Avivim, Israel – Backed by intensive artillery fire and airstrikes, Israeli forces fought Saturday for a Lebanese hilltop town in a widening campaign to secure a roughly 15-square-mile region of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah guerrillas, who continued firing scores of rockets into northern Israeli cities now largely empty of residents.
Israeli military aircraft, meanwhile, pounded roads, bridges and Hezbollah targets across Lebanon in the 11th day of a bombing campaign that has pushed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes and left the country’s civilian infrastructure in tatters.
In the mountains north of Beirut, Israeli military jets hit television and telephone transmitters and relay stations, knocking out broadcasts and cellular phone service to parts of the country.
As more than 130 Hezbollah rockets landed inside Israel – striking from the port city of Haifa to Kiryat Shmona in the east – Israeli tanks, armored bulldozers and infantry troops battled in and around Maroun al-Ras, a town along a ridgeline about a mile from the Israeli farming community of Avivim, which has emptied out in recent days. But the ground operation, now focused on controlling four Lebanese villages, remained relatively small.
Israeli officials indicated Saturday that a larger invasion may not be needed to achieve Israel’s goals, which include driving Hezbollah gunmen from the border, pressuring Lebanon’s weak government to disarm the radical Shiite Muslim militia and political movement, and freeing the two Israeli soldiers the group captured in a July 12 cross-border raid.
The officials’ statements, coming days after Israeli political leaders warned that a large ground incursion was under consideration, appeared to define the limits of a military operation that has so far failed to stop rocket fire or dislodge Hezbollah from the border region it has dominated since Israel left southern Lebanon in 2000 after a bitter 18-year occupation.
“We are not preparing for an invasion of Lebanon,” said Avi Pazner, a senior Israeli government spokesman. “A combination of air force, artillery and ground force pressure will push Hezbollah out without arriving at the point where we have to invade and occupy” southern Lebanon.
Cmdr. Siman Tov, the deputy commander of the tank brigade in Avivim, said that the operations targeting Maroun al-Ras involve 300 to 400 troops and a dozen tanks and that more troops and tanks scheduled to arrive in the coming days would roughly double the size of the current force.
He said several dozen Hezbollah gunmen are fighting from tunnels, some equipped with above-ground cameras. They are armed with weapons far more sophisticated than those being used in the West Bank and Gaza, including longer-range antitank missiles and rocket- propelled grenade launchers.
Israel’s modern army has been unable to stop Hezbollah’s rockets, relatively crude weapons that take seconds to reach their targets. The number of rockets that fell inside Israel on Saturday was among the highest one-day totals since the military operation began. More than 900 rockets have landed inside Israel during that period.
At the same time, the United Nations and some foreign governments are calling on both sides to end the fighting and give diplomacy a chance to resolve the conflict, which has killed more than 360 Lebanese, most of them civilians. In Israel, 15 civilians and 20 soldiers have been killed in the fighting and rocket strikes.
Israeli officials appeared to open the door Saturday to diplomatic efforts, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prepared to visit the region early this week.
Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, a member of Israel’s general staff, said the bombing and ground operation have diminished Hezbollah’s “overall capability, but to what extent we still don’t know.”
“There is one line between our military objectives and our political objectives,” Nehushtan said. “The goal is not necessarily to eliminate every Hezbollah rocket. What we must do is disrupt the military logic of Hezbollah. I would say that this is still not a matter of days away.”
Israeli airstrikes repeatedly targeted sites around the southern Lebanese village of Khiyam, seeking out Hezbollah positions and rocket launchers, and again blasted road traffic around the coastal city of Tyre.
By afternoon, a line of minibuses, pickups, taxis and cars packed with as many as 10 people each stretched for a mile along a cratered street heading through Tyre.
The fighting has created an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 refugees in Lebanon, many of whom have fled to neighboring Syria.
