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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Hizbullah ups the pressure
By Ranwa YehiaIn the wake of Hizbullah's two military operations in the occupation zone, in which a high-ranking militia member of the South Lebanon Army (SLA) was killed, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was visibly shaken. He said in a statement that his country would not be able to negotiate peace as long as Syria did not restrain the resistance fighters. This shows the difficult situation he has been put in.
To Hizbullah, the strikes in South Lebanon's occupation zone, in which the number two man in the SLA was killed and three Israeli soldiers died the following day, were well within its right.
In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Hussein Khalil, political assistant to Hizbullah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, said the Israeli losses fell within the resistance party's legitimate struggle against the occupation. "Undoubtedly, the operations are a harsh blow to the Israelis and an indication that now, more than ever, we can infiltrate into the zone freely and target them," Khalil said.
He said the killing of Akl Hashem, SLA's second-in-command, represented an accomplishment for Hizbullah both on a security and political level.
"From the security point of view, the operation showed Hizbullah's ability to infiltrate the depths of the zone Israel occupies in South Lebanon and hunt the militia's main man," Khalil said, adding it was a blow to Israel which had recently bragged about its militia's military abilities.
Hizbullah television on Sunday screened footage of Hashem's killing, showing a four-minute sequence of a vague image of a man, followed by an explosion from what the report described as a massive bomb planted by resistance fighters and detonated by remote control.
Hizbullah supporters celebrated Hashem's killing by handing out sweets to passers-by in Beirut and South Lebanon. They described it as the most spectacular resistance attack in Lebanon since party members killed a senior Israeli officer by a roadside bomb last February.
Khalil said Hashem's execution shattered the Israeli political plan to use SLA militiamen as human shields for the protection of Israeli soldiers. After Hashem's killing, Hizbullah warned members of the SLA to surrender or face a similar fate.
If Israel withdraws from South Lebanon, unilaterally or by agreement, its commitment to protect its militiamen is unclear. Israel had kept its casualties down in recent months partly by reducing the exposure of its men based inside Lebanon and increasing the use of aircraft to attack resistance positions.
Any signs of cracks within the SLA would increase the need for Israeli activity inside Lebanon. And as the attack on the Israeli post on Monday showed, Hizbullah is capable of increasing the pressure even when Israeli forces are inside their fortifications.
"Israel today is facing a huge dilemma because it has to face the fact that it must pay the price for occupying our land by losing more of its soldiers," Khalil said.
Hundreds of Lebanese celebrated the successful attack by Hizbullah against a leading SLA commander (photo: AFP)
Although he denied that there was any direct connection between the deadlock in the Israeli-Syrian peace process and the weekend operation, Khalil said the strike would definitely help raise the morale of the Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs as a whole.
"Neither Lebanese nor Syrian officials tried in any way to interfere in the operations. The resistance is more than just a tool to be invested for an internal or external political aim," Khalil said.
He was referring to some analysts who say the high success rate of Hizbullah's operations have served to boost the party's campaign for this year's parliamentary elections scheduled in August.
Both Hizbullah operations fell within the terms of the 1996 April Understanding, which governs the conflict in South Lebanon and is designed to protect civilians, making it even more difficult for Israel to justify retaliation, particularly as the international community closely monitors such incidents.
Political analyst Nizar Hamzeh, who heads the Political Science Department at the American University of Beirut, believes Israel has been pushed into a corner. "Israel's argument when peace process negotiations began was that it wants peace. When Syria entered the negotiations, its position remained consistent throughout the meetings while Israel appeared inconsistent before the international community," Hamzeh, an expert on Hizbullah, told the Weekly.
While Hamzeh believes the operation partly signified that negotiations have reached a deadlock, thereby giving Hizbullah more room for manoeuvering, he insisted that the resistance did no more than "stick to its usual agenda."
"These operations are nothing new for Hizbullah," Hamzeh said. "Perhaps they now have more room for manoeuvering in contrast with the case of Arab Salim, where Israel was testing the ground and where Barak was trying to show Syria's hold over Hizbullah," Hamzeh said. He was referring to Israel's shelling of a school in the village of Arab Salim in the south, wounding 18 children on the eve of the second round of negotiations between Syria and Israel in January. Hizbullah refrained from retaliating, deciding against lobbing Katyusha rockets over the border as it usually does when the terms of the April Understanding are breached.
Hamzeh said that while there was no direct Syrian control over Hizbullah, the movement and Syria are allied against Israel and that Hizbullah acts according to these considerations.
The latest killings, which brought Israeli losses so far this year to four, prompted a string of retaliatory air strikes on villages in southern Lebanon but without causing any casualties. "A large-scale escalation is not part of Barak's government policy," Hamzeh said when asked if he expected Israel to strike at Beirut's infrastructure in a bombing campaign. "I believe there will be a higher escalation in the south and some kind of a breach of the April Understanding but it is unlikely that Beirut will be a target. The world is looking closely at how Israel will react."
Hamzeh's main fear is that the deadlock in peace talks might lead to the death of the peace process. The third round of peace talks with Syria, which should have started on 19 January, was postponed indefinitely, stumbling over Syria's insistence that Barak should give a prior commitment to withdraw from the strategic Golan Heights right back to the de facto border in force before Israel occupied the area during the June 1967 War.
