Report 50

Israel

's QANA MASSACRE 18 April 1996
Israel's QANA MASSACRE 30 July 2006

MID-EAST REALITIES - MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4/15/2000:    It was only four years ago; but already it has been mostly forgotten -- the terrible Qana Massacre in southern Lebanon, and the atrocious cover-up by Israel, the U.S. and the U.N. that followed.

   The Israelis now want to "withdraw" from Lebanon; and as they do they threaten and prepare for even more death and devastation.

   The Israelis now want to abide by U.N. Resolution 425, after repeatedly violated it for 18 years. Furthermore at the same time the Israelis continue to violate so many other U.N. Resolutions including 242 passed some 33 years ago.

   The Israelis now want to end their occupation of Lebanon, but at the same time they continue their occupation of Syria and are putting the Palestinians on Army-surrounded Reservations claiming it is a "peace process".

   The Israelis want everyone to simply forget what they have done. They want everyone to forget the invasions, the bombings, the massacres, the assassinations, the occupations, the apartheid-like policies, the millions of Palestinian refugees. They want everyone to forget their arrogant defiance of international law and the U.N. for decades. They want everyone to forget their still-growing arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their loud threats to devastate any and all who oppose their designs.

   The Israelis now want everyone to forget the many tens of thousands of deaths they are responsible for in Lebanon, not to mention the billions of dollars of property destruction and the terrible suffering they have inflicted on so many.

   And while the Israelis always demand that what has happened to them be constantly remembered, that they be substantially compensated, that major reparations be paid to them, when the tables are turned the Israelis are hypocritical in the extreme.

   So remember Qana too. Remember the terribly bloody details. Remember the historic coverup. Remember the connivance of the Americans. And remember the cowardess and impotence of the United Nations.

   The following was originally published by MER at the time of the second anniversary of the Qana massacre.

ANOTHER TERRIBLE U.N. FAILURE

MER - Washington, 4/18/98 - Today, April 18th, marks the two-year
anniversary of one of the most brutal and unforgivable massacres in
Middle East History.

The name "Qana", like those of "Sabra and Chatilla" and "Deir Yassein",
goes down in history as among Israel's most brutal and outrageous acts.
And it should not be forgotten that without the ongoing and constant
support and assistance of the United States, Israel could not act as
it does nor prevent international sanctions against it.

Even though the U.N. formally found that Israel had purposefully brought
about the massacre and then grossly lied to cover up its deeds -- itself a

unique finding for the U.N. and one which was further supported by an
independent Amnesty International investigation and report -- to this date no
one has been brought to justice and both the massacre and the cover-up have
gone completely unpunished. Much flowed to and from Qana. Like the
assassination of "The Engineer" in Gaza the previous January, Qana backfired
on Shimon Peres personally. His attempts to look tough and act with military
force in order to win the upcoming election instead resulted in a wave of
Hamas suicide-attacks and the downward spiral in what was already a deceptive
and disingenuous "peace process." And the defeat of Peres has since lead to
another round in the "good cop/bad cop" maneuvering by the politicians who
have a way of claiming things would have worked out, "if only" this or
that... Of course the actual realities are otherwise. Just as the Qana
massacre was so terribly distorted and covered-up; much the same is done
daily by the same political players when it comes to what the "peace process"
is really all about, rather than what they say it is all about. The following
was originally published by MID-EAST REALITIES in June of 1996:

      U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL AND SEC-GEN BOUTROS-GHALI
                COLLAPSE UNDER U.S. PRESSURE

       PERES' HOPE TO BECOME U.N. SEC-GEN UNDERMINED

In April, the Israelis brutally massacred over a hundred persons at the Qana
U.N. Base in Southern Lebanon. A U.S./Israeli cover-up immediately took
place. However unexpected hard evidence, including a video tape of the
attack, convinced U.N. investigators that the attack was premeditated. Severe
pressure was brought on U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali not to
release the report to the Security Council or the public. However, after
watering it down as best he could Boutros-Ghali was forced to release the
report, some U.N. officials going so far as to indicate they would resign if
he did not do so. Shamefully though the U.N. Security Council has refused to
act on the report or to hold the Israelis accountable. Of course the American
veto threat and tremendous pressures upon Boutros-Ghali and member states at
the U.N. was behind this further demonstration of U.N. impotence andcowardice.

