By Edward Cody and Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 29, 2006; A08
BEIRUT, July 28 -- As fighting raged on in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah joined the Lebanese government in a peace proposal calling for an immediate cease-fire with Israel followed swiftly by a prisoner exchange and reinforcement of U.N. troops along the embattled border, senior Lebanese officials said Friday.
The agreement for the first time put Hezbollah and the rest of the Lebanese government in a unified position on how to end the 17-day-old conflict. But its terms varied widely from ideas put forth by Israel and the United States, particularly its insistence on an immediate cease-fire.
In Washington, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday they wanted a cease-fire, but only after a U.N. framework is devised that would extend Lebanese government authority to the south and disarm Hezbollah forces. They called for the dispatch of an international force to southern Lebanon.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will return to the region for more diplomacy Saturday, Bush said. U.S. officials and European diplomats said the elements for an eventual cease-fire -- on a track separate from the Lebanese proposal -- are taking shape despite the failure of a conference Wednesday in Rome to call for an immediate end to the escalating crisis.
More than 100 missiles crashed into northern Israel on Friday, slightly wounding 14 people. Israeli warplanes and heavy artillery, meanwhile, maintained a punishing rhythm of attacks against what officials in Jerusalem called Hezbollah targets.
Israeli and Hezbollah forces again traded fire in several Lebanese towns and villages Friday. Twenty-six Hezbollah fighters were killed Friday in the contested town of Bint Jbeil, the military said, and large amounts of weaponry were found there, including rifles, antitank missiles, and materials and instructions for making explosives. The Israeli military reported that six Israeli soldiers were wounded.
Lebanese officials told reporters that at least 10 more civilians were killed in fighting in the southern Lebanese hills. Three others died in early-morning Israeli attacks in the Bekaa Valley to the northeast, pushing the confirmed civilian death toll to nearly 450, according to Lebanese officials.
Journalists driving along south Lebanon's roads described a relentless drumbeat of bombs, rockets and artillery shells as jets flew overhead and artillery batteries fired from just south of the frontier. One convoy of evacuees and journalists, heading from Rmeish to Tyre, was jarred by an Israeli shell that crashed down nearby, slightly wounding a cameraman and driver for a German television station.
In the seaside city of Tyre, the trails of several Katyusha rockets arced overhead in the afternoon, headed for northern Israel. Convoys of scores of cars plied the border road that snakes along the hilly Lebanese-Israeli frontier. Nearly all flew white flags.
In Aita al-Shaab, one of the hardest-hit villages, a group of Syrian workers carried their white flags on tree branches. Others stranded along the road pleaded for help -- food, medicine or a ride to Beirut.
[On Saturday, an Israeli army spokesman said the army had launched two air strikes overnight into the Gaza Strip, the first on a weapons storage facility and the other on a tunnel along the Gaza-Egypt border, adding that "forces entered an industrial area seaching for tunnels and explosive devices as part of our earlier operations, not an incursion of any sort."]
U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland called Friday for a three-day truce to evacuate trapped civilians and replenish supplies in areas of Lebanon cut off by the fighting. Egeland told reporters that thousands of children, elderly and disabled have been stranded by more than two weeks of war, while supplies of food and medicines are dwindling.
Egeland cited estimates that nearly a third of the fatalities were children. "There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children than armed men," he said. "It has to stop."
The International Committee of the Red Cross announced in Geneva that it was appealing for $81 million to help care for people displaced by the conflict, news agencies reported. Lebanese officials put that figure at half a million or more.
On Friday, the United States evacuated about 500 more U.S. citizens from Beirut aboard a chartered cruise ship, in what may be the last U.S.-organized mass departure for Americans, the Associated Press reported. About 15,000 U.S. citizens have left Lebanon.
Hezbollah's al-Manar television reported that the radical Shiite militia fired Khaibar-1 rockets for the first time in the conflict Friday. Nine rockets, presumably Khaibar-1's, reached the Israeli coastal city of Afula, about 30 miles south of the border. The weapon draws its name from the site of a 7th-century battle in which early followers of the prophet Muhammad conquered a Jewish enclave on the Arabian Peninsula. Police called the rockets the biggest so far to fall on Israel.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a Katyusha rocket struck a hospital in Nahariya, damaging an upper story. The floor in Western Galilee Hospital was empty of patients, who had been moved to an underground shelter.
