By Scott Wilson and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 23, 2006; A01
AVIVIM, Israel, July 22 -- Backed by intensive artillery fire and airstrikes, Israeli forces fought Saturday for a Lebanese hilltop town in a widening campaign to secure a roughly 15-square-mile region of southern Lebanon against seasoned Hezbollah guerrillas, who continued firing scores of rockets into northern Israeli cities now largely empty of residents.
Israeli military aircraft, meanwhile, pounded roads, bridges and Hezbollah targets across Lebanon in the 11th day of a bombing campaign that has pushed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes and left the country's civilian infrastructure in tatters. In the mountains north of Beirut, Israeli military jets hit television and telephone transmitters and relay stations, knocking out broadcasts and cellular phone service to parts of the country.
As more than 130 Hezbollah rockets landed inside Israel -- striking from the port city of Haifa to Kiryat Shmona in the northeast -- Israeli tanks, bulldozers and infantry troops battled in and around Maroun al-Ras, a town along a ridgeline about a mile from this Israeli farming community, which has emptied out in recent days. Israeli commanders on the ground said they'd taken control of the village, although it remained unclear whether Hezbollah gunmen had been driven off. The Israeli ground operation, now focused on controlling four Lebanese villages, remained relatively small.
[Early Sunday, the Associated Press reported, warplanes for the first time hit inside the port city of Sidon, currently swollen with refugees, destroying a religious complex the Israeli military said was used by Hezbollah. Official said four people were wounded. Also Sunday, large explosions reverberated in Beirut and Israeli jets hit targets in eastern Bekaa Valley, firing missiles in the cities of Hermel and Baalbek, witnesses said.]
Israeli officials indicated Saturday that a larger invasion may not be needed to achieve Israel's goals, which include driving Hezbollah gunmen from the border, pressuring Lebanon's weak government to disarm the radical Shiite Muslim militia and political movement, and freeing the two Israeli soldiers the group captured in a raid July 12.
The officials' statements, coming days after Israeli political leaders warned that a large ground incursion was under consideration, appeared to define the limits of a military operation that has so far failed to stop rocket fire or dislodge Hezbollah from the border region it has dominated since Israel left southern Lebanon in 2000 after a bitter 18-year occupation.
"We are not preparing for an invasion of Lebanon," said Avi Pazner, a senior Israeli government spokesman. "A combination of air force, artillery and ground force pressure will push Hezbollah out without arriving at the point where we have to invade and occupy" southern Lebanon.
Israel's modern army has been unable to stop Hezbollah's rockets, relatively crude weapons that take seconds to reach their targets. The number of rockets that fell inside Israel on Saturday was among the highest one-day totals since the military operation began. More than 900 rockets have landed inside Israel during that period.
The United Nations and some governments are calling on both sides to end the fighting and give diplomacy a chance to resolve the conflict, which has killed more than 360 Lebanese, mostly civilians. In Israel, 15 civilians and 20 soldiers have been killed. [The Israeli military said early Sunday that the body of a fifth soldier killed Thursday in a battle in southern Lebanon has been recovered, the Associated Press reported. ]
Israeli officials appeared to open the door Saturday to diplomatic efforts, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prepared to visit the region early next week. Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, a member of Israel's general staff, said the bombing and ground operation has diminished Hezbollah's "overall capability, but to what extent we still don't know."
"There is one line between our military objectives and our political objectives," Nehushtan said. "The goal is not necessarily to eliminate every Hezbollah rocket. What we must do is disrupt the military logic of Hezbollah. I would say that this is still not a matter of days away."
Israeli warplanes attacked television and telephone relay stations north of Beirut. The attacks fit a pattern of sustained Israeli efforts to destroy civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, much of it rebuilt from the wreckage of previous wars. But Saturday's strikes were the first directed at the mountain heartland of Lebanon's Maronite Christians, Israel's allies in the 1982 invasion, who often share its hostility toward Hezbollah.
Israeli airstrikes repeatedly targeted sites around the southern Lebanese village of Khiyam, seeking out Hezbollah positions and rocket launchers, and again blasted road traffic around the coastal city of Tyre.
By noon, a snarled line of minibuses, pickups, taxis and cars packed with as many as 10 people each stretched for a mile along a cratered street heading through Tyre. Lebanese soldiers directed traffic as it began moving over a dirt road across the Litani River.
Many were fleeing Aitaroun, Bint Jbeil and other cities following Israel's urgent evacuation orders to the 300,000 people who live south of the Litani, which runs roughly 25 miles north of the Israeli border.
