'Israel heading toward Lebanon occupation'

Lebanese people gather at the destroyed Halat main bridge linking northern Lebanon with the rest of the country after it was hit by an Israeli air strike yesterday. PHOTO: AFP

"We did not intend this or want this, but we are approaching with giant steps the last and largest operation level in this book of war -- the takeover of the territory up to the Litani River," wrote the nation's mass-selling Yediot Aharonot.

On Thursday, after eight civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets and four soldiers killed in clashes with the Shiite militants, Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered the army to prepare for a takeover of south Lebanon up to the Litani River.

The river runs from east to west across southern Lebanon and is in various locations between five and 30km from the Israeli border.

Israel has been in much of this territory before -- between 1985 and 2000 it occupied an area that reached eight to 15km inside Lebanon along 100km of the border.

The Jewish state withdrew under intense public pressure and a rising troop toll in 2000, and officials have repeatedly said they have no intention of returning to the Lebanese "trap" at the end of this war.

"The goal was and remains to push back Hezbollah, prevent the rocket fire and to allow the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon, not to install ourselves on Lebanese territory," Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry, told AFP Friday in the latest such statement.

Captain Jacob Dalal, an army spokesman, also told AFP: "What we want is to uproot Hezbollah from the villages where they're implanted, not to occupy the villages."

But therein lies the main problem faced by Israel, analysts say.

The only way to stop Hezbollah from firing the short-range rockets is to be present on the ground in Lebanon south of the Litani River, from where most of them have been fired, they say.

"There is no army in the world that can shut down such a sophisticated rocket array which is spread over an entire country and mostly concealed, within a few weeks," Maariv, the nation's second-largest daily, wrote in an analysis.

"It is necessary to take over the country house by house, or else wait for the stock to run out."

Aharonot's analysis also questioned the late decision to send a massive force of ground troops into southern Lebanon.

"How is it that only in the fourth week of warfare did we realize that the short-range Katyusha rocket fire can only be substantially reduced if the IDF is physically present in the launching grounds?" Aharonot wrote.

The military admits that it has not dented Hezbollah's stockpile of short-range Katyusha rockets.

"Hezbollah still has full capability to launch short-range rockets," a senior military official told reporters on Thursday. "We haven't damaged them."

Out of an estimated 13,000 short-range rockets that Israeli intelligence thought Hezbollah to possess in the beginning of the war, it has only destroyed 1,500, the official said.

When combined with the 2,200 that Hezbollah has fired at Israel, that leaves the militia with more than 9,000 rockets after 24 days of intense bombardment of Lebanon by air, sea and land.

The military says that in the three-plus weeks of the war so far, it has concentrated on taking out Hezbollah's medium and long-range rockets, which have the capacity to hit Israel's most populous central region.