The Observer Special

The Observer: My journey on the highway of fear
with families who lost everything

The Observer's Foreign Affairs Editor records his remarkable week with Lebanese refugees fleeing the Israeli onslaught

Peter Beaumont
Sunday July 30, 2006

You can hear the bombs detonate and see the damage in Beirut, but something changes in people's faces as you drive out and down along the coast road. South of Sidon you reach the war. By Tyre, the faces are desperate as they race their cars north, seeking some element of safety.

Israeli gunships shell the coastal road. They sit out of sight, just over the horizon. All you hear is the buzzing of the Predator drones transmitting GPS coordinates of targets to the ships and planes. Where the coastal road is destroyed you wind on to a track lined with abandoned, dust-covered cars that have run out of petrol. Others are wrecked by shell and missile blasts.

An Israeli transmission breaks into the frequencies on the car radio in perfect Arabic, but with Rs that roll a bit too much. It is on a loop. 'Where is Hassan Nasrallah? [Hizbollah's general secretary],' it asks. It blames him for the violence and Lebanon's woes. It warns that there may be worse to come.

We stop on the outskirts of the town by a vast bomb crater. It is recent enough that its churned clods of earth are damp. An old, toffee-coloured Mercedes rolls down the road. It is striking because the roof has been flattened. The driver squashed inside is an elderly man in a blue shirt. He shouts as he speeds by: 'My journalist's been killed.' Later we discover she was a young Lebanese photographer, aged 24. She was killed when an Israeli missile hit the refugee convoy with which she was travelling. Suddenly there is the whoosh and boom of naval gunfire exploding near by. It hits a car belonging to some of the refugees to whom we had been talking.

Monday 24 July,
Beirut

Beirut has become a city of two halves. The southern suburbs are wrecked and paranoid places where young Hizbollah gunmen stand on street corners. In the centre - even as the bombs still fall to the city's south - the streets are filling with cars, and the cafes with elegant Lebanese reading L'Orient Le Jour and the Daily Star with one eye on the television.

In the morning I decide to take Hizbollah's daily tour of Haret Hreik, the most bombed of the southern suburbs. In half an hour 100 journalists have arrived and the man from Hizbollah marches us off at a brisk pace. Almost immediately we arrive at a seven-storey housing block chopped down the middle by a precision 1,000lb bomb - the US-made JDAM. The quick-moving crocodile turns a corner. Suddenly the scene is of a devastation quite complete.

I scribble this: 'Twelve-storey building to my left, four ground floors scorched where cars had flamed and burned. Cars scattered around an open area capped by a collapsed motorway bridge. Beyond in a rough semi-circle more housing blocks. Whole floors blown out.' I hear a rattling on a balcony above me and realise that someone is beginning to clean up what once had been their home. Suddenly there is a tension. The Hizbollah guides are running and shouting: 'Khatar! [Danger] F-16!' We flee.

Back in the city centre, we head for a restaurant in Hamra for lunch. The waiters flirt with each other and ignore the customers. Well-groomed women sit gossiping, while men sit and read the newspapers and smoke. But eyes flick constantly to the television.

Outside there are now soldiers from the Lebanese army manning checkpoints in the streets. They are there not to give protection against the Israelis but out of fear that the huge influx of Shia refugees into Beirut might spark a renewal of sectarian violence, not least from the Christians, many of whom are cheering on their old allies, the Israelis.

Tuesday 25 July,
Nabatiye

Hadi Fakih is a paediatrician at the Sheikh Ragheb Harb hospital in Nabatiye. These difficult days he spends as much time as he can working on emergency cases: lacerations, crushing injuries and burns. He sleeps in the afternoon because the bombing usually starts after midnight. Usually. As we chat, an Israeli jet screams in and tosses a bomb into the neighbouring area of Harouf. It is close enough to smell the explosives.

Fakih is 30 years old and looks younger. His wife Lina and six-month-old-son Ali are in the neighbouring city of Sidon. They talk three times a day so he can reassure her of his safety.

Later we can hear the villages a little to the south being hit with a ferocious intensity throughout the day with artillery and air strikes, sounds rolling through the mountains like a demented drummer.

