US-Israeli
Onslaught On
Lebanon Intensifies
By Mike Head
03 August 2006
World
Socialist Web
Backed
by the Bush administration, Israel has poured thousands more troops
into Lebanon and escalated its aerial bombardment in its bid to crush
all resistance and take control of the south of the country. With the
US blocking all calls for an immediate ceasefire—to give the Israeli
military more time to complete the job—Israeli leaders have openly
declared that the offensive will continue for weeks.
Aided by the lack of any
opposition from the UN and the European Union, the objectives set by
the US and Israel from the outset of the war are being pursued methodically
and with barbaric devastation. Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli
Defence Force (IDF) soldiers has been used as a pretext to attempt to
kill or drive out the population of south Lebanon and bring the entire
country under its political sway.
Up to 20,000 IDF troops have
invaded Lebanon on multiple fronts, backed by tanks, military bulldozers
and ferocious air power. There is no indication that the offensive will
necessarily stop at the Litani River, the northern border of Israel’s
self-proclaimed “security zone”. IDF infantry have already
crossed the river in several places, going beyond the territory that
Israel occupied for 18 years from 1982 to 2000.
Throughout southern Lebanon,
south Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley, the IDF is pursuing a scorched
earth policy, reducing towns and villages to rubble, leaving the remaining
residents—those too old or weak to escape—without water
and food. Far from “surgical incursions” to dismantle Hezbollah
command posts, as claimed by Israel, the operation is systematically
blowing up and bulldozing houses, apartment buildings, community facilities
and essential services to make whole areas uninhabitable.
Following the end of the
48-hour cessation of air strikes, Israeli war planes carried out a wave
of bombings throughout Lebanon on Wednesday. Air strikes resumed in
the battered outskirts of Beirut in the early hours of today. Residents
heard the impact of large explosions about every five minutes starting
at 2.30 a.m. as missiles hit Dahieh, a Shiite Muslim suburb that has
been repeatedly shelled by Israel since fighting began three weeks ago.
Yesterday IDF commandos provocatively
landed near the eastern city of Baalbeck, 100 kilometres into Lebanon
and close to the Syrian border. Seizing a Hezbollah-run hospital, they
captured several alleged Hezbollah militants under the cover of an Israeli
bombardment that killed at least 19 civilians, including five children.
Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff, told reporters
at a briefing that the raid was intended to show that Israel could strike
anywhere in Lebanon.
There is open speculation
in the US media that the ground war will not be limited to the south
but could lead to a wider military operation if Israel decides to push
toward Beirut. Brigadier General Shuki Shahar, the deputy chief of the
military’s Northern Command, was quoted saying: “The farther
north we can push them, the fewer Israeli citizens they can put under
threat with these rockets.”
Further south, in Tyre, the
mass burial planned for 90 victims of the Qana massacre and other atrocities
had to be postponed because of the intensity of the Israeli missile
barrage. Tens of thousands of people are streaming out of the ancient
Mediterranean city. In recent days, its population had swollen to 100,000
because of the influx of refugees from villages inland. By Tuesday,
only about 15,000 remained.
It is now obvious that the
slaughter of innocents at Qana was part of a wider plan to terrorise
and force people to flee. With the official Lebanese civilian death
toll already nearing 1,000 and the number of displaced people one million—a
quarter of the country’s population—Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert yesterday boasted that this was a mark of success in the
war. “All the population, which is the power base of the Hezbollah
in Lebanon, was displaced,” he declared.
In other words, the strategy—agreed
with Washington from the start—is the systematic de-population
of south Lebanon, where the three-week onslaught has only increased
popular support for Hezbollah as a national resistance movement. With
IDF troops meeting further fierce opposition and Hezbollah firing more
rockets into Israel on Wednesday than on any previous day of the 22-day-old
war, Olmert declared that the army would not stop fighting or withdraw
until a “robust” international force moved into southern
Lebanon on Israel’s terms.
His government is confident
that this could take weeks or more because of the insistence of the
US, joined by Britain and Germany, that no truce be permitted until
Israel has conquered the area. A cabinet minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer,
said on army radio he expected the offensive to take up to two weeks.
Israeli generals are publicly predicting an even longer war. Brigadier
General Alon Friedman of Israel’s Northern Command said seizing
control of south Lebanon could take a week, and securing it “could
take from three to eight weeks, depending on the size of the area.”
Israel is intent on retaining
a free hand to carry out military operations throughout Lebanon even
after a peace-keeping force is put in place. Writing in Haaretz today,
Israeli military analyst Ze’ev Schiff commented: “Meanwhile,
there is a delicate situation emerging over the mandate of the future
multinational force... The danger is that sanctions will apply to both
sides. This may make it very difficult for Israel to defend itself,
even if it argues self-defence.”
Whatever tactical differences
exist with France over the timing and composition of the planned international
“stabilisation force,” there is no disagreement over its
basic function, which will be to obliterate all opposition to Lebanon
being reduced to a protectorate, completely subservient to US and Israeli
interests.
White House spokesman Tony
Snow said an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon was not on the agenda, and
downplayed differences with France on the urgency of ending the fighting.
“An immediate ceasefire is something that at this point doesn’t
seem to be in the cards. Neither side is headed that way,” he
told a press briefing.
The truth is that Washington
is urging the Israelis to get on with the slaughter as quickly as possible,
as Schiff alluded to in his Haaretz comment yesterday. A fervent advocate
of the war, he complained that the Olmert government had not yet provided
the US with the “military cards” it needed to ensure the
permanent eradication of Hezbollah.
“US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice is the figure leading the strategy of changing the
situation in Lebanon, not Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Defense Minister
Amir Peretz. She has so far managed to withstand international pressure
in favor of a ceasefire,” he wrote.
The Lebanese government has
continued to denounce Israel’s war crimes. Foreign Minister Fawzi
Salloukh called Tuesday for an immediate ceasefire and the creation
of an international tribunal to try the Israeli officials. Speaking
of Qana, Justice Minister Charles Rizk said: “Israel committed
a hideous crime against children, women and elderly and [there should
be] an international and independent committee to probe the crime.”
In Beirut, Lebanon’s
High Relief Committee (HRC) said it had counted 828 people killed and
3,200 wounded so far. “These are identified bodies, and the toll
does not count the people still believed to be under the rubble,”
an HRC spokesman said. The number of displaced has reached 913,760.
Economic losses caused by the destruction of the country’s infrastructure
are now estimated at $4 billion.
Such is the “new Middle
East” promised by the White House. The barbaric war on Lebanon,
alongside the worsening bloodletting in US-occupied Iraq, are the product
of a neo-colonial policy directed at suppressing all resistance to American
dominance of the region’s massive oil and gas reserves and US
imperialism’s wider goal of achieving unchallenged global hegemony.