The only good thing to come from the Qana Massacre is that there is no longer
a likelihood of Shimon Peres becoming Secretary-General of the U.N. Peres is
known to covet the job. At first, shortly after Binyamin's Netanyahu's
victory, Peres and his long-time aide Yossi Beilin, maneuvered to join
another "national unity government" with Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Peres
served as Foreign Minister in previous Likud-led governments, as did Yitzhak
Rabin who served as Defense Minister. Realizing this effort would probably
fail, at the same time Peres took steps to reinvigorate the idea of his being
nominated to become U.N. Secretary-General -- an idea Peres (with American
encouragement) had pushed prior to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The
notion that since an Egyptian had been Secretary- General, now an Israeli

should be selected, was one Peres and friends thought they could use to
catapult him into the job. With Qana still fresh in memory, it seems this
latest Peres gambit is running into considerable roadblocks though there may
be further attempts to resuscitate the idea later this year.

In an ironic twist of fate, Peres' own most recent duplicity did him in.
After a half-year cease-fire with Hamas, it was Peres' assassination of Yehya
Ayyash, "the Engineer", in Gaza in January that unleased the terror-wave in
the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that in turn led to the attacks on
Hizbollah in Lebanon, that then led to Qana -- all of which combined to lead
to Peres' electoral defeat. In short, the Israeli people did not believe or
trust Peres; and for good reasons. Certainly it would be the height of
historical chicanery if the notion of Peres heading the U.N. after an
American/Israeli effort to push out Boutros-Ghali should again be pushed
forward.

Robert Fisk, writing in THE INDEPENDENT newspaper, has done more than any
other investigative journalist to report about the realities of the recent
situation in the Middle East -- the false "peace process"; the deceptions of
Yasser Arafat as he pretends to have an embryonic State and emulates Israeli
repression tactics against his own people; the duplicitous conduct of Rabin
and Peres in preaching peace while pursuing Middle Eastern apartheid.

The following article by Fisk was published a few weeks ago in THE
INDEPENDENT and uncovers more of the realities behind the Qana Massacre and
Shimon Peres' decline.

Tyre -- An Israeli army operation to plant booby-trap bombs inside the United
Nations zone in southern Lebanon led to the Qana massacre last month in which
well over 100 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli shells while
sheltering in a UN base. It now emerges that the Israeli "patrol" which came
under mortar fire from Hizbollah guerrillas on 18 April -- the incident which
led to the Qana bloodbath -- had been tasked to leave plastic explosive
charges and mines near the village of Henniyeh, about five miles from Qana.

The UN's official report, which suggested that the Israeli massacre of
civilians was deliberate, quoted Brigadier General Dan Harel, the commander
of the Israeli army's artillery corps, as saying that an Israeli patrol,
whose location was not given, had come under mortar fire from the Qana area
and that at least one round landed 40m from the Israeli troops. What had not
hitherto been revealed was the task the Israeli soldiers had been engaged in,
north of their occupation area and inside the UN zone, when they came under
fire. A similar and even more complicated field of plastic mines and booby
traps was left by Israeli soldiers close to the village of Bradchit in the
UN's Irish battalion area at around the same time.

Shortly after the Israeli bombardment ended, it now transpires, Israeli
officers met UN ordnance officers and handed them detailed maps of the booby
traps and mines they had planted. Polish troops subsequently defused the
booby traps at Henniyeh on a hilltop from which Katyusha rockets had been
fired in the past, although the Irish army took longer to complete its
disposal of the Bradchit minefield.

What has caused particular concern to UN personnel is that it was a roadside
bomb in the village of Bradchit that killed a Lebanese teenager last month,
an explosion which prompted the Hizbollah to blame Israel and fire Katyushas
across the border into Galilee in retaliation. Shimon Peres said at the time
that Israel had nothing to do with the Bradchit bombs and the Katyusha
retaliation set off Israel's bloody Grapes of Wrath offensive. But the
revelation that an Israeli unit was planting booby-trap devices in Bradchit
and Henniyeh on 18 April has cast new doubt on Mr. Peres's denial.