Nabatiye is a ghost town. The few women and children who have stayed are hiding in the basement of the Ghandour hospital. Upstairs we meet 21-year-old Shireen Hamza. The night before, two Israeli bombs hit her house and that of a neighbour, killing her father Ahmed, 58, her brother Mohammed, 19, and her 45-year-old mother, as well as three neighbours.

'We heard the first air strike,' she says from her bed. 'I was screaming, but no one could hear me. Then there was the second air strike and I knew my brother was dead and my father was lying there under the bricks. I said: "Please don't go to sleep!" We stayed because my dad is a guy who is not easily scared. My mum was scared. But we are civilians. Why did they kill us?'

As we are leaving Nabatiye, the vegetable sellers in the bomb-damaged souk encourage two friends who live in Beirut to take a kitten that has been abandoned by its owners. At the Canycat vet in Beirut it becomes apparent that in the rush to flee many have been left behind while their rich owners have fled. A whole wall is filled with cats in boxes. They sit miserably confined or fight to find an exit. It seems a metaphor for Lebanon's pain.

Wednesday 26 July,
Keyfoun and Beirut

The flags left over from the World Cup, which the Lebanese passionately followed, have been co-opted for war use, stuck onto buildings and flown from cars as a message to the jets - don't hit us. I am reminded of this on the way up to Keyfoun, a Shia resort in the Shouf mountains, for the second time, to see an aid distribution by Mercy Corps. The food is being handed out at the Suites Hotel, its reception and rooms filled with refugees from the Bekaa Valley, from the south and from the southern suburbs. 'Any time anybody gets upset they come and make trouble for the Shia,' the youth behind the reception desk laughs, but there is a bitter edge in it. He is, it turns out, a Shia. Seconds later the television at the end of the reception area is turned on and a group of refugees gather around it to watch Condoleezza Rice answer press questions at the international conference on Lebanon in Rome. A man in a white vest shouts at the television repeatedly: 'God help us to destroy our enemies!' He gets up as if to assault the television set, but is restrained.

Thursday 27 July,
Jieh and Tyre

Omar al-Ahmad is fishing from the pier at the deserted Sand's Rock resort in Jieh. Less than a kilometre away the burning tanks at the Jieh power plant, rocketed by the Israelis, throw flames several hundred feet into the air. He is not bothered by the threat of a new explosion or the slick of oil on the sea. 'It is only on the surface,' he explains. Inside the resort its elderly owner, Elias al-Kazi, drinks his coffee under the restaurant canopy to avoid the rain of oil and surveys the ruination of his dreams.

The run into Tyre is as frightening as before. The bomb crater at the outskirts has a new addition: a smashed red car sitting inside it. The city is full of groups of journalists prowling in cars or sitting at the Tyre Rest House. Lebanon has become a ghastly reality show. We head to the hospital as shells fly in. A petite, intense young woman in a headscarf approaches and asks to speak. She has a story she wants to tell. Alamida Ghaith, 22, is a student from the village of Shihin, 20km from Tyre. Last Sunday she was sitting down to lunch with her father, Mohammed, 60, her mother Mounira and her sister Raja. 'We could hear the helicopter all morning, but the atmosphere seemed calm and the helicopter seemed far away. I wasn't afraid and I was eating lunch when the helicopter fired and the building fell on us.

'My father and mother were in the kitchen. A large block fell on me. But God spared me. When I got to the rest of my family they were under blocks. My sister - she was going to be married at the end of this month - her head was destroyed.' The horror passes across Alamida's face. 'My mother looked so content. She reached up a hand to touch my face. I tried to put an arm under her to support her, but when I reached beneath her there was only a hole and a red-hot piece of shrapnel. But she touched my face and looked at me.

'My father does not know his wife and daughter have died. His ears have gone.' Alamida becomes angry. 'Do we look like fighters? Do we look like Hizbollah? Until Sunday all I lived for was my education. Now all of us are the resistance.'

Later, on the most dangerous section of the road, we come across a broken-down car full of refugees from Aita Shaab, the border village from which Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, the incident that sparked this war. We squeeze the women and children into our two cars, exhausted, frightened and hungry after 10 days under constant shellfire.

