Israel, Hezbollah Agree to Truce

The Clinton administration succeeded Friday in arranging a cease-fire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, ending 16 days of fighting.

Along with the cease-fire, the United States obtained agreement from Israel and Lebanon on a written understanding that imposes new restrictions on military units in southern Lebanon and for the first time spells out on paper the rules governing these forces.

The terms agreed to Friday bar attacks on civilians and prohibit the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, or Party of God, militia from using civilian installations as cover for military operations.

The agreement was issued in the name of the United States government “in consultation with Syria,” the dominant military power in Lebanon. Syrian President Hafez Assad, who maintains 35,000 troops inside Lebanon, is supposed to help impose the agreement on Hezbollah, which operates in the southern part of the country.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who had shuttled between Jerusalem and Damascus, the Syrian capital, during seven days of intensive diplomacy, announced the agreement here early Friday night along with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

“We have achieved the goal of our mission, which was to achieve an agreement that will save lives and end the suffering of people on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border,” the secretary of state said.

Peres told Christopher that the deal was “an achievement for you and for all of us.”

“I think you served peace,” Peres said, standing next to Christopher. Peres called the accord “a kind of draft for additional agreements in the future between the three countries.”

The cease-fire went into effect at 4 a.m. today. As of midmorning, it appeared to be holding.

The agreement was reached after a frenetic, topsy-turvy final round of diplomacy. Christopher and his aides flew back to Jerusalem from Damascus late Thursday night, believing that they might have a deal. But Israeli officials balked at some of its language.

Christopher and his aides were racing against a series of deadlines. They wanted to get a deal before the beginning of the Sabbath in Israel on Friday evening, before Peres’ scheduled departure today on a trip to the United States and before Eid al Adha, the four-day Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, starts in Syria on Sunday.

The U.S. officials decided to fly back to Damascus on Friday morning for a seventh, final round of talks with Assad and for a third meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

So sudden was the turnaround that the Americans had to give up their regular Air Force plane because its crew could not get the required 15 hours of rest. An Air Force C-141 military transport plane was flown in from Ramstein Air Base in Germany to fly Christopher and his aides to Syria.

The agreement they finally worked out contains four clauses.

First, it says armed units in Lebanon, such as Hezbollah, will not attack Israel with Katyusha rockets or any other kind of weapon. Second, it says Israel will not fire any kind of weapon at civilian targets in Lebanon.

Third, the deal includes language aimed at preventing Hezbollah from using civilian areas as cover for its military operations. “Under no circumstances will civilians be the target of attack,” the agreement says. It also promises that “civilian-populated areas and industrial and electrical installations will not be used as launching pads for attacks.”

Fourth, the accord guarantees all parties the right to defend themselves against attacks--as long as they do not target civilian areas in doing so. Israel had sought this provision to make sure it has the right to retaliate against Hezbollah if attacked inside Lebanon.

Before Friday’s accord, Israel and Lebanon had been operating under a less precise oral understanding reached in 1993 that also was aimed at protecting civilians. But it did not include the new, detailed language.

“It’s much more precise [than the 1993 agreement],” one senior U.S. policymaker said. “There’s a clear emphasis that civilian areas won’t be targeted by either side.”

About 100 civilian refugees died at a U.N. compound in Qana, in southern Lebanon, last week as Israeli forces retaliated for a Hezbollah attack. Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel had wounded about 50 civilians there.

Also as part of Friday’s accord, a special monitoring committee will be set up to make sure the agreement is not violated. The committee will consist of the United States, France, Syria, Israel and Lebanon.

France, arguing that it has a special role in Lebanon, where it was the former colonial power, has been conducting its own Middle East diplomacy all week.

U.S. officials said that in the final days of negotiations, Israel tried unsuccessfully to keep France out of this monitoring committee. The United States went along with the Lebanese government’s desire to have France become part of the deal.

The monitoring committee is important because the agreement establishes a “cooling down” period. If a country believes the cease-fire is being violated or the agreement is otherwise being broken, it is required to take its grievance to the committee within 24 hours.

The agreement does not explain how this monitoring committee will work, and U.S. officials said procedures will be spelled out later.

