Militants Sweep In as Israel’s Hold on Buffer Zone Crumbles

Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon crumbled Monday, as Islamic guerrillas and their jubilant civilian supporters swept into village after village, laying claim to disputed Lebanese land and moving to within scant distance of the Israeli border.

Scores of members of Israel’s proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, defected, were arrested as collaborators, surrendered to Lebanese authorities or were fleeing south toward Israel in search of asylum.

With dizzying speed, the militia appeared to be disintegrating and Israel hastened its forces’ retreat from southern Lebanon after two decades of occupation and bloodshed.

The chaos dashed all Israeli hopes for an orderly withdrawal and threw the ambitious agenda of Prime Minister Ehud Barak into disarray. Barak had promised to end Israel’s traumatic occupation of Lebanon by July 7. An emergency session of the Israeli Cabinet early today gave Barak the power to expedite the pullout.

Hours later, Barak told Israeli Army Radio that the withdrawal would be complete within a few days.

“This . . . tragedy is over,” he said.

Israel and its allies shelled roads and abandoned outposts in a frantic attempt to stop crowds from swarming positions as soon as militiamen deserted them, while Islamic fighters pressed their attacks on Israeli positions. Six Lebanese civilians were reported killed.

Fully one-third of the 9-mile-deep “security zone” that Israel maintained along its northern border inside Lebanon fell to the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah guerrillas Monday, according to the Israeli army.

Hezbollah militants raided abandoned posts and sauntered through newly “liberated” towns, waving their new weapons, some with Hebrew inscriptions, and receiving the cheers of their supporters.

Terrified Israeli residents in the pastoral communities that dot Israel’s northern tier watched in disbelief as red and yellow Hezbollah flags waved just a few hundred yards from their homes, across a border marked by a wire fence.

Many of the Israelis headed for bomb shelters Monday afternoon in anticipation of Hezbollah shelling.

Caught off guard by the sudden turn of events, Barak came under renewed pressure, from both the military and some members of his Cabinet, to speed up the withdrawal. Publicly Monday, he insisted that his government would decide the timing of the pullback based on its own criteria, and he warned that reprisals against Hezbollah attacks would not be limited to southern Lebanon.

“If someone initiates attacks on Israeli soldiers, not to mention [against] the settlements of the north, as we withdraw . . . the response will be very painful,” Barak said.

But the reality on the ground was shifting around Barak, even as he toured the north in what had been intended as a reassuring visit to besieged Israeli farmers and kibbutzniks.

“It’s very simple,” said Ehud Yaari, a prominent Arab affairs commentator for Israeli television. “The Israeli plan for an orderly pullout is over. Basically, we have lost control over what is happening there.”

Desertions Precipitate Change of Control

The South Lebanon Army desertions in effect severed the security zone, ceding the middle section to Hezbollah control.

Overnight, Israeli troops pulled out of Bint Jbeil, their second-largest base in southern Lebanon, the army said today.

That left firmly in Israeli hands only the eastern segment, the site of Lebanese Christian strongholds. More than 12 villages--all Shiite--were retaken Monday by Hezbollah, and two of the SLA’s five battalions folded.

Israel had begun its withdrawal, piece by piece, more than a week ago. But the domino of events began Sunday when the SLA abruptly withdrew from the Taibe outpost that it had received from the Israeli army a few days earlier.

Hezbollah guerrillas, as well as displaced residents from the area, seized on the news and began streaming back into the villages around the Taibe post. The movement snowballed as the returning throngs drove unimpeded through United Nations checkpoints--or got out and walked.

Roads were jammed with vehicles and with people chanting “Allahu akbar! [God is great!]” In villages, there were tearful reunions of family members who had been separated by the conflict.

Nisrin Kteish, a 24-year-old medical student, came to her family village of Houla for the first time, carrying a bouquet of roses to place on her grandparents’ grave and shedding her disbelief that her homeland was finally “free.”

“We are certain there’s no turning back now,” she said.

The Israeli air force found itself in the odd position of having to bomb tanks and artillery that Israel had supplied the SLA but that the fleeing militia had left behind, lest the same weapons be turned against Israeli soldiers by the quickly advancing Hezbollah, or Party of God. The army beefed up defenses along the Israeli side of the northern border.

That was of little comfort to residents of northern Israel, some of whom grabbed binoculars and from their balconies watched the returning Lebanese. They fretted over a return to the ‘70s, before Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when northern communities were periodically attacked by Lebanese-based Palestinian guerrillas. The security zone was established in 1985 as a buffer against those attacks.

“It’s a very, very terrible situation,” Bilha Gat, a resident of Israel’s northernmost kibbutz, Misgav Am, said as her neighbors went to shelters. “I don’t know what to do. I cannot sit in a situation like that, but I am very connected to this place. It’s my home. We hope it will be finished, but I don’t know when or how.”

Like many Israelis, Gat blamed Barak for allowing the situation to burst out of control. The chaos in southern Lebanon cast doubt over how effective an enhanced deployment of United Nations peacekeepers will be. Israel and Lebanon were prepared to rely on the U.N., which already has 4,500 peacekeepers in the region, as the chief arbiter in the withdrawal. But angry Israeli officials noted that the U.N. did not prevent Hezbollah from entering abandoned posts.

Withdrawal a Key Element in Campaign

Barak had made a withdrawal from Lebanon the cornerstone of his election campaign one year ago. He promised to extract his nation from the “tragedy” that is often seen here as Israel’s Vietnam. Now, the future of peace in the volatile region hangs in part on Barak’s success.

Hezbollah has wasted no time in declaring itself the first Arab force to defeat the Jewish state. And a number of Palestinian militants who have been tired of fruitless peace negotiations with the Israelis are taking away the message that violence wins.

With Hezbollah’s familiarity with the terrain and improved weaponry from Iran and Syria, the guerrilla group’s operations were taking a devastating toll on the Israeli army as an Israeli public grew less and less tolerant of casualties.

Barak’s domestic political opposition was also eager Monday to accuse the prime minister of having bungled the withdrawal, especially noting Israel’s failure to better provide for the SLA. The Israeli government made tentative offers to provide refuge for a portion of the 2,500-man militia, but concrete plans never emerged. Several senior SLA commanders have been sentenced to death in absentia by Lebanese courts.

“We are abandoning the SLA,” former Defense Minister Moshe Arens complained bitterly Monday. “How can you call this by any other name but betrayal?”

A Hezbollah officer said 25 “collaborators” were rounded up from their homes in the town of Houla and taken into custody. Up to 200 SLA militiamen deserted Monday alone, following dozens more in recent days. Others were crowding at the Israeli border in hopes of asylum. About 50 officers and their families were reported to have crossed into Israel by Monday night.

The SLA commander, Gen. Antoine Lahad, was reported to be at his home in France on Monday. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, meanwhile, promised fair trials for all those who bore weapons “alongside the enemy” and said revenge killings would not be tolerated.

“Every Lebanese will remember today’s victory,” Lahoud told a crowd in the southern town of Aaramta, which the SLA abandoned May 9 under intense Hezbollah fire.

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Special correspondent Kim Ghattas in Houla contributed to this report.