Back in Beirut's centre that evening, bathed and clean, I watch the rituals of the youthful evening strollers. And Lebanon survives.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833341,00.html

---

Cabinet in open revolt over Blair's Israel policy

· Straw joins criticism of Lebanese toll
· Rice in Jerusalem to push peace plan

Gaby Hinsliff in San Francisco, Ned Temko in London and Peter Beaumont in Beirut
Sunday July 30, 2006

Tony Blair was facing a full-scale cabinet rebellion last night over the Middle East crisis after his former Foreign Secretary warned that Israel's actions risked destabilising all of Lebanon.

Jack Straw, now Leader of the Commons, said in a statement released after meeting Muslim residents of his Blackburn constituency that while he grieved for the innocent Israelis killed, he also mourned the '10 times as many innocent Lebanese men, women and children killed by Israeli fire'.

He said he agreed with the Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells that it was 'very difficult to understand the kind of military tactics used by Israel', adding: 'These are not surgical strikes but have instead caused death and misery amongst innocent civilians.' Straw said he was worried that 'a continuation of such tactics by Israel could destabilise the already fragile Lebanese nation'.

The Observer can also reveal that at a cabinet meeting before Blair left for last Friday's Washington summit with President George Bush, minister after minister pressed him to break with the Americans and publicly criticise Israel over the scale of death and destruction.

The critics included close Blair allies. One, the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, was revealed yesterday to have told a Commons committee that he did not view Israel's strikes on power stations as a 'proportionate response' to Hizbollah attacks.

Another Blairite minister among the cabinet critics said: 'It was clear that Tony knows the situation, and didn't have to be told about the outrage felt by so many over the disproportionate suffering. He also completely understands the effect on the Muslim community - both in terms of losing Muslim voters hand over fist and the wider issue of community cohesion.'

Blair responded to the dissenters by 'engaging seriously', the minister said. 'But he made it clear why he felt he had to choose the high-risk strategy of trying to move things forward for the future of the Middle East through his talks in Washington.'

In addition to the cabinet critics, one of Blair's closest Labour confidants was understood to have urged him last week to 'place distance' between himself and Bush over the crisis.

In interviews last night in San Francisco, the Prime Minister defended his decision not to call for an immediate ceasefire, but voiced the hope that an agreement on a UN framework for ending hostilities could be reached within a period of days. Asked by Sky News if he was too close to the White House, he said: 'I will never apologise for Britain being a strong ally of the US.'

He said there had been 'perfectly good' cabinet discussions on Lebanon, telling the BBC they had not been divisive: 'What they were saying was: "Let us make sure with urgency we can stop this situation which is killing innocent people".' Yet there had to be a long-term solution, he said.

The increase in political pressure came as shifts by Israel and Hizbollah provided the first faint signs of encouragement for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to sell a Blair-Bush plan for a ceasefire.

Diplomats said her mission would still be difficult, with Israeli strikes continuing in a bid to end rocket attacks by Hizbollah and the militia vowing to increase them. But as Rice arrived in Jerusalem last night, an Israeli official said his government would no longer insist on immediate disarmament by the militia as part of a deal. The Israelis would accept an interim arrangement under which an international force moved it back from the border and prevented it firing into Israel. Hizbollah has accepted a Lebanese government proposal including an international force.

Rice was due to meet the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, last night and, after further meetings in Jerusalem, to travel on to Beirut.

Straw's decision to go public with his concerns deepened the rift between the Prime Minister and his cabinet and MPs in what threatens to become his biggest foreign policy crisis since the Iraq war.

It also puts Straw's successor, Margaret Beckett, on the spot. She was planning to go on holiday this week, but may now have to go to New York to help pilot the draft UN resolution. Eyebrows in Whitehall were raised last week when she sent Howells to Beirut and Tel Aviv at the height of the conflict.

The timing of the revolt is awkward for Blair, forcing him to choose whom to upset: his colleagues back home or his two main hosts on the five-day trip to the US. President Bush and Rupert Murdoch both back the Israeli military action. The Prime Minister is due to make a major speech in California today at a conference hosted by Murdoch. He is expected to argue that his Washington talks with Bush were geared towards an 'urgent cessation of hostilities'.

