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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 May 1999 Issue No. 430 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 May 1999 Issue No. 430
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Supplement Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Netanyahu campaigns in south Lebanon
By Zeina KhodrNine people killed, 13 wounded, two captured and an Israeli position and an armoured personnel carrier seized. That was the toll in south Lebanon in just over 48 hours earlier this week. The flare-up of fighting came days before Israelis went to the polls. It was not good timing for the right-wing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who was already trailing behind his main rival Labour leader Ehud Barak in opinion polls.
This led security sources to believe that the situation in south Lebanon reached a "dangerous phase" and warned "the security situation may deteriorate".
But according to analysts here the situation is unlikely to spiral out of control. "I do not think that there will be a large-scale response by Israel," Mohamed Mashmoushi, the deputy editor of the As-Safir daily told Al-Ahram Weekly. "If Netanyahu wanted to utilise the situation in the south for his own electoral ambitions he should have started playing with that card two or three weeks ago and he did not."
The occupation of southern Lebanon and the steady death toll its forces suffer took centre stage in Israeli elections a few weeks ago but it has not become an issue anymore. "You see the latest violence did not claim any Israeli lives. Israeli allied militiamen were targeted. This means Israel does not feel it has an obligation to respond harshly," Mashmoushi explained. "And Netanyahu is aware that any operation in the south may lead to a catastrophe."
Thursday was the bloodiest day south Lebanon witnessed since the start of the year. In the early hours of the morning, a woman was killed when a shell hit her house in the occupied village of Houla. Four civilians were also hurt by flying glass. That night, there was heavy exchange of fire between Hizbullah resistance guerrillas who launched a series of attacks against Israeli positions and Israeli forces and their local allies.
Nasrallah holding up an Israeli machine-gun during a rally in Beirut (photo: AFP)Hours later an Israeli warplane fired rockets on the edge of the southern village of Majdel Selm. A house was flattened and two of its occupants were killed. A civilian standing nearby was wounded. The two were members of the "Faithful Amal Movement". But residents in the area denied the men were active resistance fighters and claimed they were working in their fields when they heard shelling and ran to the house to take cover.
Not long after that attack, a roadside bomb went off in the occupied enclave of Jezzine. An Israeli allied militiaman and three of his family members were killed and another wounded when the bomb destroyed their car. The militia accused the Hizbullah resistance movement of carrying out the attack but the movement categorically denied involvement. "This criminal act against civilians is an Israeli plot to ignite confusion among the Lebanese residents of Jezzine," Hizbullah MP Ammar Mussawi said. Hizbullah's top official in the south Sheikh Nabil Kawook meanwhile vowed "the crime will not go unpunished".
Jezzine is officially outside the occupation zone but held by the militia. The mainly Christian population of Jezzine held a strike to protest the attack and called on the Lebanese authorities to take "whatever measures are necessary to prevent an exodus from the area". The town's dignitaries also accused the bombers, without naming them, of "resuming a campaign to depopulate the area of its Christian residents".
Israel responded to the attack by staging a series of air raids on locations facing Jezzine. Security sources said it was more of a muscle flexing exercise and an attempt to restrain their local allies from launching revenge attacks. "The Israelis did not want the militia to respond on the eve of elections," security sources and Israeli newspapers said. "That would have been dangerous for Israel especially if Hizbullah retaliated by attacking northern Israel."
The resistance was also able to overrun an Israeli allied militia position at Beit Yahoun. Footage of the attack was shown on television. Its fighters captured an Israeli allied militiaman and an armoured personnel carrier which they drove through the streets of south Lebanon. Fighting in other areas also left one militiaman dead, an Israeli soldier and five militiamen wounded. Two civilians were also wounded in Israeli bombardment of the villages of Haddath and Aita Al-Jabal.
Hizbullah also announced the capture of a security officer serving in the militia. "Our fighters who infiltrated the occupation zone snatched the officer and took him to government-controlled territory," the group said.
The local press linked the air raids and mortar bombardments to the Israeli poll. "Seven southerners fall prey to Israel's election countdown", the conservative daily An-Nahar said.
Other press reports linked the upsurge of violence to the visit of Iran's President Mohamed Khatami to Syria where he met Syrian officials and the head of the Hizbullah movement Sayed Hassan Nasrallah. An observer who preferred to remain anonymous told the Weekly that "there could be some kind of link".
"First of all the resistance movement in Lebanon wants to show they are still very active," the observer said. "Hizbullah tends to have closer ties with the fundamentalists in Iran more than Khatami and maybe they were giving the Iranian president a message -- that his policy of moderation will not work."
