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Page 2 of 3 French President Jacques Chirac appealed for rapid agreement. “The most immoral of solutions would be to accept the current situation and give up on an immediate cease-fire,” he said. Nasrallah rejected a draft U.N. resolution that would temporarily let Israeli troops remain in south Lebanon and take defensive action. “The least we can describe this (draft resolution) is as unfair and unjust. It has given Israel more than it wanted and more than it was looking for,” he said. He also signaled Hezbollah’s intention to step up attacks, calling on Israeli Arabs to leave the northern city of Haifa so Hezbollah could pound it with rockets and not worry about killing fellow Muslims. Israeli officials said their new offensive was meant to run parallel to the cease-fire talks. “Israel is still working for a diplomatic solution, preferably in the Security Council,” said Isaac Herzog, a member of Israel’s Security Cabinet, which voted Wednesday to approve the new ground offensive. “We cannot wait forever, we have a million civilians living in bomb shelters, and we have to protect them.” Other officials said privately that the offensive was aimed at pushing the Security Council to take fast action, as well as to clear Hezbollah from south Lebanon. “The Israeli decision today is taken in absence of concrete steps by the international community to deal with the situation in Lebanon. Such steps would of course make an Israeli military operation superfluous,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. “Israel understands fully that the real solution is diplomatic.” A minister in Israel’s Security Cabinet said the offensive might not begin for two or three days to give more time to cease-fire talks, but senior military officials said the operation could begin very quickly. Soon after the Cabinet decision, a column of Israeli tanks and armored vehicles crossed into southern Lebanon and took up positions inside Lebanese territory, witnesses said. The Litani River is about 18 miles north of the border. Fighting intensifies amid new casualties
Before the new offensive got off the ground, fighting intensified in the border strip that 10,000 Israeli troops were already occupying four miles into southern Lebanon. Fifteen Israeli soldiers were killed in a single day of fighting Wednesday, the military said, the highest one-day total in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. The military said 38 soldiers were wounded in battles across south Lebanon. Israel also hit Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp with an airstrike, killing at least two people. Israeli attacks Wednesday killed eight Lebanese civilians, according to Lebanese officials, and three guerrillas, according to Hezbollah.
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