He will also suggest the conflict could have been avoided. Instead, he will argue, the world turned a blind eye to Lebanon as Hizbollah built up its arsenals in breach of a UN resolution that required it to be disarmed and the Lebanese army to be deployed in the border area.

Blair won a concession in the Washington talks - an apology from President Bush for having failed to ask permission for a plane carrying bombs bound for Israel to land at Prestwick airport, near Glasgow. But yesterday, the civil aviation authorities announced that permission had been granted for two similar refuelling stops by US aircraft carrying 'hazardous' cargo to Israel.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833538,00.html

---

Israelis withdraw from Hizbollah border stronghold

Inigo Gilmore in Jerusalem and Peter Beaumont in Southern Lebanon
Sunday July 30, 2006

Israeli forces pulled out of the Lebanese border town of Bint Jbeil yesterday on the 18th day of the Middle East crisis.

Israeli troops had raided the Hizbollah stronghold, 2.5 miles from the Israel-Lebanon border, earlier in the week as part of a major offensive but were taken by surprise by the strength of resistance from militia. Israeli Military Northern Command chief Udi Adam said the army would continue to operate in southern Lebanon, saying: 'We will continue to fight in the area of Bint Jbeil. We hold commanding positions in the areas.'

Adam told reporters that troops killed 70 to 80 Hizbollah guerrillas in the territory over the past few days. The army had suffered its biggest losses in fighting with Hizbollah in Bint Jbeil and nearby areas.

Israeli sergeant Yoad Mor, who was wounded in the clashes in southern Lebanon, said troops found a large cache of weapons and munitions, and that heavy clashes made it difficult to evacuate him to Israel.

'It was very dangerous,' he said. 'It was a good rescue. I immediately called my father. I said... "Listen, it sounds strange but I went in and came out [of Lebanon]." He said: "No problem, which hospital are you at?"'

Israel has been accused of pursuing a scorched-earth policy in the region, using aerial weapons and phosphorus shells in a manner human rights organisations claim is in breach of international law.

As Lebanese medical staff reported that an Israeli air strike had killed a woman and her six children in a house in the southern village of Nmeiriya, western diplomats in Beirut admitted they were 'baffled' by Israel's targeting policy. Ambulances, refugee columns and civilian homes, infrastructure and UN posts have all been hit - and evidence has begun to emerge that civilians may have suffered phosphorus burns.

Footage has also emerged of the increasingly widespread use of cluster munitions in areas with civilian inhabitants. Concern has been further heightened by the delivery to Israel by the US of at least 100 GBU-28 'bunker-buster' bombs containing depleted uranium warheads for use against targets in Lebanon.

Human rights organisations are also examining whether Israel's 'order' for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese residents south of the Litani river to abandon their homes is a breach of international law and UN conventions.

A field researcher from the American based Human Rights Watch (HRW), Lucy Mair, sent pictures to military experts at the organisation's New York office of munitions being transported to Israel's northern border and fired into Lebanon from howitzers. She was shocked to discover they were cluster munitions.

Mair said researchers on the other side of the border documented an attack using the munitions on the village of Blida last week which killed one person and injured 12 and that the explosives - which disperse after impact - are 'inaccurate and unreliable', and should not be used in populated areas.

Mair, who heads HRW's Jerusalem office, said a disturbing picture was emerging of the use of weapons, fired from air and land, which pointed at best to a lack of due care regarding civilian life and at worst to the direct targeting of civilians.

'The overwhelming impression is that time and time and again civilians are attacked and only civilian infrastructure is targeted. In cases of civilian casualties our investigators have studied, they have not been able to find the presence of Hizbollah rockets or launchers - only civilian targets,' she said.

The group believes the use of cluster munitions in populated areas may violate the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks contained in international humanitarian law. Critics say the law of war requires a distinction between soldiers and civilians, so when an army is using an outdated, unreliable weapon in a populated area it is likely the attack will violate international law.

Regarding reports that Israel was intentionally trying to depopulate a large swathe of territory in the south, Mair said: 'It's hard for us to speak about this. But given there is such a massive displacement, it's difficult to imagine a situation where the population can move back.'