Nor did another claim by Mr. Peres during his abortive campaign for
re-election --that the Hizbollah fired rockets at Israel from "within" the UN
compound at Qana -- do anything to repair the cynical state of relations that
now exist between Israel and the UN. Neither the Israeli army nor the UN
believe that Hizbollah men opened fire on the Israelis from a UN position --
the Hizbollah did so several 100 metres from the outer perimeter of the Qana
camp -- and UN officers are mystified as to why the Israeli Prime Minister
should have made such a statement just before the election, when he must know
that it is untrue.

"It was election time in Israel," a security source in southern Lebanon
commented. "On such occasions, truth goes out the window."

The written ceasefire agreement that followed the end of the Israeli
bombardment has meanwhile been rendered meaningless scarcely a day after
Binyamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister.

The "monitoring committee" that was to have ensured that all parties complied
with the truce terms has never met, and in the past three days the Hizbollah
have killed four Israeli soldiers and two pro-Israeli militiamen inside the
occupied zone of southern Lebanon. Since the ceasefire, the Israelis have
also carried out three retaliatory air raids on Lebanon, without waiting for
the truce committee to pronounce on Hizbollah attacks, as they are obliged
to do under the truce agreement.

In an Israeli air raid on a Hizbollah arms dump near Baalbek before dawn
yesterday, an attack which set off secondary explosions for an hour
afterwards, three civilians were slightly wounded -- another breach of the
ceasefire terms, which state that civilians should not be harmed in any
Israeli-Hizbollah battles inside Lebanon. Two civilians were also reported
to have been wounded when the Hizbollah killed four Israeli soldiers at
Marjayoun on Thursday.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14287.htm

By Robert Fisk

07/31/06 "The Independent" -- -- They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. "Mehdi Hashem, aged seven - Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 - Qana',' "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one - Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the "pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening "western civilisation" - as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.

I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to us?"
Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the country begun on 12 July after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians denounced what they described as "an ugly crime".
Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making trip to Beirut.
No one in this country can forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire - a truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two weeks.
Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed in colourful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun - close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil - and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.

And Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its people more and more terrorised - and terror is the word they used - by Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made, and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid agencies.
Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and - when they do - they frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside civilian houses - just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a scale?
Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.

Yesterday, the laborers from the second largest Labor Confederation in Turkey, the DISK, had marched to the Israeli consulate with lanterns and torches and had sent a letter of protest to the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in continuation of actions within their campaign initiated on July 26 called, PEACEFUL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD UNITE! STOP ISRAEL

To counter the protests, the Istanbul Consul of Israel, Mordehai Amihai paid a visit to DISK, THE Confederation of Progressive Labor Unions and tried explaining Israel position. He tried justifying the illegal Israeli aggressions by mentioning unrelated issues such as attacks from terrorists etc.

However, the Israeli diplomat was lectured by the DISK officials, something the Turkish government has not done, and reminded the forgetful diplomat that the war started by Israel was not legitimate and all the basis being used by Israel as an excuse were unjustified. DISK officials also reminded the diplomat that the terror organizations Israel complains about had been fed and protected by the imperialists for years, and now, Israel was attempting to use this excuse to attack its neighbors where the poverty stricken laborers in the region were being targeted.

In a gesture as well as part of the planned actions against Israel, right after the meeting, the officials of the DISK labor confederation left to join and continue the sit-in protest of Israel in Istanbul central, main square, the Taksim Plaza.

The actions, which have been taking place for the last three days against Israeli aggression staged by DISK, will end this evening after a march.

Ankara
While these developments continue in Istanbul, in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, the members of DISK joined forces with another large labor confederation, KESK, the confederation of Public Workers Unions, held a press conference in the city center. After the conference and the rally, all participants distributed fliers exposing Israeli atrocities and imperialism in Ankara most crowded streets.

