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Israeli War Plan Had No Exit Strategy
Israeli forces fire into southern Lebanon from the frontier in northern Israel on July 12, the day Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in an ambush.
(By Oded Balilty -- Associated Press)
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On July 12, the dull thump of explosions reached Efroni's brigade headquarters as he reviewed morning intelligence reports. Six other army posts reported taking fire at the same time, coordinated attacks that knocked out surveillance cameras.
Contact with the patrol was lost after the Hezbollah team knocked out the trailing Humvee, killing the soldiers inside. But it took 20 minutes to confirm that Staff Sgts. Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26, were missing from the first vehicle, a delay that gave the gunmen a large lead as they fled through olive orchards to the Lebanese border village of Aita al-Shaab.
Efroni sent a Merkava tank, an armored personnel carrier and a helicopter in pursuit. But the most direct route into the village was a dirt track lined with explosives-filled trenches. Instead, Efroni ordered the tank through a rocky canyon from the east. Tracking its progress from the operations room, he watched with alarm as it unexpectedly veered onto the road near a known Hezbollah post.
The blast beneath the tank was enormous, killing the four soldiers inside instantly. The fight to retrieve the bodies lasted hours and killed the eighth Israeli soldier of the day.
"All they wanted was some part of their bodies," Efroni said, referring to the Hezbollah fighters. He recalled that Israel had released hundreds of Palestinian, Lebanese and other Arab prisoners in exchange for the remains of three soldiers taken in 2000 and a kidnapped civilian. "They know we go to great efforts to get our people back."
An Evolving Response
At 9:45 on the morning of July 12, Olmert sat across from Noam and Aviva Shalit, an unassuming couple who had come to hear how Israel's leader intended to free their son, captured by radical Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip 2 1/2 weeks earlier.
There was a knock on Olmert's office door. His military aide entered with a note.
The slip contained news of the ambush. "Hannibal," the army code word for a captured soldier, had been passed up the chain of command.
"I think you should read this, too," Olmert said as he handed the note to Noam Shalit, according to his communications director, Asaf Shariv, who watched events unfold that morning.
The Hannibal code triggered instant aerial surveillance and airstrikes inside Lebanon to limit Hezbollah's ability to move the soldiers it had seized. "If we had found them, we would have hit them, even if it meant killing the soldiers," a senior Israeli official said.
Olmert ordered his government to assemble that evening for an emergency meeting at military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Just before 6 p.m., Olmert arrived at the compound of palms and grassy courtyards. For the next two hours, his generals and intelligence chiefs presented him with a plan to strike Lebanon's roads, bridges, international airport and other infrastructure, especially in the Shiite Muslim south that is Hezbollah's heartland. This was followed by a government meeting, which went on until midnight.