Outside Tyre, which appeared deserted as airstrikes continued, the swoosh of Hezbollah rockets fired into Israel could be heard. In the afternoon, Israeli forces showered the city with leaflets showing a bound Lebanese family next to a cleric. Playing on a Lebanese aphorism, the leaflet read: "Those protecting it are robbing it."
"Every two or three years, we see another war," said Ali Ghandour, a 50-year-old resident of Nabatiyeh, who fled to Tyre on the first day of fighting. With about 40 other people, he was living in an unfinished, three-story villa. "For the first time, we want to see a real end to the war, where we live in dignity."
Hussein Daher, a wiry 28-year-old from Toura, shook his head. "Citizens didn't start the war, and they can't end it either," he said.
Relying on goodwill from friends and relatives, those who had been displaced spoke of abandonment by the Lebanese government, other Arab states and the world. Only Hezbollah is protecting them, they said. "From what we've seen all around us -- destroying homes, and the schools, and the bridges, and the roads -- it's become clear what Israel's true ambitions are," Ghandour said.
The fight for Maroun al-Ras has killed seven Israeli soldiers, disabled several tanks and left what Israeli commanders said were dozens of Hezbollah gunmen dead. The operation now comprises a tank brigade and several hundred troops ranged along the border, the commanders said.
Israeli military officials and battlefield commanders said the incursion is designed to drive Hezbollah gunmen from four villages in an area six miles wide and 2.5 miles deep inside Lebanon. Maroun al-Ras, Aitaroun and Yaroun lie in a cluster just over the border roughly 20 miles inland. The fourth village, Marwaheen, is about halfway between the coast and the three other villages.
"We see them sitting inside villages and shooting, getting inside the village and running away," said Lt. Col. Yishai Efrani, deputy commander of the army's Galilee Brigade, which is fighting near Marwaheen. "We don't see Hezbollah face to face. We only see them when we cross the border and try to hunt them."
Tank commanders who have been fighting inside Lebanon said here Saturday that Hezbollah's resistance, based in a network of tunnels, bunkers and posts, was as stiff as expected. Working under a blazing sun, crews emptied one Merkava II tank that had been battered by a Hezbollah mine the previous day, scattering tank shells, .50-caliber ammunition, machine guns and flares.
"They are well-protected and have a lot of ammunition," said Cmdr. Siman Tov, the deputy commander of the tank brigade here.
Tov, 26, said the operations targeting Maroun al-Ras involve 300 to 400 troops and a dozen tanks and that more troops and tanks scheduled to arrive in the coming days would roughly double the size of the force. He said several dozen Hezbollah gunmen are fighting from tunnels, some equipped with above-ground cameras. They are armed with more sophisticated weapons than those being used in the West Bank and Gaza, including longer-range antitank missiles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
"Here we're dealing with missiles, a little army," Tov said. "Here they have been organized. In Gaza, they are just getting organized."
Regarding the fight for Maroun al-Ras, Tov said, "I'm not saying Hezbollah is not there, but we control it."
From a vantage point among the abandoned houses here, however, Israel's army appeared to still be fighting for the town.
The battle has been unfolding along a plowed plain. Dirt tracks run up the hillside toward the apartments and a minaret, near a U.N. peacekeepers' base.
In the afternoon, two columns of tanks and bulldozers kicked up dust trails as they approached the town from two sides. Artillery batteries sent shells whistling across the valley to the hillside as Israeli jets peppered the area with bombs.
After entering two of the towns in recent days, Israeli military officials said, soldiers found Katyusha rocket launchers, antitank missile launchers and ammunition. Israeli officers say the weapons were from Iran and Syria, Hezbollah's chief sponsors.
Ilay Talmor, a second lieutenant who commands a tank, helped strip down a damaged tank. Two days earlier he had been trapped inside his platoon commander's tank a half-mile inside Lebanon; the vehicle had been crippled when its tread fractured.
"It was more important for him to go on, so we switched tanks," Talmor said.
After taking mortar fire every few minutes for 24 hours, Talmor's tank was rescued by colleagues. Hezbollah's tenacity, he said, was understandable.
"We knew they were going to do this," Talmor said. "This is territory they say is theirs. We would do the same thing if someone came into our country."
Shadid reported from Tyre. Correspondents John Ward Anderson in Jerusalem, Jonathan Finer in Zarit, Israel, and Edward Cody in Beirut contributed to this report.