Sendika.org

U.S. risks backlash in Mideast
Deadly Israeli assault strikes at core of U.S. foreign policy in region

ANALYSIS
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post

Updated: 10:40 p.m. CT July 30, 2006

The Israeli bombs that slammed into the Lebanese village of Qana yesterday did more than kill three dozen children and a score of adults. They struck at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the region and illustrated in heart-breaking images the enormous risks for Washington in the current Middle East crisis.
With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.
Although the United States has urged Israel to use restraint, it has also strongly defended the military assaults as a reasonable response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, a position increasingly at odds with allies that see a deadly overreaction. Analysts think that if the war drags on, as appears likely, it could leave the United States more isolated than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago and hindered in its foreign policy goals such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program and spreading democracy around the world.
"The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction," said Richard N. Haass, who was President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director. "The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights."
The White House recognizes the danger but thinks the missiles flying both ways across the Israel-Lebanon border carry with them a chance to finally break out of the stalemate of Middle East geopolitics. Bush and his advisers hope the conflict can destroy or at least cripple Hezbollah and in the process strike a blow against the militia's sponsor, Iran, while forcing the region to move toward final settlement of the decades-old conflict with Israel.
"He wants a resolution that will solve the problem," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters yesterday. "Not only do we feel sorrow for what happened in Qana, but also a determination that it is really important to remove the conditions that led to that."
"This moment of conflict in the Middle East is painful and tragic," Bush said in his radio address Saturday. "Yet it is also a moment of opportunity for broader change in the region. Transforming countries that have suffered decades of tyranny and violence is difficult, and it will take time to achieve. But the consequences will be profound for our country and the world."

Broader struggle with

Iran

At the heart of the crisis for the United States is a broader struggle with Iran for influence in the Middle East, one that arguably has been going on since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and that has escalated during Bush's presidency. The United States not only backs Israel in the current war but also has accelerated weapons delivery to Israel. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has long acted as a surrogate for Iran, and in the past three weeks it has shown off Iranian weapons never before used by the radical group.
"It's really a proxy war between the United States and Iran," said David J. Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Running the World," a book on U.S. foreign policy. "When viewed in that context, it puts everything in a different light."
The Hezbollah attacks on Israel that touched off the latest conflict came just as international pressure on Iran to give up uranium enrichment had reached a crescendo. Bush aides suspect Iran orchestrated the attacks to distract attention from its nuclear program or to demonstrate the consequences of pushing too hard. "It's tempting to believe that," said a senior official involved in the crisis but not authorized to speak on the record. "Iran spends a very large amount of money on Hezbollah."
The president hopes the crisis will ultimately help him rally world leaders against Iran's nuclear program. Even as the U.N. Security Council today considers a peacekeeping force for Lebanon, it may vote on a U.S.-backed resolution to threaten sanctions if Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment in August.
"There's no question that this is going to stiffen up in the long run the resolve of the Europeans in dealing with Iran," said Henri J. Barkey, a former State Department official who teaches at Lehigh University. "Even if they don't like what Israel is doing," he said, they will recognize that Iran "is a menace."
Others are not so hopeful. Outside the White House, the mood among many foreign policy veterans in Washington is strikingly pessimistic, especially as leaders of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, traditional rivals based in different Islamic sects, began calling for followers to take the fight to the enemy.
Analysts foresee a muddled outcome at best, in which Hezbollah survives Israel's airstrikes, foreign peacekeepers become bogged down, and U.S. relations with allies are severely strained. At worst, they said, Hezbollah and Iran feel emboldened, Islamic radicalism spreads, and a region smuggling fighters and weapons into Iraq fractures further along sectarian lines.
Increasingly isolated U.S.?
"What the conflict has exposed in a really clear way is how linked all these issues in the region are to each other," said Mara Rudman, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton White House now at the liberal Center for American Progress. "The worst-case scenario . . . is a much more radicalized Islamic fundamentalist Middle East and much more isolated Israel and a much more isolated United States and fewer people to talk with."

