Barak Halts Peace Talks With Syria

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Monday called off peace talks with Syria until the Damascus regime reins in Shiite Muslim guerrillas who had killed three Israeli soldiers and a senior Lebanese ally in the previous 24 hours.

Barak’s ultimatum came amid a fierce escalation of fighting in southern Lebanon and despite pleas for restraint from American officials, who have been struggling to put the negotiations back on track.

In the worst fighting in months along the region’s last active battlefront, Syrian-backed guerrillas of Hezbollah, or the Party of God, launched rocket and artillery attacks on Israeli forces and Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, or SLA. Israeli warplanes pounded suspected militant strongholds in a string of retaliatory airstrikes.

“Israel will not be able to negotiate peace as long as the Syrians do not restrain the Hezbollah from acting against the Israeli army in the security zone,” Barak said in a statement issued after an emergency Cabinet meeting.

Israel and its allies have occupied the 9-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon for nearly 15 years. Hezbollah is waging a battle to oust them.

Negotiations between Israel and Syria--the real power broker in Lebanon--were launched in December at the White House amid much fanfare. The talks were suspended last month in what U.S. officials insisted was a momentary glitch. The new skirmishing and Barak’s response Monday night appear to further estrange the two sides.

“We have known in the past and we will know in the future when to strike back,” Barak said, after earlier warning that Israel would punish those responsible for the latest casualties.

Three Israeli soldiers were killed Monday and four wounded when their patrol was blasted by rocket-propelled grenades near the Israeli-occupied Crusades-era Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon, authorities said. Added to the slaying last week of a young Israeli staff sergeant, the attack brought to four the number of Israelis killed since the peace talks between Israel and Syria resumed after a nearly four-year hiatus. Before last week, there had been no Israeli casualties in Lebanon since August.

Monday’s bloodshed also followed the ambush killing Sunday of the No. 2 officer in the SLA, Col. Akl Hashem, a Lebanese Christian and longtime ally of the Israelis. His death dealt a devastating blow to morale among the Israeli-backed forces.

Barak has vowed to pull his troops out of Lebanon by the summer, and he reiterated that pledge Monday. But he has said he first wants a peace treaty with Syria.

Israel maintains that Hezbollah gets all its backing and weapons from Syria and Iran. Until now, both U.S. and senior Israeli military officials have said they believed Syria had ordered Hezbollah to hold back during peace talks; Iran, on the other hand, is as determined as ever to escalate tensions and violence, these officials said.

The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, David Satterfield, appealed for calm on all sides.

“The violation in south Lebanon can only hurt and not help the question of peace, so we hope that restraint will be exercised,” Satterfield said in Beirut, according to Agence France-Presse.

Last June, after Barak was elected but before he took office, the outgoing rightist government of Israel responded to a Hezbollah rocket attack on northern Israel with air raids deep into central Lebanon, knocking out infrastructure in Beirut and killing eight civilians.

But Israeli officials said Monday that they would measure their response with the prospects for resuming peace talks with Syria in mind.

Hezbollah, though its stated military goal is to oust Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, has refused to say whether it will lay down its weapons if Israel withdraws.

In an interview with The Times in Beirut early last month, a senior Hezbollah politician, Hussein Haj Hassan, said the organization would oppose any peace agreement that Syria and Lebanon negotiated with Israel.