TROOPS READY, BUT ISRAEL BETS ON AIR POWER

Troops Ready, but Israel Bets on Air Power









By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 23, 2006

JERUSALEM, July 22 — On Israeli intelligence maps of southern Israel from each village as registered by Israeli surveillance planes and radar. The villages, whose names cannot be published under Israeli Army censorship regulations, stretch north to roughly the Litani River, some 15 miles from the Israeli-Lebanese border.
“This is where Hezbollah has most of its 10,000 rockets,” said a senior Israeli commander, who would not allow his name to be used because he has access to sensitive information. “And these villages are where most of the rockets are kept, with their launchers, and where they’re fired. This is where the command and control is located, and the weapons storehouses.”
After two days of fighting in the area, Israeli troops entered Maroun al-Ras in Lebanon on Saturday. Near there, above the northern Israeli town of Avivim, Hezbollah has built an underground warren of metal-lined tunnels, barracks and rocket-storage facilities, the officer said, showing photographs of an entrance disguised by a metal lid covered with leaves and branches, visible only from the ground.
For the last three days, Israel has been telling the residents of southern Lebanon, through leaflets, radio broadcasts, taped telephone messages and conversations with the local authorities, to leave these villages and move north.
But the preparation now seems to be less for a ground invasion than for more punishing airstrikes to try to eliminate Hezbollah military assets and stockpiles, which the Israelis say are distributed and hidden through the civilian population, in houses, garages and apartments.
“We want the freedom to attack these places,” the officer said. “I believe in air power. I believe in our ability to destroy Hezbollah without going into Lebanon again the way we did in 1982. And the only way to do it is to attack any movement we detect, any launch or any activity aimed at hitting Israel — especially from the villages we see.”
The overall aim, Israel says, is to weaken Hezbollah sufficiently so that the international community can help the Lebanese government to carry out United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 and exercise its sovereignty all over Lebanon, expelling any foreign fighters and disarming Hezbollah.
Israel is more interested in having an international force patrol the border than it has been in the past, officials say, especially if the force has rules of engagement that will allow it to ensure that Hezbollah cannot reinfiltrate to the border.
Israel wants “to change the calculus for any future kidnapper,” showing that it will respond in force and that the Israeli population is willing to suffer pain and casualties, undermining the theory of Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, that Israeli society is “like a spider’s web,” soft and easily broken.
Hezbollah will not surrender, the officer said. “They won’t come out with a white flag. But at the end they should be beaten and be seen to be beaten. It won’t be a knockout, but what matters is how big the decision is on points.”
Currently, as Israeli troops and armor continue to build on the border and commandos operate secretly and deeper inside Lebanon, Israeli infantry activity has been limited to operations within a mile or two of the border.
These operations, described by Israeli chief of staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz as “limited” and “pinpoint,” have focused on knocking down Hezbollah outposts built on the border, finding and destroying camouflaged storehouses, barracks and rocket launching sites and defusing some of the many boobytraps and “improvised explosive devices,” which contain up to the equivalent of one ton of TNT, the Israelis say. Israel’s wider bombing campaign across Lebanon has killed hundreds of civilians and reduced parts of south Beirut and southern Lebanon to rubble.
“We’re moving very carefully” to destroy outposts, storage areas and take control of elevated positions that provide a field of fire, the officer said. “We have time.”

Published: July 23, 2006
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Part of the aim is to ensure, as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has insisted, that Israeli forces never again face armed Hezbollah fighters nose to nose across the international border. Part of the aim is to clear routes for any larger ground incursion. The army also hopes to pull Hezbollah fighters out of hiding into firefights, the officer said, “so we can kill them.”