Haass, the former Bush aide who leads the Council on Foreign Relations, laughed at the president's public optimism. "An opportunity?" Haass said with an incredulous tone. "Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
In the long run, he and others warn, the situation could cement the perception that the United States is so pro-Israel that a new generation of Arab youth will grow up perceiving Americans as enemies. The internal pressure on friendly governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere could force them to distance themselves from Washington or crack down on domestic dissidents to keep power. In either case, Bush may have little leverage to press for democratic reforms.
Jon B. Alterman, a Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, outlined "not even the worst-case scenario, but a bad-case scenario: South Lebanon is in shambles, Hezbollah gets credit for rebuilding it with Iranian money, Hezbollah grows stronger in Lebanon and it's not brought to heel. The reaction of surrounding states weakens them, radicalism rises, and they respond with more repression. None of this is especially far-fetched. And in all of this, the U.S. is seen as a fundamentally hostile party."
All of this is far too gloomy for administration officials, who see such dire forecasts as the predictable reactions of a foreign policy establishment that has produced decades of meaningless talks, paper peace agreements and unenforced U.N. resolutions that have not solved underlying issues in the Middle East.
"Some of the overheated rhetoric about how the United States can't work with anybody, we've lost our leadership in the world, is just completely ridiculous, and this crisis proves it," said the senior administration official involved in the crisis. "We are really indispensable to solving this crisis, and you're not going to solve this problem merely by passing another resolution."
While the diplomats work, the Pentagon is studying the possible impact on an already-stretched U.S. military. Commanders have diverted the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group from a training mission in Jordan where they were available as reserves for Iraq. Now they are on ships in the Mediterranean Sea to help with humanitarian efforts, and another unit has been put on alert as backup for Iraq.
The Pentagon has done contingency planning for U.S. troops participating in a multinational peacekeeping mission, but Bush aides have all but ruled out such a scenario. A more likely option, officials said, would have the United States provide command-and-control and logistics assistance.
U.S. troops in Lebanon?
Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said that officials are studying the possibility of putting troops in Lebanon but that it is too early to comment on what such a force would look like. "The concept is still under development, and discussion of any potential U.S. participation would be premature."
Some analysts acknowledge the varied challenges the United States faces but consider the possible gain worth the risk. "It's a Rubik's Cube. It's very, very difficult to resolve," said Peter Brookes, a former deputy assistant defense secretary under Bush who is now at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But if we were able to dismantle Hezbollah, that would be very positive for the war on terror."
The White House is acutely aware of the dangers of stirring up anti-American sentiment in the region. "There may be times when people say that they're unhappy with whatever methods we pursue," the White House's Snow said last week. "We are confident that in the long run, people are going to be much happier living in freedom and democracy than, for instance, in nations that are occupied by terrorist organizations that try to hijack a democracy in its formative stages."

Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14110834/from/RS.1/

Israelis took cover Sunday morning as a rocket fired by Hezbollah passed over the town of Kiryat Shmona.

JERUSALEM, Monday, July 31 — Taken aback by the carnage from the Israeli bombing of Qana, Lebanon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrung the first significant concession from Israel late on Sunday in its nearly three-week-old war against the Hezbollah militia: an immediate 48-hour suspension of aerial strikes.

Especially notable about the suspension was that Ms. Rice’s deputy, Adam Ereli, and not the Israelis, announced it after she held intensive talks with both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni.

The American decision to break the news on what was essentially an Israeli tactical change reflected the increased concern in the Bush administration about the rising civilian death toll in Lebanon and the havoc it is wreaking with America’s already shaky relations with the Arab world.

Indeed, while Mr. Ereli took pains to assure reporters that American officials had confirmation of the temporary suspension directly from Mr. Olmert’s office, Israeli officials had said nothing publicly about the suspension as of early Monday.

Ms. Rice, who had been making little progress in her talks with the Israelis this weekend, clearly needed to come away with something in response to the Qana bombing, which killed dozens of people, many of them children, and incited a new level of world anger against the Israeli military campaign in southern Lebanon.

Even so, one fact is unchanged: the United States is still not calling for an immediate cease-fire.

Ms. Rice’s maneuvering highlights the deepening crisis in which she now finds herself — by far the biggest in her tenure as America’s top diplomat.