There have also been reports in Lebanon that Israel is using phosphorus munitions, with doctors reporting burn wounds to civilians. Israel has commented that it believes that it has used its weapons legally.

Israeli troops said yesterday they had killed two Islamic Jihad militants in Nablus, including Hani Awijan, described as the leader of its militant wing in the West Bank city.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833616,00.html

---

The day Israel realised that this was a real war

When a bloody ambush in a Lebanese village ripped apart a squad of Israeli troops last week, the full reality of the fighting reached homes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time. But calls for a major offensive have reawakened painful memories of old defeats, and old losses, across the troubled border

Ian Black in Jerusalem, Inigo Gilmore in Nahariya and Mitchell Prothero in Beirut
Sunday July 30, 2006

It was five in the morning and the lead Golani Brigade squad was moving carefully through the outskirts of Bint Jbeil when a burst of automatic fire rang out. Hizbollah fighters engaged the Israeli patrol at close range with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades, from alleys, windows and rooftops. Two men died in the first moments; six more were killed over the coming hours. It was, one survivor said later, an 'ambush from hell'.

Sergeant Evyatar Dahan, shot through the shoulder, managed to kick away a live grenade seconds before it exploded but watched as his company commander was killed. 'It was terrible: the shooting went on and on and there was screaming from all directions,' the young infantryman recalled afterwards. 'We were like sitting ducks,' said another soldier.

After the initial shock, reinforcements arrived and air strikes were called in from across the border - just two kilometres south - to pin down the Lebanese Shia guerrillas. But it was seven hours before the wounded could be evacuated by helicopter, and only then under heavy fire. Hizbollah said its men could hear the Israelis screaming.

The men of C Company fortified a house and guarded their dead, to ensure they were not snatched as part of a macabre strategy of trading prisoners, alive, dead or dismembered. They eventually dragged eight corpses down a steep hillside under cover of darkness. 'We did everything we could to stop them getting to the bodies,' Sergeant Ohad Shalom told reporters, 'because we knew that, for them, that's the big prize. '

Two weeks into the fighting between Israel and Hizbollah, Wednesday's battle - 'the longest day', one newspaper called it - may have marked a bloody turning point. Indeed last night Israel announced it was pulling its ground troops out of Bint Jbeil, saying it had accomplished its objectives there and dealt a heavy blow to the militant group, but admitting it had paid a heavy price with the lives of Israeli soldiers. Heavy indeed, as it was a withdrawal, not a victory. Hizbollah fighters still hold Bint Jbeil.

The strangest war in Israel's history began almost by accident. In the safety of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, out of range of the rockets, it has had an air of bizarre unreality. Now it has become desperately real - a grim swirl of military funerals and interviews with grieving families.

Before Wednesday, Hizbollah rockets had killed 19 civilians, and 24 servicemen had died in earlier fighting, including the eight killed on 12 July, when two soldiers were also abducted in a signature Hizbollah operation. But the ordeal of Golani Battalion 51 has the makings of a myth - like the notoriously costly attack on Syrian positions on the Golan Heights in the 1967 war. Heroic it may have been, but it was painful too: 'like sticking a finger into boiling soup,' one commander complained. And it looks like triggering a more unpredictable war.

Even before Wednesday there was unease in Israel about the conduct of the fighting. Military experts called for larger ground forces, for more and bigger bombing raids on Hizbollah's rocket launchers, especially around Tyre, and for razing villages or hitting strategic targets further north.

But Ehud Olmert, like other Israeli politicians and generals, remembers only too well what happened in 1982, the last time young conscripts died for Bint Jbeil and scores of other Lebanese towns and villages. Twenty-four years on, the ghosts of Ariel Sharon's disastrous 'Peace for Galilee' operation have never been laid. Thus calls for a wider ground offensive were resisted at Thursday's cabinet meeting, where there were angry exchanges between ministers and generals. Still, orders for a large stand-by mobilisation of reserves suggests it will come - and probably sooner rather than later. The army is only using a tiny proportion of its strength, chief of staff Major General Dan Halutz, told the paper Yedioth Ahronoth on Friday.

