AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
Columns of Israeli tanks have thrust into Lebanon and battled Hezbollah fighters but Israel said it had put a broader offensive on hold to give diplomacy a chance to end the month-old war.
Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter said Thursday the timing of a new offensive “depends to a great extent on what is happening in New York,” where the UN Security Council struggled to negotiate a ceasefire resolution.
The White House said divisions between council members, Lebanon and Israel made it impossible to set a date for a vote, but it warned the warring parties against any “escalations” in a conflict that has killed more than 1,000 people.
“We want an end to violence and we do not want escalations,” spokesman Tony Snow said. “It's a message to all parties.”
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who declared open war on Israel after his home and headquarters were bombed, warned that south Lebanon would become a “graveyard” for the Middle East's most powerful army if it invaded.
Lebanese police said one Israeli armoured column had entered Marjayun, a major border town about 10 kilometres (six miles) inside Lebanon, after meeting little resistance.
They said another column was locked in fierce fighting at nearby Khiam, where Hezbollah guerrillas were still dug in and firing anti-tank rockets, hours after Israeli artillery rained about 1,000 shells on the little town.
Police said Israeli soldiers were driving in military vehicles inside Marjayun, but the head of the town council, Fuad Hamra, told Lebanese television that sporadic shooting could be heard.
“We have a problem because we have 600 displaced in schools. We were supposed to deliver water for them and now we cannot do anything” he said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman suggested that the troops had not seized control of Marjayun, saying: “Our forces are going in and out of the town.”
The mainly Christian town was the headquarters of Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army militia until the Jewish state ended its previous 22-year occupation of south Lebanon in May 2000.
It is now the site of one of the largest Lebanese army barracks in the border region, and Israeli planes dropped flyers urging soldiers to stay inside before the tanks began their assault shortly after midnight.
The Lebanese army has so far stayed on the sidelines of the conflict, which began on July 12 when Israel launched a massive campaign by air, land and sea after Hezbollah captured two of its soldiers in a cross-border raid.
The government of Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has offered to deploy 15,000 troops north of the frontier to help enforce a UN ceasefire resolution, provided that Israeli forces pull out immediately hostilities come to an end.
Members of the UN Security Council have for days been wrestling with a draft resolution which called for an immediate end to the fighting but would allow Israel to take defensive action and to remain temporarily in Lebanon.
The United States, Israel's top ally which provides several billion dollars in aid to the Jewish state each year, wants Israeli troops to be able to remain until an international force arrives, fearing that Hezbollah could take back control of the border area.
“We must exhaust all diplomatic options. Important efforts for a solution are being deployed in New York,” Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon told public radio.
“It's a matter of a few hours, maybe 24 hours, let's be patient,” he added.
Ramon is a member of the security cabinet, which on Wednesday approved the army's plans to pour more troops into south Lebanon after a six-hour meeting.
The cabinet gave Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defence Minister Amir Peretz the authority to decide when to start the broader offensive, a government spokesman said.
Dichter reiterated that the aim of a broader ground offensive against Hezbollah was “to significantly reduce rocket fire” which claimed the lives of two more people in northern Israel on Thursday, one of them a baby.
The deaths, in the Arab village of Dir el-Assad, brought to 38 the number of Israeli civilians killed in the past month. About half of them were Israeli Arabs who had disregarded Nasrallah's call to leave their homes.
Nasrallah warned on Wednesday that the army faced far higher casualties if it launched the threatened broader offensive.
“I tell the Zionists that you can invade but this will be very expensive,” he said in a television broadcast.
“You will not be able to stay on our land … we will transform our dear south into the graveyard of the Zionist invaders and if there is no other way than a confrontation then welcome to the large-scale ground operation.”
On Wednesday, the army confirmed it had lost 15 soldiers in its biggest single-day toll of the conflict, taking to 80 the number of troops killed since start of the campaign.
On Thursday, Lebanese police reported that four Israeli tanks were destroyed and burnt near Marjayun. Hezbollah's television channel Al-Manar said 13 or 14 Merkava tanks had been knocked out in the area.
The Arabic-language television channel Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, reported that eight Israeli soldiers were wounded in fighting with Hezbollah but gave no further details.
Lebanese officials say more than 1,000 civilians have died since July 12, mostly as a result of Israeli bombing raids, and that close to one million, a quarter of the population, have fled their homes.
The medical relief agency Doctors Without Borders (known by its French initials MSF) said it would defy an Israeli threat to bomb all vehicle moving south of Lebanon's Litani River — a region which includes the port of Tyre.
“To forbid all forms of movement, without distinction, will lead to even more civilian deaths and suffering,” MSF's international president Rowan Gillies said in a statement.
“We refuse to accept this paralysis of humanitarian assistance and will continue to assist those in need.”
But the UN World Food Programme said it had cancelled plans to send convoys to south Lebanon even though the United Nations had been told the ban did not apply to them.
“We find Israel's attitude to guaranteeing humanitarian assistance very disappointing,” Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, said on a visit to Cairo.
Despite its military superiority, Israel's armed forces have found it much harder than expected to crush the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah and to quell its deadly rocket attacks.
Most of the residents of the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona have left in the first evacuation of an entire town since the creation of Israel in 1948.
Insisting in his broadcast that his arsenal had not been seriously depleted by the Israeli offensive, Nasrallah urged Arab residents of Haifa to allow Hezbollah free rein to press on with missile attacks against Israel's third city.