By refusing to call for an immediate cease-fire, even in the face of the Qana bombing, Ms. Rice was teetering on the edge of a public relations disaster, particularly in the Arab world. All day on Sunday, scenes of dead children being pulled out of the wreckage at Qana dominated the airwaves.

But American officials continued to say that, despite the civilian death toll, an immediate cease-fire would do little good unless underlying issues were first addressed, including the ultimate disarmament of Hezbollah.

In the meantime, Israeli officials continued to say, publicly, that they needed more time to diminish Hezbollah’s military abilities, and America’s insistence on reaching agreement on a political package before calling for a cease-fire worked to give Israel that time.

But that left the impression that Ms. Rice and the Bush administration were willing to stomach the killing of innocent children to reach their larger aims.

After learning about the Qana bombing, Ms. Rice canceled her planned trip to Beirut on Sunday, and instead is heading back to the United States on Monday. A State Department official said Ms. Rice would travel to New York on Wednesday or Thursday to push for a Security Council resolution that would include a cease-fire as one of its components.

The contents of the diplomatic package are basically set, and Bush officials said Ms. Rice would lay out its terms on Monday. Under the proposal, Israel and Lebanon would agree to a cease-fire as part of a larger pact that would include installing 15,000 to 20,000 international peacekeepers throughout southern Lebanon, American and Israeli officials said. The Lebanese government would work to disband Hezbollah, and the United States and other countries would funnel money and send military officials to help train the Lebanese Army, so that it could work to prevent future attacks on Israel. Israel would agree to talks on whether it would withdraw from a disputed border area known as Shabaa Farms, a Hezbollah demand.

“We want the Security Council to take it up soon, and we want the Security Council to take it up with as much concrete progress toward a real cease-fire as is humanly possible by the time that that meeting takes place,” Ms. Rice said. She spoke at a hastily called news conference on Sunday, just two hours after learning of the bombing at Qana. She appeared shaken, and said she learned of the bombing while she was meeting with the Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz.

She said she reiterated to Mr. Peretz her “strong concern about the impact of Israeli military operations on innocent civilians,” and added that she was “deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life.” American officials scrambled to try to counter the wrenching TV scenes of the devastation at Qana. Immediately after Ms. Rice’s news conference, State Department officials worked quickly to get her statement broadcast on Arab TV stations, including Al Jazeera.

“Do you think that, with the close relationship he has with Bush and Condi, he would go and say something like that without their consent?” one senior Israeli official asked.

The official, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said he believed that American diplomats accepted that Israel’s armed forces needed more time to clear out a buffer zone in southern Lebanon before an international peacekeeping force could enter.

Even if Ms. Rice does begin work on a Security Council resolution on Thursday, he said, the resolution would probably take days to pass.

Ms. Rice was set to travel to Beirut on Sunday afternoon for talks with Lebanese leaders when the Qana bombing curtailed her trip.

At 8:38 Sunday morning, as Ms. Rice and Mr. Peretz were meeting in a suite at her hotel in Jerusalem, Assistant Secretary of State C. David Welch received an e-mail message — on his Blackberry — from Jeffrey D. Feldman, the United States ambassador to Lebanon, alerting him to the bombing. In the message, Mr. Feldman described some of the scenes broadcast on TV in Lebanon.

Mr. Welch, Blackberry in hand, went into the hotel suite to give Ms. Rice the news, a senior American official said. It was unclear, the official said, whether Mr. Peretz was already aware of it.

“She was sickened,” said the official, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak about the meeting between Ms. Rice and Mr. Peretz. After the meeting, the official said, Ms. Rice told her staff, “We have to get it done.” She was referring to the 48-hour suspension of the aerial bombardment, he said.

In the meeting with Mr. Olmert and a later meeting with Ms. Livni, the foreign minister, Ms. Rice pushed for a temporary suspension of Israel’s airstrikes. Around 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, American officials in Jerusalem received a call from Mr. Olmert’s office that Israel was willing to commit to the suspension, beginning immediately.

QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — The dead lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with dirt. Faces were puffy. A man’s arm was extended straight out from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their skin like wax.