Caution is certainly called for. Hizbollah spent the six years after Israel's withdrawal in 2000 building bunkers and tunnels and stockpiling rockets supplied from Iran and Syria - itself raising troubling questions about Israel's much-vaunted intelligence services as well as the judgment of the country's political leaders. 'Even if we did know what was going on, the withdrawal from Lebanon was more important that the Hizbollah build-up,' said one Israeli diplomat.

Halutz and other senior officers rebuff suggestions that the Israel Defence Forces have gone soft, lost their fighting edge or falling asleep on the job. 'There is nothing we didn't know,' the chief of staff insisted. 'It's not fair and its not right to attack our intelligence. We knew a lot.'

Hizbollah is said to have mined approach roads from Israel, honing techniques tried with devastating effect on American forces in Iraq. Their fighters, local men, have the advantage of familiarity with difficult terrain. Three regional commands have operational autonomy from Beirut. The IDF has a healthy respect for their weapons - including laser-guided anti-tank missiles capable of penetrating the armour of Israel's Merkava tank.

General Udi Adam, head of Israel's northern command, made a revealing slip of the tongue when he referred in a briefing to Hizbollah 'soldiers', quickly correcting himself to say 'fighters' instead. Israelis who sneer at rag-tag Palestinian 'terrorists' armed with little more than Kalashnikovs compare the Lebanese group to Iranian special forces that have studied their enemy's tactics and battle doctrine. 'This isn't like the war we fight in the territories [the West Bank and Gaza],' said another senior officer. 'This is a real war.'

So a large-scale invasion could play to Hizbollah's advantages. 'They don't want to take on Israel's military might head-on near the border, but to draw them in, extend their supply lines and then start hitting them,' suggested Timur Goksel, a Turk who served with UN peacekeepers in Lebanon for 20 years and watched Hizbollah win its spurs as the 'Islamic resistance' against Israeli occupation.

Israel claims to have killed 200 Hizbollah fighters so far, including several senior commanders. But the group is keeping quiet, aware of the power of misinformation and psychological warfare in a conflict like this. Its operational secrecy is formidable - vital to prevent the penetration by Israeli agents that has proved so fatal to Palestinian groups. 'After almost 20 years covering them, I have exactly one source in the Hizbollah military wing,' complained a Lebanese Shia journalist, 'and he tells me nothing.' Fighters have to meet stringent social, religious and aptitudinal requirements. Recruits often come from the same family or tribe to ensure loyalty.

Still, Israel is clearly far from being completely 'blind'. It reportedly intercepted a message from Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, admitting he was taken aback by the scale of Israel's response. It knows enough to be able to bomb trucks bringing in supplies from Syria and Iran - but worries about exposing intelligence by trumpeting its successes. Some surprisingly detailed information about Hizbollah capabilities has certainly reached Israeli military correspondents. The most alarming concerns the Iranian Zelzal rocket, with a range of 150 to 210 km, capable of reaching Tel Aviv; Nasrallah's ominous threat to hit targets south of Haifa was assumed to be a reference to that.

The Israeli military clearly has its own agenda. But one independent expert believes Hizbollah is in trouble, though still capable of doing serious damage. 'To fire missiles at Israel you don't need a well-oiled chain of command,' said Professor Eyal Zisser of Tel Aviv University. 'One of the advantages of a guerrilla organisation is it doesn't need a complex system of command and control.'

Shocked by its losses, Israel is displaying a new determination to see this through, though nobody can say exactly what that means. 'What's our endgame?' said one senior government official. 'We're working on it now.' But before the end there looks like being a lot more bloodshed - cheered on by the public and media. 'Before any international agreement, Israel must sound the last chord, launching a massive air and ground offensive that will end this mortifying war, not with a whimper but with a thunderous roar,' urged the influential Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus.

And the soldiers are showing no sign of weakness, boasting that Hizbollah's fighters may be the toast of the Arab world but can still be beaten. 'For us it's like rain,' said Colonel Ofek Bukhris after the men of Battalion 51 were buried. 'We got wet, but they got wetter. We were really smashed up. But they were smashed up worse. It wasn't a failure and it wasn't a black day. It was a fight between us and them. That's war.'