The most important sticking point in the negotiations was the clause guaranteeing the right to self-defense, and U.S. officials admitted Friday that they had been worried by Israeli threats to widen the war in Lebanon if no deal was reached.

“We heard privately that if this thing fell apart, Israel was not going to shrink off into the sunset,” one American official said. “It was going to step up its operations.”

In the end, as part of the deal, the United States gave Israel a letter explaining Washington’s interpretation of the accord’s self-defense clause. U.S. officials did not make this letter public Friday, although they said they intend to do so soon.

In Lebanon on Friday, Prime Minister Hariri hailed the accord at a news conference. “We have said from the first beginning that this problem cannot be solved by force; it can only be solved by negotiation. And that is exactly what happened,” Hariri said.

But he reiterated his anger over the Israeli military campaign that he said killed mostly civilians and destroyed villages that had nothing to do with Hezbollah.

The leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said on his party’s television station that the group will honor the “very good” accord.

The fighting erupted April 11, when Israel began attacking Lebanon with bombs and artillery in a military offensive called “Operation Grapes of Wrath.”

More than 150 people were killed in the two weeks of conflict, most of them Lebanese civilians; no Israelis died. Hundreds of people were injured on both sides and hundreds of thousands uprooted.

Israeli officials said the bombing raids were a response to Katyusha rocket attacks by Hezbollah guerrillas against northern Israel.

Israeli military officials at times suggested a second aim as well: to improve the worsening situation for Israel Defense Forces inside their self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

That zone is a 440-square-mile strip in southern Lebanon that amounts to about 10% of the country. Established after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, it is patrolled by 2,400 troops of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army, but Israel also has 1,000 of its own soldiers there.

Over the past few years, Hezbollah has stepped up its attacks on Israeli forces and the SLA. Israel hoped, through its recent raids, to win new guarantees that would restrict such guerrilla assaults.

But the tide appeared to turn against Israel nine days ago with the incident at Qana.

Within hours, it was announced that President Clinton was sending Christopher to the Middle East to seek a cease-fire. State Department officials maintain that the decision to dispatch Christopher had already been made before the refugees died in the Israeli attack.

Over seven days, the secretary of state visited Damascus and Jerusalem six times each. In Damascus, he held more than 20 hours of talks with Assad. He also made a brief foray, under heavily armed guard, into Lebanon to talk with that country’s top political leaders.

Throughout the early days of the week, Assad proved especially difficult. He kept Christopher waiting twice for meetings and on Tuesday, after the secretary of state arrived in Damascus, sent word that he was too tired to see him.

Aides said Christopher asked for a 25-minute, one-on-one meeting with Assad the following morning to talk about what a spokesman euphemistically called the “scheduling problem.” One U.S. official said Christopher told the Syrian president it was “unacceptable” to keep him waiting while he was trying to arrange a cease-fire.

“There was some question in our minds whether he [Assad] really wanted an agreement,” one U.S. official said Friday. “There was an exasperation [on the part of American officials] with his [Assad’s] negotiating style. That’s nothing new. Henry Kissinger felt the same thing in the 1970s.”

Still, Christopher’s aides said that at the end of the negotiations, Assad said he would enforce the cease-fire terms on Hezbollah. Assad said he would summon Hezbollah leaders to Damascus immediately to explain the situation to them, according to U.S. officials.

The negotiations were more complicated than past American diplomacy in the Middle East, because Christopher at first had to compete for attention with several other foreign ministers in the region from France, Russia and Iran.

Times staff writer John Daniszewski in Beirut contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Terms of the Cease-Fire

The main provisions of the cease-fire, reached after U.S. discussions with Israel and Lebanon and in consultation with Syria:

1. Armed groups in Lebanon will not carry out attacks on Israel by Katyusha rocket or any other kind of weapon.

2. Israel and those cooperating with it will not fire any kind of weapon at civilians or civilian targets in Lebanon.

3. The two parties commit themselves to ensuring that under no circumstances will civilians be the target of attacks and that civilian-populated areas and industrial and electrical installations will not be used as launching grounds for attacks.

4. Nothing in the accord precludes any party from exercising the right of self-defense.

* Who will oversee it: A monitoring group consisting of the United States, France, Syria, Lebanon and Israel will supervise the application of the understanding stated above.

Source: Reuters