TV Brings Lebanon War Into Israeli Living Rooms

The scenes were chaotic and disturbing: Wounded young men, some bleeding profusely, were rushed from the battlefront and laid out for treatment on a muddy roadside as their frantic rescuers fought to save them.

Broadcast Sunday on Israeli television news, the graphic images of the latest casualties from Israel’s ongoing struggle in southern Lebanon were perhaps the most explicit from the Lebanese front ever shown here. They immediately touched off an agonized public debate about the wisdom of airing them--and once again, about the conflict itself.

“The Lebanese valley of the dead has infiltrated the living room of Mr. Israeli after 18 years of repression,” columnist Hemi Shalev wrote in Monday’s Maariv newspaper, comparing the pictures to those that helped turn Americans against the war in Vietnam.

The public discussion came amid a sudden upsurge of violence in southern Lebanon--five Israeli soldiers have been killed there in the past two weeks--and as Prime Minister Ehud Barak vowed that Israel would retaliate forcefully against the Syrian-backed Hezbollah fighters who are waging a guerrilla war against Israeli troops in the area.

Early today, Israel did strike back, escalating the conflict sharply by sending warplanes to bomb a Hezbollah military headquarters in the Bekaa Valley, not far from the Syrian border, and three power stations in central, northern and eastern Lebanon. Reports from Beirut said parts of the Lebanese capital had been plunged into darkness. Police said 18 people had been injured.

A statement by the Israeli army said the attacks, the first on Lebanese infrastructure since a similar escalation last June, were carried out to protect Israeli soldiers and allied Lebanese militiamen in Israel’s nine-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, as well as residents of Israeli communities along the Lebanese border. Israel long has held Syria, the main power broker in Lebanon, responsible for Hezbollah’s actions.

The army said any retaliatory assaults from Hezbollah on northern Israel would prompt further Israeli attacks.

Anticipating the airstrikes, Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss appealed to the United States on Monday to help stop any new Israeli raids on his nation. He said that Hezbollah’s battle against Israel is the “natural” result of the Jewish state’s occupation in southern Lebanon and that it will continue as long as Israel keeps its troops across the border.

But Monday evening, after spending more than six hours closeted with his security Cabinet and top military officers, Barak warned that Israel was prepared to hit back.

“We will fight--and we will make sure that those who hit us will be hit,” the prime minister told a gathering of young supporters in Jerusalem. “It will be impossible to continue to operate against the Israeli [army] without the attackers and those who sent them being punished.”

The statement appeared aimed at sending a signal to Hezbollah and to Syria. Barak has been trying to keep a delicate balance in his response to the Lebanon fighting, aware that tough retaliation could damage chances of resuming now-stalled peace negotiations with Syria. The Israeli prime minister also has promised repeatedly to pull Israeli troops out of Lebanon by July, although he says he wants a peace treaty with Syria first.

Throughout Monday, with radio talk shows filled with emotional discussions of Lebanon and the televised pictures of wounded soldiers, Barak was urged by an array of military and political figures, including moderate members of his Cabinet, to send Hezbollah and its backers a tough message.

But Israelis were far from united on whether the country’s two television stations--especially the privately owned Channel Two, which showed the more graphic images of the Lebanon casualties--had acted properly in deciding to air the footage. It included close-ups of the soldiers’ faces and, in some cases, their injuries.

Brig. Gen. Oded Ben-Ami, the army’s chief spokesman, condemned the stations’ decisions as woefully insensitive to the injured men and their families. He said the switchboard at his office “exploded” with dozens of angry and upset calls immediately after the evening news broadcasts.

Ben-Ami said he understood that the photographs formed part of a legitimate discussion about Lebanon but said it should not be conducted “over the bodies of the soldiers.” He said the army had lodged a formal complaint with Channel Two.

Shalom Kital, the station’s news director, said he decided to air the footage out of a growing belief that he and others had erred in not doing so before. Kital said he had come to believe that viewers were being presented with a “sterilized” and ultimately inaccurate portrait of the long-running conflict.

“We believe that the dilemma of southern Lebanon is so deep, so important, that we cannot be the censors of the public,” Kital said. Out of consideration for the families and the young men themselves, though, he said, the majority of the footage had been cut.

Other Israelis, including the mother of a soldier who died in Lebanon, applauded the stations’ decision to broadcast the images, arguing that the public must be forced to confront the horrors of the conflict there.

Raya Harnick, whose son was killed in Lebanon in 1982, told Israel Radio that she did not believe that airing such images would increase or lessen the grief of the bereaved families. For others, she said, the scenes could have a painful but, from her standpoint, positive impact.

“It sounds terribly cynical, as though blood is used for political purposes,” Harnick said. “But we must do something, one way or the other--or get stuck there for another 10 years.”