Israel suffers its heaviest losses in fierce fighting

Hezbollah dealt Israel its heaviest losses yet in the current campaign, killing nine soldiers in fierce firefights.

With key Middle East players failing to agree on a formula for a ceasefire, an Israeli general said the operation could last weeks.

Israel says it intends to damage Hezbollah and establish a “security zone” that would be free of the guerillas and extend 1.2 miles into Lebanon from the Israeli border.

Such a zone would prevent Hezbollah from carrying out cross-border raids such as the one two weeks ago that triggered the Israeli military response.

Israel said it would maintain such a zone, with firepower or other means, until the arrival of an international force with muscle is deployed in a wider swathe of southern Lebanon, as opposed to the United Nations force already there that has failed to prevent the violence.

In Rome, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said participants at a day-long conference on the Middle East crisis agreed yesterday on the need for a strong international force under a UN mandate. Italy, Turkey and Spain said they might send troops.

Rice said more work was needed to define the force and its mission. UN secretary general Kofi Annan, Lebanese prime minister Fuad Saniora and diplomats from European and moderate Arab countries also attended the meeting. Israel, Iran and Syria did not.

The Israeli bombardment has failed to stop guerilla rocket fire, even while killing hundreds, driving up to 750,000 people from their homes and causing billions of dollars worth of damage. Hezbollah fired another large barrage into northern Israel yesterday.

One hundred and fifty-one rockets wounded at least 31 people and damaged property from the suburbs of Haifa to the Hula Valley above the Sea of Galilee.

Over the past two weeks, the guerillas have fired 1,436 rockets into Israel.

Pushing Hezbollah back with ground troops was proving to be bloody. Several thousand troops were in Lebanon, Israeli military officials said, mainly in a roughly six-square-mile pocket around the town of Bint Jbail, a Hezbollah stronghold about 2.5 miles from the border.

The Hezbollah fighters are heavily outnumbered, with some 100 in Bint Jbail and several hundred more in surrounding fields, bunkers and caves, according to the officials, but they use classic guerilla tactics, choosing when to strike in the hilly territory they know well.

They are dug in with extensive tunnel networks and are stockpiling weapons, including rockets with which they pelted Israeli forces yesterday.

Israel is feeling the pressure on the international front and anger over Tuesday night’s bombing that directly hit a UN observation post on the border, killing four UN observers.

Australian troops will not join a new international force in southern Lebanon unless it has the strength and will to disarm Hezbollah, the prime minister said today after his government decided to withdraw its 12 peacekeeping troops from southern Lebanon.

“It’s no good sending a token force there, and I make it clear that Australian forces will never be part of a token force because it would be too dangerous,” John Howard told Perth Radio 6PR. A “serious” force would be made up of “tens of thousands”, he said.

At the Rome talks, Rice resisted pressure from allies for Washington to change its stance and call for an immediate halt to the violence.

Rice insisted any ceasefire must be “sustainable” and that there could be “no return to the status quo”, a reference to the US and Israeli position that Hezbollah must first be pushed back from the border and the Lebanese army backed by international forces deployed in the south.

The chief of Israel’s northern command warned that the fight would drag on.

“I assume it will continue for several more weeks, and in a number of weeks we will be able to (declare) a victory,” Major General Udi Adam said.

While the ground battle was intensifying, the bombardment in the rest of Lebanon appeared to be easing. Israeli jets were heard repeatedly over Beirut in the evening, but the capital saw no strikes.

Early today, local broadcasters said Israel warplanes hit an army base and an adjacent relay station belonging to Lebanese state radio at Aamchit, 30 miles north of Beirut, near the Mediterranean coast, knocking down a transmission tower.

The Israeli military said it had targeted a Hezbollah radar base like the one used in the July 14 attack on an Israeli vessel that killed four soldiers.

Meanwhile, violence was also increasing on the other front of Israel’s fight against Islamic militants, Gaza, where Hamas-linked militants are holding an Israeli soldier seized a month ago.

A force of 50 tanks and bulldozers entered the northern Gaza Strip to battle Hamas gunmen. Israeli air and artillery attacks killed 23 Palestinians, including at least 16 militants and three young girls.