Israel Wades Into Bloodiest Day

In ferocious house-to-house fighting, at least nine Israeli soldiers were killed and more than two dozen wounded Wednesday battling Hezbollah guerrillas for control of a strategic Lebanese border town.

The day’s casualties, Israel’s highest one-day military death toll during its 15-day-old offensive, fueled debate in Israel over the army’s tactics against a determined, heavily armed and deeply entrenched guerrilla force.

Amid the intensifying ground combat, Hezbollah fired more than 150 rockets into Israel, injuring more than 30 Israelis. The latest tally brings to more than 1,400 the number of rockets launched since fighting broke out July 12.

A day after four U.N. observers in southern Lebanon were killed by Israeli shelling, diplomats meeting in Rome failed to agree on a plan for an immediate cease-fire. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held firm to the Bush administration’s demand that any truce be part of a broader political agreement in which Hezbollah is disarmed.

Early today, Israel launched more airstrikes, hitting 90 targets between midnight and dawn, the army said, most of them in south Lebanon, where warplanes struck what were described as areas from which rockets were launched.

Wednesday’s fighting centered on the town of Bint Jbeil, a longtime Hezbollah stronghold, and the neighboring village of Maroun el Ras, less than two miles inside Lebanon. The Israeli army had earlier said its troops were in control of both enclaves, but it later backed off, saying Bint Jbeil was not in hand.

Bint Jbeil, a town of 20,000 known as a base of fervent support for the Hezbollah, is a crucial target for Israeli forces because it is used for firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel and because of its symbolic importance to the Shiite Muslim militant group.

Israeli army officials described running battles between Israeli infantry and Hezbollah fighters entrenched in apartment buildings and bunkers and holed up inside reinforced hide-outs.

The fighters ambushed Israeli soldiers as they edged into Bint Jbeil on foot. Military officials said the troops came under small-arms, rocket-propelled grenade and mortar fire from different directions. It took them an hour to determine the sources of the fire and shoot back.

The Israeli army confirmed that eight soldiers died in a close-quarters battle that broke out in the early morning and the ninth in a separate clash nearby that continued into the early evening. Army officers estimated that about 50 Hezbollah gunmen were killed during the hours-long fight with the Golani Brigade, which has a long-standing reputation as one of Israel’s toughest units. The brigade also had fought recently in the Gaza Strip as part of the offensive there against Palestinian militants.

“It was a very tough day, but our soldiers withstood it,” Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, head of the army’s northern command, told reporters near the border.

Israeli officials said their forces had killed about 250 Hezbollah fighters in combat along a narrow stretch of the border and destroyed communications and planning centers.

The casualty figure could not be confirmed.

Wednesday’s Israeli casualties, which came two days after two soldiers died in the same area, were not an indication that the campaign was going poorly, he said.

“It’s a war,” Adam said. “In war you have days like this, and we know.”

Israeli military commentators said it appeared that the army had underestimated Hezbollah’s strength as a fighting force.

“If over the past day we were led to think, or misled to think, that we had control over Bint Jbeil, then this Hezbollah operation showed us they are still very much determined to inflict as many casualties as possible in the strongholds,” said Channel One’s military affairs correspondent Yoav Limor.

Limor and other analysts also said a new generation of Israeli field commanders did not yet fully comprehend Hezbollah’s tactical advantages in southern Lebanon.

“There is no one in the army from the level of company commander and down who has fought in Lebanon,” he said. “This isn’t the Palestinian territories, where the threat is inside a house, a refugee camp.... In Lebanon, the threat is outside -- in the hills, lying in ambush, or carrying antitank weapons. This is a different kind of threat.”

Hezbollah portrayed the day’s clashes as a setback for the Israeli military.

“Victory comes from God almighty,” said a statement read on Hezbollah’s Al Manar television.

Timur Goksel, a longtime observer of the battle between Israel and Hezbollah, said the group was relying on classic guerrilla tactics.

“They are fighting a very effective harassment action without actually taking on the Israelis,” said Goksel, a former U.N. official in southern Lebanon who has been watching border clashes for more than 25 years.

U.S. military and intelligence officials who have been monitoring the conflict say they believe Israel has destroyed far fewer Hezbollah rockets and missiles than their public estimates, which put the toll between one-third and half of the militia’s estimated 12,000 rockets.

Israel has had difficulty tracking down and destroying the small and highly mobile rocket launchers. The officials who have been monitoring the conflict say Hezbollah’s arsenal has been reduced by the high number of rockets it has fired at Israel.

At the same time, U.S. officials say Israel has made significant progress in hitting fixed targets such as command centers and supply routes, which has prevented Hezbollah from restocking its supplies, particularly larger, longer-range missiles.

Israel says that Hezbollah has armed itself with sophisticated antitank missiles along with Katyushas and longer-range rockets since Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago.

“I know they’re making progress in terms of hitting their infrastructure, because it’s not just about the missiles and the launchers, it’s about the roads, the transports, the ability to command-control, and all that’s being degraded,” said Henry A. Crumpton, head of counter-terrorism at the State Department. “But it’s going take a long time. I don’t believe this is going to be over just in the next couple of days.”

