One year on: The Israeli-Hizbullah conflict
Foreign citizens flee Beirut in last summer's Lebanon evacuation
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Thursday, 12, Jul 2007 10:39
Twelve months after Lebanese militants triggered the Israeli-Hizbullah conflict, InTheNews.co.uk's Alex Stevenson takes a look back at southern Lebanon's bloody summer of 2006.
Kidnappings
Tensions in the Middle East were already high prior to the start of the Israeli-Hizbullah conflict. Corporal Gilad Shalit had been kidnapped by a radical Palestinian group on June 25th, prompting the deployment of Israeli forces - including heavy armour - into the Gaza Strip on July 6th.
When Lebanese militants kidnapped two soldiers and killed seven others on July 12th it seemed as if a second front had been opened up against Israel. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) launched heavy reprisals, prompting Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah to threaten "open war".
The fighting
Wave after wave of devastating air strikes on Hizbullah outposts in southern Lebanon followed the kidnappings, but Hizbullah responded with hundreds of rocket attacks on Israeli towns during the next few weeks.
Raids on Lebanese soil by IDF forces followed, as on August 5th when commandos clashed with guerrillas in a raid near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre.
Israeli commanders then opted to expand their ground force operations into southern Lebanon, seeking to flush out the Hizbullah network. They struggled to achieve their mission goals, however, and threatened to dramatically expand their operations as the ceasefire approached.
A heavy price
As well as enduring a mounting casualty list, the Israelis began to suffer from negative international coverage as their air strikes killed more and more innocent civilians. These led to mass evacuations from expatriates living in Lebanon from Beirut, which was repeatedly bombed during the conflict
Instances like the deaths of at least 28 farm workers on the Lebanese-Syrian border near the village of Qaa, a strike against a Lebanese refugee camp on August 9th and the killing of four
UN peacekeepers on July 26th all undermined the Israeli cause.
Human rights watchdog Human Rights Watch criticised the IDF for their "indiscriminate" attacks on Lebanon, blaming Israeli forces for "having systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hizbullah in Lebanon".
But the Hizbullah rocket strikes also had a deadly effect, slowly reaching further and further south into Israel as the conflict progressed. In total 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers, died in the conflict, compared to about 1,000 Lebanese.
United Nations unheeded
Initial pleas to stop the killings from the international community met with little progress as both sides refused to stop fighting on the ground.
Difficulties establishing the exact wording of UN resolutions demanding a ceasefire caused.
unexpected problems. Disagreement centred on whether Israel should be forced to withdraw from Lebanon's borders after the cessation of hostilities.
Final ceasefire achieved
Eventually the UN unanimously passed a resolution requiring a 15,000-strong peacekeeping force of troops to police the southern Lebanon strip between the Israeli-Lebanese border and the Litani river.
Even after the Israeli cabinet approved the ceasefire on August 13th concerns remained that it would be broken; on August 19th Israeli forces launched a raid close to the city of Baalbek, claiming that arms were being smuggled from Syria into Lebanon to aid Hizbullah.
After these worries the truce held, however, as aid flooded into southern Lebanon to help the region's stricken population.
Establishing the UN force
Kofi Annan was then frustrated by reluctance on the part of the international community to volunteer forces to police the buffer zone. The Lebanese army deployed in the south on August 17th but European countries like France were criticised for originally pledging hundreds, rather than thousands, of troops to the force.
Eventually the French were pushed into raising their commitment, as the force slowly began to accumulate into an effective barrier between the two sides.
Aftermath
Although much of southern Lebanon had been completely devastated, Hizbullah claimed victory in the conflict. The Lebanese government of prime minister Fouad Siniora has been hit by a series of Cabinet resignations since the conflict as popular opinion shifts more and more towards the militants. He managed to cling on into 2007, however.
Weaknesses in Israel's IDF were exposed by the conflict, causing the resignations of a senior general in November and the country's chief of staff in January. Israeli troops finally left Lebanon on October 1st, closing this chapter in the long-running history of animosity between Hizbullah and Israel.