How a solution could be found

Scenario One

The Quick Fix

Aim: earliest possible ceasefire

Time frame: a week to 10 days

What has to happen: Condoleezza Rice, who headed back to the Middle East yesterday, must get the Israeli and Lebanese governments to agree to the terms of a Security Council resolution under which Israel stops firing and pulls out of southern Lebanon while Hizbollah stops firing missiles and is disarmed. In separate talks starting tomorrow, the Americans, British, French and a host of other outside powers must put together an international force with the muscle and mandate to police such a deal and help the Lebanese army move south. An internationally brokered arrangement is made to release the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbollah.

What can go wrong: an awful lot. But among the main possible roadblocks, Hizbollah - and its Syrian and Iranian patrons - won't play ball. The Israelis will decide they haven't sufficiently weakened the militia's missile batteries and other installations to stop attacking.

Chances of success: 20 to 30 per cent.

Scenario Two

'Urgent but stable' ceasefire

Aim: reverse the escalation in hopes of a deal as soon as practicable.

Time frame: two to three weeks

What has to happen: Rice must get her resolution, and the bare bones of a proposed international force put in place. But with Hizbollah still determined - and able - to fire missiles into Israel, and the Israelis determined to achieve their minimum war aim of taking out all the missile launchers and command bunkers they can, diplomacy must somehow bring the militia to heel. The most likely mechanism: a mix of Lebanese, Saudi, Egyptian and other Arab pressure on Syria, Iran and Hizbollah.

What can go wrong: Hizbollah will decide time is on its side. Though Syria may be amenable to Arab pressure, the Iranians may prove less so. Deployment of the international force, hopeful of policing a deal rather than fighting to impose one, is delayed.

Chances of success: 50 to 60 per cent.

Scenario Three

The long, hard slog

Aim: To wind down the conflict while minimising civilian casualties, shrinking the battlefield and getting aid sent in.

Time frame: one to two months

What has to happen: all of the above, plus a painstakingly negotiated arrangement under which the Israelis rein in their offensive as it clears Hizbollah launchers and strongholds near the border, the international force gradually takes over as Israel pulls back, and Lebanon moves army units southwards to the border area.

What can go wrong: some of the above, but less likely to block a deal assuming Israel's military attacks in the south have achieved significant success, and Hizbollah has been weakened. Still, the political climate in the Middle East and internationally is likely to have been further poisoned by a prolonged conflict - even this deal may be difficult.

Chances of success: 70 per cent

Scenario Four

A widened regional conflict

The chances: can't be discounted completely, given the turbulence in the Middle East, but probably unlikely since neither of the two main potential combatants - Israel and Syria - wants it.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833349,00.html

---

I, too, am horrified by the awful scenes in Lebanon.
But wait...

This is not another round in the conflict of good and evil. It's much more complex than partisans of either side allow

Mary Riddell
Sunday July 30, 2006

A boy stares from a bus window. His family has fled the fighting between Hizbollah and the Israeli army, and now he is on the road, somewhere in Lebanon. He is maybe four years of age; old enough to absorb horror but too young to analyse it. Such feelings are endemic in his land.

Many of the Hizbollah fighters who fire rockets today remember being four years old in an age of devastation. Their apprenticeship in loss and hatred began in 1982, when Israel's invasion of Lebanon killed 19,000 people. Almost a quarter of a century on, the children of that war have come of age.

This time, the battles echo round a global theatre. Britain is outraged by Tony Blair's refusal to demand an instant end to Israel's assault. Full-page newspaper adverts by charities, religious groups and the trade union, Unison, demand an urgent ceasefire. A letter bearing 6,000 signatures is handed in at Downing Street.

The affiliation of the disaffected is a curious mix. Those filling a political vacuum include the Archbishop of Canterbury, cabinet dissenters, Tory warhorses, rock stars and former ambassadors. According to a Guardian poll, 61 per cent of people think Israel over-reacted to provocation, and 63 per cent say Mr Blair is wrong to tie himself so closely to George W Bush. Even on Iraq, there was no such groundswell.

Fractured, uneasy Britain has found a cause round which to coalesce. Old tensions are being smoothed and new alliances formed. A recent survey claimed that only 32 per cent of British Muslims had a favourable opinion of Jews. Now, members of both communities decry Israeli intemperance.