Since the conflict began July 12, 18 Israeli civilians have been killed by Hezbollah rockets and missiles. During the same period, 33 Israeli soldiers have died in exchanges with Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanese villages.
In diplomatic circles, discussions continued as to what form an international force for southern Lebanon might take. Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja said that European Union countries "will be providing the biggest share in any such force" and that France could end up taking command.
European critics have said that the U.S. opposition to an immediate cease-fire is meant to give Israel further time to grind Hezbollah down militarily.
On Thursday, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said that the Rome meeting's failure to call for an immediate cease-fire gave Israel a green light to carry on its offensive. That drew a rejoinder Friday from Rice's spokesman, J. Adam Ereli. "Any such statement is outrageous," Ereli said. "The United States is sparing no effort to bring a durable and lasting end to this conflict."
The unified Lebanese proposal represents an alternative approach and a diplomatic challenge for Rice, because it came from the Lebanese government, whose sovereignty she has repeatedly said she wants to buttress.
Hezbollah signed on to the joint proposal "in principle" on the understanding that more discussions will be held between it and other political factions after the U.N. Security Council decides on the composition and mandate of an international force on the border, according to Hezbollah and government officials. The radical Shiite Muslim movement would maintain its heavily armed militia in the south during the talks.
The plan, arrived at in prolonged negotiations Thursday, followed the broad outlines of what Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora presented to fellow leaders at the emergency meeting in Rome. It got nowhere then, chiefly because of Rice's opposition to the idea of a cease-fire as the first step.
Labor Minister Tarrad Hamadeh, a Hezbollah supporter, said that the cease-fire must come first but that once the shooting stopped, a prisoner exchange could take place "in two or three hours" through intermediaries. German intelligence officials, who have arranged previous exchanges, would again be welcome candidates for the job , he said.
Hezbollah has demanded that Israel release three long-jailed Lebanese prisoners in return for two Israeli soldiers that Hezbollah captured in the July 12 cross-border raid that touched off the fighting. Israel, backed by the United States, has demanded that the two Israelis be turned over unconditionally.
After a prisoner exchange, "we will discuss between us Lebanese how to proceed toward a reinforced international presence along the border," Hamadeh said. He acknowledged that disarming Hezbollah would have to be part of the discussion, saying: "We would discuss that as part of the system of national defense, but between us Lebanese."
The proposal also demands a Security Council commitment to place the disputed Shebaa Farms area under U.N. supervision until Syria, Israel and Lebanon can work out a settlement on whose territory it should be. Ghaleb Abu-Zeinab of Hezbollah's political bureau said this was key because the tiny pocket of orchards -- where the Israeli and Lebanese borders meet the occupied Golan Heights -- is the militia's only territorial dispute with Israel.
With that issue settled, he suggested, Hezbollah could consider some form of disarmament and cooperation with the Lebanese army and international peacekeepers. "If we got rid of the Shebaa Farms issue, for instance, then the liberation role of Hezbollah would end and we would be in a defense role," he said in an interview. "So we would be open to new discussions."
The idea of a U.N.- or European-led international force with a mandate and weaponry to make Hezbollah lay down its arms, as suggested by Israel and the United States, is "out of the question," Hamadeh said. "It would never be accepted," he added.
Abu-Zeinab said 17 days of fighting have shown that Israel cannot reach its aims by force of arms, and so the time has come "to discuss a way out of the impasse." Many Hezbollah supporters and other Lebanese share the view that the militia, by holding out as long as it has against Israel's well-equipped army, has enhanced its position in Lebanon and the Middle East.
Abu-Zeinab said the U.S.-Israeli demand that Hezbollah leave the southern border zone as part of any settlement is unrealistic. The group and its militia, he explained, are formed by the local population, which amounts to about 400,000 people between the Litani River and the Israeli border.
"The only way they can get Hezbollah out of the south is to empty the whole area of its population," he said.
Finer reported from Jerusalem. Anthony Shadid in Rmeish and Robin Wright in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, contributed to this report.