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I admit, I got discouraged a few years ago and overwhelmed by the magnitude of news stories relevant to this site and stopped adding to them, but I guess it's time to get back to it.
the following originally appeared at this url.
Rice in Mideast but war rages on
Mon Jul 24, 2006 8:15 AM IST
By Alaa Shahine
BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was set to arrive in the Middle East on Monday but expectations were low that diplomacy would deliver a swift halt to the war between Israel and Lebanon's Hizbollah.
Israeli warplanes kept up attacks on south Lebanon early on Monday after Hizbollah missiles hit northern Israel over the weekend.
The United States has resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire, saying the cessation of hostilities has to address the root causes of the conflict, which Washington blames on Hizbollah and its allies, Syria and Iran.
Israel has said it would to back a temporary international force in southern Lebanon to ensure Hizbollah is removed from the border and to take control of Lebanon's border crossing with Syria.
Civilians have taken the brunt of the 12-day-old conflict that has cost 369 lives in Lebanon and 37 in Israel, prompting U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland to demand a halt to the violence to allow aid to reach the hardest-hit areas.
Israeli warplanes pounded south Lebanon in the early hours of Monday, wounding six people, including one child, at a Palestinian refugee camp in the port city of Tyre.
In Sidon, southern Lebanon's largest city, security officials said they arrested two men for "spreading panic among civilians" by printing and distributing leaflets urging residents to flee the south. Israeli warplanes have dropped thousands of leaflets across the south carrying similar demands.
The Israeli army said it had seized two Hizbollah guerrillas during fighting in the village of Maroun al-Ras in southern Lebanon, believed to be the first prisoners taken in Lebanon since the outbreak of violence following Hizbollah's July 12 capture of two Israeli soldiers.
The cross-border raid prompted Israel to launch a military campaign that also targeted civilian installations across Lebanon. It coincided with an offensive in the Palestinian territories to retrieve another soldier captured on June 25.
THE FORCE QUESTION
During her visit, Rice is set to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, before discussing the Lebanon crisis with European and Arab officials meeting in Rome on Wednesday.
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad has said Damascus is ready for dialogue with the United States and wants an immediate ceasefire, followed by diplomacy to end the war. Rice is not expected to meet officials from Syria or Hizbollah during her visit.
Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, pressed President George W. Bush to work for a ceasefire, the start of a prisoner exchange between Hizbollah and Israel, and to delay the dismantling of Hizbollah for now.
An official at the Saudi embassy in Washington later said the kingdom's demands did not include a call to delay the dismantling of the guerrilla group.
Olmert said the proposed multinational force would assist the Lebanese army, and would be charged with disarming Hizbollah in line with U.N. Security Council resolution 1559.
It would be hard to deploy any such force in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim south without the consent of Hizbollah, which says it will keep its weapons to deter Israeli aggression and liberate the occupied Shebaa Farms border strip.
U.N. peacekeepers have patrolled the south since Israel first invaded Lebanon in 1978, but their mission to help restore Lebanese government authority in the area remains unfulfilled.
The U.N.'s Egeland said the violence must stop to enable major aid efforts to get under way.
"The rockets going into Israel have to stop," he said. "The enormous bombardment that we have seen here with one block after another being levelled has to stop," he said as he toured Beirut's shattered Haret Hreik area, a Hizbollah stronghold.
He said Israel had agreed to let aid shipments through its naval blockade of Beirut, but had yet to guarantee safe passage for convoys to distribute aid to up to one million people, some of them in the hardest-hit areas in the south.
Israeli air raids on Sunday killed nine civilians and wounded 100, many of them in Tyre.
Two people were killed and 20 wounded when Hizbollah rockets hit houses and vehicles in Haifa, Israel's third largest city. About 50 people were wounded in similar attacks in at least 10 other towns across northern Israel.
Israel has called up thousands of reserve soldiers and has assembled troops and tanks on its northern border, but the army said its chief, Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, had not decided whether to launch a major ground incursion.