In America, there is no such uprising. As few as 7 per cent of citizens want their government to censure Ehud Olmert. As Paul Rogers of Bradford University points out, the backing comes not from the Jewish lobby, which is uneasy, but from many millions of Christian evangelicals for whom the Holy Land is sacred. Here, critics deplore the feeble package to come out of Washington. None but the most leathery neocon exalts Bush's imprimatur on an offensive that could yet draw in Syria or Iran, and his prosecution of a war on terror whose latest sideshow has reconciled the Sunni-led al-Qaeda with the Shia 'infidel' of Hizbollah.

The British protest is a showdown overBlair's long refusal to refute Bush's belief in rocket-borne democracies. This time, he may lay down his political life for that creed and his opponents may gladly claim the sacrifice. But the protest is more than a salvo against a Prime Minister in his struggling last days. It is a cry of rage against the politics of nemesis.

Four days after 7/7, Bush pledged the US would fight 'until victory is America's and there is no enemy'. Now, as deaths rise in Afghanistan and Iraq, jihadists multiply where none existed. The original estimate of terrorists dangerous to the US was 500 to 1,000. Five years after 9/11, the notion that Bush can kill all whom he has helped to create is political delirium.

For the dying and displaced of Lebanon, an instant ceasefire is imperative. Arab alienation, the threat to regional and global stability and the future of Israel itself all ordain that the fighting must stop. No civilised country should demand less. And yet, there is something unsettling in the certitude of the protest. As Bush and Blair have never learnt, conviction should have a small corner of doubt. This is mine.

British campaigners, who will never watch their homes burn and their children perish, have the luxury of seeing clearly. That gives them a duty not only to support the Lebanese but to understand why 95 per cent of Israelis still support Olmert and why they have cause to be afraid. Israel effectively pulled out of Lebanon six years ago, yet Hizbollah never abandoned its crusade against the Israeli state. In the latest battle, the shopping malls of Haifa have not yet become mass tombs, but that is because Katyushas don't fly straight, not for any qualm on the part of Hizbollah.

Those who rail against Israel's aggression are right. But they - and I - also risk playing a mirror image of Bush's game. This is not another round in the conflict of good and evil, but a greyer conflict than the partisans of either side allow. I do not defend Israel, whose slick PR cannot mask its despicable behaviour towards Palestinians and Lebanese.

Yet it seems odd, too, that Britons who distance themselves from their Prime Minister draw no distinction between Israeli citizens and their governing classes. There is a hint that the loathing of Israel's policies is sliding into contempt for Israel itself. Commentators are already starting to praise Hizbollah. In fact, the movement regards America as 'the great Satan' and Britain as 'evil,' and it behoves the West and all who negotiate.

Other reality checks are necessary, too. Bushites believe Hizbollah can be wiped off the planet. Some Western liberals, almost as fancifully, hope its fighters can be easily disarmed and kept at bay by peacekeepers with teeth. Welcome to dreamland. That is not to say that there are no solutions, though none is obvious. This conflict will end, sooner or later, with some face-saving deal, but nothing will be the same again.

The disaster unfolding in Lebanon is not a tableau of imperial tyranny at work. It is the vision of Western power imploding. On the last available figures, the US spent an annual $422.5bn on defence. The remaining two 'axis of evil' nations, North Korea and Iran, spent a combined $8.5bn, or roughly 2 per cent. Yet the West is not winning its conventional wars against other states, let alone prevailing against terrorist groups whose infrastructure and targets are not amenable to military force.

When politicians lose their compass, citizens can become the steersmen. That is why British protesters of all creeds and opinions must stay united to press for better diplomacy, better intelligence-gathering and a foreign policy not designed to alienate half the world. But critics losing faith in an obdurate Prime Minister may also have to question their own certitudes.

Those who die, in Lebanon and Israel, are the reminder of how the world has been destabilised by those blinded by self-belief. Unless certainty is tempered with humility and humanity, the future is not hard to read. Look into the eyes of any four-year-old refugee, on any road to nowhere. And wonder what he will be if he grows up.

mary.riddell@observer.co.uk

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1833487,00.html