DEBKAfile reports: Israel tries a short cut for ending the war as it entered its second week - and fails

July 22, 2006, 10:10 AM (GMT+02:00)

A dozen Israeli fighter-bombers dropped 23 tonnes of ordnance, including bunker busters, on a subterranean system at the edge of Beirut’s Burj al Barajne Palestinian camp Wednesday night, Day 8 of the war. Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah and his top command were reported to be holed up there. Hizballah later claimed none of its leaders were harmed, and - to show how poor Israel intelligence is - added that the target was no bunker but “a mosque under construction.”

Israel will no doubt keep on trying to get them. DEBKAfile reports the Shiite terrorist group has appointed an alternative leadership whose members are scattered across Lebanon outside Beirut, to prevent Hizballah falling apart if Nasrallah goes - as it did when Israel killed his predecessor, Abbas Moussaoui.

The massive aerial bombardments tried in the first week of the war were a first attempt to bring the Lebanon war to an abrupt end. But Hizballah has emerged unbowed and its rocket blitz against northern Israel is as savage as ever Thursday morning.

Now, small, swift in-and-out ground raids to sterilize southern Lebanon of Hizballah fighters and rocket launchers will begin to figure largely in the Israeli campaign. To ease the action of these special units and the air force - and remove civilians from the line of fire - some 300,000 Lebanese were instructed Wednesday night, July 19, to move out of the south Lebanon to a line north of the Litani River.

It is not clear how this mass migration can be effected when many of the roads and bridges were bombed out by Israeli jets. Hizballah is also blocking their path.

If this stratagem does work, it will leave the IDF with a broad sweep of land 38-40 km deep inside Lebanon, quite a different proposition from the 1-km security zone Israeli officials were discussing at the outset of the campaign. The Olmert government is clear on one point: Israel will not send large-scale tank and ground forces to seize control of the south and risk being trapped there again as it has before. Hizballah can be expected to take advantage of the spaces in the region for small-scale, painful strikes and ambushes against the swift-moving Israeli special ground forces. The Shiite terrorists will also persevere in their attempts to send contingents across the border into northern Israel, accompanied by heavy Katyusha attacks against Israeli civilians, where human distress and shortages grow daily.

The Lebanon war has thus entered a new, broader stage.

Wednesday, July 19, when the Lebanon war entered its second week, plunged Israel in combat on four warfronts.

Hizballah rockets hit the Israeli town of Nazareth and killed two brothers aged 3 and 7, Rabiya and Mahmoud Taluzi, as they played outside their home. Twenty- seven people were injured.

Central Israel became one large gridlock for five hours as security forces staged a manhunt for a Palestinian suicide bomber from the West Bank heading for a crowd center. He was caught in Hod Hasharon.

Two Israeli special forces soldiers were killed in South Lebanon, the first to fall in a major ground battle with Hizballah. Nine were injured. At three points, Rosh Hanikra, Avivim and Metula, Hizballah forces went on the offensive and breached the border - only to be thrown back by Israeli ground and air units in heavy exchanges of fire which raged into the night.

Hizballah hurled at Israel the largest number of rockets in the eight-day conflict, an estimated 200. They wrought heavy damage to homes and instilled shock, terror and the first signs of deprivation in more than a million Israeli civilians caged in shelters in the northern Israeli towns of Haifa, Nahariya, Acre, Carmiel, Safed, KIryat Shemona, the small communities and farms of Upper Galilee, Lower Galilee and the Hula Valley.

In Gaza, Israeli raider forces clashed with armed members of the Palestinian Hamas. In the West Bank town of Nablus, another Israeli counter-terror unit held the government center to siege to round up dozens of wanted Palestinian terrorists. Ten Palestinian gunmen were killed in the two engagements.