The fighting has been intense, the army admits. Hezbollah has had six years to prepare its positions, ambushes and minefields, including buried explosives that can destroy the underbelly of even the most modern Israeli tank. Hezbollah forces are also well equipped with Syrian and Iranian infantry weapons, including laser-guided anti-tank rockets, that far outclass what the Palestinians can muster.
Hezbollah is also believed to possess the Russian Kornet missile, laser-guided and with a thermal sight, designed in the mid-1990’s to attack the most modern tanks equipped with explosive reactive armor, the officer said. Russia sold the Kornet to Syria.
General Halutz asserts that the Israelis have killed at least 100 Hezbollah fighters and commanders so far, while Israel has lost about 19 soldiers since this part of the conflict began on July 12 with a coordinated Hezbollah rocket attack and raid into Israel, which ended in the death of eight soldiers and the capture of two more.
Many Israelis compare their 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, which began in 1982 and lasted until 2000, to the American experience in Vietnam. Israeli commanders do not want to get sucked back into the “quicksand” of Lebanon, as one of them described it, leading Mr. Olmert and General Halutz to emphasize the “limited” and “temporary” nature of any Israeli raid.
But if there is a major ground operation, the senior officer said, it would be almost useless to go just a few miles into Lebanon, and necessary to go up to the Litani River. “The Katyushas have a range of 20 to 32 kilometers,” he said, and Hezbollah also has Syrian and Iranian missiles with ranges of 40 to 70 kilometers, or 43 miles, with a few Iranian Zelzals that can go 100 kilometers, or 62 miles.
“Two to five kilometers does the outposts, that’s all,” the officer said.
He predicted that Israel would stick largely to air power for now, on the presumption that its war against Hezbollah would not be curtailed too quickly by the international community, in particular the Bush administration.
“We have no intent and no desire to go back in force into Lebanon,” he said. “But if I’m wrong, and there’s not enough time and if air power proves ineffective, then we’ll do it,” he said, adding: “We’re capable of doing it. We’re not afraid to do it.”
But ground forces won’t defeat Hezbollah, which can keep retreating northward. “A ground maneuver won’t solve the problem of the long-range missiles,” he said. “The problem is the will to launch. We have to break the will of Hezbollah” to confront Israel.
And how will that happen? “By killing them,” the officer said. “Maybe many of their soldiers are fanatics and want to be martyrs. But the leadership is clever, and it wants to live. They’re rational guys, and they’re hiding.”
Israel needs to “restore our military deterrence against terror organizations, whether Hamas or Hezbollah,” the officer added, “and this goal is already achieved.” Israel must show again that “Israeli soldiers on the ground can defeat any enemy,” the officer said, pointing to Gaza, where Israel has killed about 100 Palestinian fighters since June 25 and lost only one soldier, who was killed by another Israeli by error.
General Halutz, the chief of staff, put it this way: “The restraint which we showed over the course of years is interpreted by those among the terrorists as weakness. On this count, they made a horrible mistake by assuming that we would persist in holding back and restraining ourselves. Our duty as an army was — and we did as such — to recommend a halt to this development, which stems from a sense of us not having an answer.”
An international force with teeth, Israeli officials say, would help deal with serious Israeli concerns about the loyalties of the Lebanese Army, even after the Syrians have gone.
Israelis note that the Lebanese Army, while some 50,000 men strong, has never been willing to try to displace Hezbollah in the south, even though Hezbollah has many more rockets than organized fighters — perhaps 6,000 of them, the Israelis say.
“The Lebanese Army is not a strong army, and half of it is very close to the Hezbollah,” the Israeli officer said, citing the large number of Shiites from southern Lebanon who serve in the army. Asked if the army would, even if deployed along the border, prevent reinfiltration of Hezbollah fighters, the officer said, “I look for Hezbollah to understand that any future move against Israel will be very counterproductive and to concentrate on becoming a real political party.”
Syria, he said, had far more potent and dangerous weaponry than Hezbollah, but it has always kept to its cease-fire agreement with Israel, deterred by the losses it knows Israel could inflict. “There’s a state in Syria that controls its territory,” the officer said. “We hope the international community will help Lebanon become a real state and keep the border calm.”