit and partly burned by a missile fired from an Israeli gunboat.

Kleib, formerly of Huntington Beach, left his native Lebanon during the 1975-90 civil war but returned in November because “I love this country.” Now he is again experiencing the trauma of war. He lost his wedding pictures when the house was rocketed, he said.

Adnan Iskander, a political scientist at the American University, said the common suffering has fostered unity in a country that in past decades was characterized by deadly religious and ethnic rivalries.

That the cease-fire negotiations by Christopher are being carried out in Syria and Israel reveals Lebanon’s relative powerlessness in the whole matter, Iskander said.

On one hand, he said, Israel and the U.S. say the Lebanese government should be responsible for ending the Hezbollah rocket attacks. On the other hand, when they negotiate the issue with Damascus, not Beirut, those countries tacitly acknowledge that Lebanon is far too weak to do any such thing.

Nevertheless, it is civilian and economic targets in Lebanon, not Syria, that are suffering the brunt of the military onslaught, Iskander said.