Some Israeli troops now inside Lebanon

Diplomatic efforts to stop the week-long conflict between Israel and Lebanon gained momentum, but Israel said it was preparing to fight Hezbollah guerrillas for several more weeks and might send in ground forces.

At daybreak today, an undisclosed number of Israeli troops were operating just across the border, looking for tunnels and weapons, the military said, in what appeared to be a small-scale, routine operation.

“This is an operation which is very measured, very local,” Israel’s UN ambassador, Dan Gillerman, told CNN. “This is no way an invasion of Lebanon. This is no way the beginning of any kind of occupation of Lebanon.”

Early today, explosions were heard in southern Beirut, and Beirut TV stations reported strikes in two towns and a bridge in southern Lebanon. No casualties were reported in the latest strikes.

Yesterday, Israeli warplanes struck an army base outside Beirut and other areas in south Lebanon, killing 17 people, and Hezbollah rockets battered towns across northern Israel, killing one person.

Hundreds of Europeans and Americans fled Lebanon aboard ships, and hundred of other foreigners prepared to evacuate in the coming days. However, evacuation of 25,000 US citizens on a cruise ship was delayed by a day. The ship docked early today, and boarding was to begin at dawn, as US officer said.

Families in southern Lebanon, the site of most Israeli airstrikes, drove north on side roads, winding among the orange and banana groves and waving improvised white flags from their car windows.

In diplomatic efforts to end the fighting, which has killed at least 227 people in Lebanon and 25 in Israel, a UN mediation team met yesterday with Israeli leaders a day after speaking with Lebanese officials in Beirut.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who met with the delegation, said a cease-fire would be impossible unless the soldiers captured by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid last week were released and Lebanese troops were deployed along the border with a guarantee that Hezbollah would be disarmed.

Prime minister Ehud Olmert told diplomats that he does not oppose negotiations, but the solution must be based on freedom for the two soldiers and implementation of a Security Council resolution that calls for disarming Hezbollah and posting the Lebanese army on the border, according to a statement from his office.

Later yesterday, meeting mayors from Israel’s battered border communities, Olmert said Israel would not allow the previous situation of Hezbollah, armed with thousands of rockets controlling south Lebanon, to be restored.

“Does anyone imagine that we will stop halfway through so that in two months it will come back again? No way,” he said.

In Washington, US Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that any cease-fire should be based on fundamental changes that would have a lasting impact on the region.

“We all want a cessation of violence. We all want the protection of civilians. We have to make certain that anything that we do is going to be of lasting value,” Rice said.

The week-old offensive was sparked by the soldiers’ capture, and Olmert said Iran, a patron of Hezbollah, was behind the raid to distract the world and the G8 summit from the country’s nuclear program.

“To my regret, Iran’s trick succeeded, everybody remembers the G8 decision on the subject of Lebanon and are not dealing with the Iranian issue,” he said, according to the statement.

The commander of Israeli forces on the border said the operation would take a few more weeks, and the army’s deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinski, said Israel has not ruled out deploying “massive ground forces into Lebanon.”

Israel, which has mainly limited itself to attacks from the air and sea, has been reluctant to send in ground troops because of still-fresh memories of Israel’s ill-fated 18-year-occupation of south Lebanon that ended in 2000.

Meanwhile, a proposal to send a new international force to bolster the current 2,000-member UN force in south Lebanon gained steam.

Western nations have proposed the beefed-up force as part of a possible cease-fire agreement, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday in Brussels, Belgium, that a new force must be “considerably” larger and better armed than the current force, which is viewed as weak and ineffectual. Rice also called for the introduction of a strong peacekeeping operation.

In the statement, Olmert belittled the current force in Lebanon, but said he would be cautious about discussing the new force. “It seems to be its too early to debate it,” he said.