By Jonathan Finer and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 26, 2006; A08
AVIVIM, Israel, July 25 -- Israeli tanks and infantrymen fought house to house Tuesday against Hezbollah fighters whose hit-and-run tactics and punishing attacks have frustrated Israeli troops and slowed their onslaught.
By early evening, Israeli forces said they had seized control of Bint Jbeil, one of the largest Lebanese border towns, which one Israeli general called a Hezbollah "capital." An Israeli military spokesman said that Israeli forces had also shot dead a senior Hezbollah commander for the central section of the border.
Several days of intense clashes gave way by late afternoon Tuesday to sporadic firefights. Exchanges of Israeli artillery and airstrikes and Hezbollah mortars and rockets, which shook the surrounding hills, turned dry patches of ground into smoke-spewing fires.
Some Israeli soldiers involved in the fight, their faces drawn with fatigue, expressed frustration at Hezbollah's tactics while grudgingly acknowledging their effectiveness.
"They don't come right at us because they know we'll shoot them. So they just shoot and run away, shoot and run away. They do what they can do, and we do what we can do," 1st Sgt. Erez Kremer, 21, a tank commander, said in an interview after returning from a 72-hour mission in Lebanon. A Hezbollah missile had narrowly missed his vehicle Tuesday morning, he said, exploding on the side of a nearby building.
"If they face us, they don't have a chance," he said. "I think they fight like cowards, but it can be effective."
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz said during a visit with troops on the northern border Tuesday that Israeli forces aimed "to build a new security strip, a security strip that will be a cover for our forces until international forces arrive," the Reuters news agency reported.
Peretz gave no indication of the size of the zone envisioned, nor of when or for how long it would be established. But the phrase "security strip" evoked memories of the buffer established after Israel's 1982 invasion and the subsequent 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that helped give birth to Hezbollah. The radical Shiite group's bloody guerrilla campaign helped push Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000.
Col. Hemi Livni, commander of troops along the western part of Israel's border, told Israel's Army Radio on Tuesday that operations would be limited to southern Lebanon and would not be "going beyond that."
The Lebanese border towns of Bint Jbeil and Maroun al-Ras have seen the heaviest fighting of the two-week conflict. Israeli commanders say Hezbollah has massed its forces in the towns, and a stream of Israeli troops and armor flowed into and out of the area day and night. The conflict began July 12 when Hezbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid and killed eight others.
Blasts reverberated across the hilly terrain of southern Lebanon north of Bint Jbeil. Some residents fled the fighting in cars, usually flying white flags. Others walked the winding roads toward the relative safety of towns farther north such as Tibnin or Tyre. On hillside after hillside, bombing had left terraced farms charred. Plumes of smoke rose over some villages.
Dozens of people who fled Bint Jbeil arrived in the morning in Tibnin, where they joined at least 1,350 people huddled in a hospital that has become a camp for the displaced. Many were angry, frustrated and scared.
"This isn't our land?" asked Hoda Fawwaz, 50, carrying a blue radio tuned to broadcasts of Hezbollah's radio station, al-Nur. "They're the ones aggressing against us. We're not the ones aggressing against them."
Others shouted condemnations of Israel, the United States and other Arab states for failing to defend them. "God destroy Israel," said Hassan Hamza, 19.
Meanwhile, Israel's battle-weary Bokim Battalion, which lost two soldiers in Hezbollah ambushes Monday, returned from the fighting exhausted Tuesday afternoon, lounging in the shade of a kiwi grove and hanging their sweat-soaked uniforms out to dry. They described a complex attack in which one of their tanks, sent to evacuate wounded ground fighters, was pounded by three Hezbollah missiles. A second tank struck a mine or other explosive as it rushed to provide aid, they said.
"My radio only lets me hear people inside the vehicle, so I didn't realize right away that they had died. Then I just started to cry. I couldn't stop," said Avi Chai, 19, a tank driver whose hands and arms were still black with smoke and grease. Beside him, soldiers stripped to their T-shirts sung along to Hebrew pop songs as another soldier played guitar.
"It's easier not to talk about it," Chai said. "You just feel heavy."
Sgt. Omri Asor, 21, said the loss "only boosts our motivation."
"It's strange to lose someone close to you, who you know," he said. "It's not like seeing a soldier die on TV. It's a totally different impact."
An army major, speaking on condition that only his first name, Eli, be used, said he took over the battalion when its commander was badly wounded in the attack Monday. He said his soldiers would have no problem continuing to fight, despite the losses.
"Everybody knows that this is war, and until we finish our objectives, we cannot cease. Guys have to keep fighting because right now there is not time to think," he said. "They all, every one of them, know exactly what they are fighting for. Their families are hiding in shelters because of these rockets. And it's up to us to take them out."
In an evening briefing for reporters, Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch, commander of the Israeli army's Galilee Division, which is responsible for the Israel-Lebanon border, said Israeli forces had fought "alley to alley and house to house" for Bint Jbeil. The town was the site of a much-publicized 2000 speech by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in which he called Israel "more fragile than a spider web."
In recent days, Israeli news outlets, which had largely lined up behind the army's conduct of the war, have begun to ask why an army that once defeated the armies of several Arab neighbors in six days was finding it so difficult to push one militia off Israel's border.
Hirsch acknowledged that Hezbollah was "well-trained, well-supported and well-equipped" but said his forces had "badly hurt" the group in recent days.
"When you fight a regular army, it's different from fighting against terrorists and guerrillas. They are using everything they have extensively. They have been preparing for this for many years, and we are taking action to dismantle all of that," Hirsch said. "The government has given me plenty of time, and I intend to use it as long as it takes."
Shadid reported from Tibnin. Special correspondent Tal Zipper in Avivim contributed to this report.