In Wednesday’s fighting, the Golani Brigade was backed up by an armored regiment and engineering regiment, a force numbering in the hundreds. Army officials declined to specify how many troops took part.

Commanders have said that about 3,000 Israeli troops have been involved in the overall operation in Lebanon, though the forces have been moving back and forth across the border and have not been stationed in Lebanon permanently.

Israeli military officials said the degree of resistance mounted by Hezbollah had not been a surprise, but they acknowledged that their forces encountered about twice as many Hezbollah fighters as intelligence assessments had indicated were in the area a day earlier.

The officials concluded that some new fighters had moved into Bint Jbeil from other villages before the early morning operation began.

“We have walked into a wasp’s nest, and we knew it would be a wasp’s nest,” said Maj. Zvika Golan, an army spokesman.

Concern over the presence of antitank mines meant that the soldiers were approaching on foot, he said. The infantry troops came under withering fire from fighters who popped up from hiding places.

Michael Oren, a military historian doing his army reserve service as a spokesman, said the craggy landscape around Bint Jbeil offered ready hiding places resistant to aerial bombing.

Oren, who was part of an Israeli special forces unit battling Palestinian fighters in and around Bint Jbeil during Israel’s 1982 invasion, said it was “ideal terrain for a guerrilla-type army fighting a conventional army.”

The heavy fighting has made it difficult for the Israeli army to evacuate its wounded.

At one point Wednesday, two Israeli warplanes screamed low over the rocky landscape to provide cover for medevac helicopters. Plumes of smoke drifted over the rocky landscape, and the steady boom of artillery fire echoed off the hills.

The scope and scale of the fighting made it clear just how difficult it will be for Israel to establish a 1.2-mile-deep no-go zone along the frontier that is free of Hezbollah fighters. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert outlined the plan to lawmakers Wednesday.

That frontier strip would be a much smaller area than the “security zone” Israel established in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nizar Hamzeh, a Lebanese professor of international relations who recently wrote a book on Hezbollah, said the action in Bint Jbeil was typical of the group’s fighting technique.

“This is not a classical fighting force,” said Hamzeh, a longtime professor at the American University of Beirut who now teaches in Kuwait. “They are not lined up in row after row, one behind another. They fight in groups of five or 10 maximum.”

Hamzeh said the Hezbollah fighters also were imbued with a political-religious mandate that he said made it impossible for them to retreat.

“You either win or die as a martyr. No retreat. No fleeing,” he said.

In places like Bint Jbeil, he said, this means that the Israelis may be able to enter a town in tanks, but they can never be confident that they control the territory.

“You have to go after them one by one,” he said.

Israeli Cabinet Minister Gideon Ezra, who visited the border area near where the battles took place, predicted that Israeli public support for the offensive would hold up despite the latest casualties.

“I can’t tell you how long it will take, but we should succeed in our target,” he said. “There is no other way.”

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Ellingwood reported from Avivim and King from Jerusalem. Staff writers Rone Tempest and J. Michael Kennedy in Beirut and Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Bloody day at the border

Israel suffered its worst single day of casualties as close-quarters fighting continued in south Lebanon. In Rome, participants in a daylong crisis conference failed to agree on how to stop the fighting. The day’s developments:

Lebanon

Nine Israeli troops were killed in heavy fighting in and around the towns of Bint Jbeil and Maroun el Ras, the most in any day of the 15-day campaign. Israel continued bombing targets in the south, including a building in Tyre where a Shiite cleric affiliated with Hezbollah lived. He was not at home.

Israel

Hezbollah launched one of its largest attacks since the fighting began, firing more than 150 rockets and wounding 31 in Haifa and elsewhere. Israel reportedly has plans for a 1.2-mile-deep security zone at the Lebanese border -- perhaps making a larger occupation unnecessary.

Gaza Strip

Israeli airstrikes and artillery killed 23 Palestinians and wounded at least 70; tanks and bulldozers flattened orchards in northern Gaza, removing cover that could be used by militants launching rockets.

Diplomatic efforts

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Rome with leaders from Europe and Arab nations; they agreed on the need for a multinational force to stabilize the Israel-Lebanon border but were unable to agree on how best to stop the fighting. Italy, joining Turkey, says that with a clear U.N. mandate it might commit troops to a peacekeeping force.

Humanitarian efforts

Aid supplies began arriving at the Beirut airport and a large convoy delivered food and medical supplies to Tyre. A Saudi Arabian team arrived to set up a field hospital and provide medical aid.

Evacuation

The last scheduled boatload of Americans departed Beirut, carrying 790 of a total of 14,000 evacuees. A Cypriot ferry left Tyre with 320 people, mostly Americans.

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert apologized for the deaths of four UNIFIL observers killed Tuesday. UNIFIL has been in Lebanon since 1978 and its current mandate will expire this month. More about the force:

Personnel: About 2,000 troops plus military observers, international and local civilian staff

Nations contributing troops: China, France, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Ukraine

Budget: $99.2 million for fiscal 2006

Fatalities: 261 (includes four from Tuesday)

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Sources: Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, UNIFIL, Times reporting