The highest single-day civilian death toll since Israel launched Operation Grapes of Wrath has prompted urgent calls for an end to the fighting on the Israeli-Lebanese border.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said in a CNN interview that he would accept President Clinton’s call for a cease-fire if Hezbollah also agreed.
But there was no indication whether Hezbollah would stop firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli communities.
Earlier Thursday, a largely unrepentant Peres blamed the Islamic militant group Hezbollah for provoking an Israeli attack that killed at least 75 Lebanese civilians at a U.N. compound.
“I am upset and I am sorry that citizens of Lebanon were killed, but Hezbollah is to blame,” Peres told reporters after an emergency Cabinet meeting Thursday.
But, he added, “If our citizens are fired on we will return fire.”
At the same news conference, the Israel Defense Force chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Ammon Shahak, said, “I don’t see any mistake in judgment.”
Speaking in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was to attend a nuclear safety summit, Clinton called “on all parties to agree to an immediate cease-fire.”
“An end to the fighting is imperative to allow our diplomatic effort to go forward,” he said.
Clinton said he would send Secretary of State Warren Christopher to the region to work out an agreement between Hezbollah and Israel.
U.S. Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross left Thursday for Israel to lay the groundwork to put the full weight of the U.S. diplomatic machine behind the effort to silence the guns, State Department officials said.
Christopher was expected to travel to the Middle East on Saturday, said White House spokesman Mike McCurry.
In the bloodiest day since Operation Grapes of Wrath was launched April 11 after Hezbollah hit northern Israel with a series of Katyusha rocket attacks, Israeli forces Thursday shelled a U.N. compound minutes after Hezbollah fighters launched Katyusha rockets and mortar fire about 330 yards from the base.
Only hours earlier, Israeli forces destroyed a house in a village in southern Lebanon, killing nine civilians in retaliation for a Hezbollah attack launched within 100 feet of the building.
U.S. officials continue to blame the fighting on Hezbollah and were careful not to condemn the Israeli attack on the U.N. compound.
U.N. officials in Lebanon criticized Israel for the attack on its compound, which housed about 400 Lebanese refugees as well as scores of Fijian peacekeepers.
“Israel should have waited and not fired,” U.N. spokesman Mikael Lindvall told CNN. “The risks involved should have kept them from firing.”
But at the same time, a U.N. spokeswoman in New York, Sylvana Foa, said, “This is a typical guerrilla tactic, to hide behind a civilian position.”
A day earlier, a Hezbollah fighter shot at a U.N. peacekeeper for demanding that the Iranian-backed militia stop launching Katyusha rockets at Israeli targets from the area near the U.N. base.
American officials tried in vain this week to convince Syria, Lebanon and Hezbollah to agree to a written cease-fire.
The U.S. proposal calls in part on the Lebanese government to rein in Hezbollah militants in return for an Israeli commitment to negotiate a withdrawal from its security zone in southern Lebanon after peace has been restored to the area for nine months.
The U.N. Security Council was expected to issue one of two draft resolutions that were under consideration at a closed-door session Thursday evening.
The one more likely to be adopted was sponsored by the United States. It called for an immediate cease-fire and expressed concern about the impact of the tragedy on the peace process.
The other, sponsored by Egypt on behalf of Lebanon, was deemed “totally unacceptable” by a spokesman for the Israeli Mission to the United Nations.
That resolution’s draft, written earlier this week, “strongly condemns the Israeli aggression against Lebanon” and calls upon Israel “immediately to cease its military action against the Lebanese territorial integrity.”
It also asks the secretary-general to help Lebanon “overcome the hardships resulting from the Israeli aggression” to help sustain its reconstruction efforts.
According to a U.N. spokesman, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reacted to the attack on the U.N. base “with shock and horror.”
He “deplores and condemns this shelling in the strongest possible terms,” the spokesman’s statement said.
Although the attack brought swift condemnation from numerous governments, Peres stood firm in blaming Hezbollah for the carnage.
Israeli officials in the United States adopted a similar stance.
While expressing regret for Thursday’s high civilian casualties, they nonetheless defended the Israeli operation as a measured and necessary response to sustained provocation.
The attack on the U.N. base, they said, was a tragic and inadvertent byproduct of Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilians as cover for its assaults.
And they said Israel would not end its operation without an end to the Hezbollah rocket and mortar attacks.
Knesset Speaker Shevach Weiss said he told Vice President Al Gore during a meeting in Washington, D.C., “We, as Jews and Israelis, are strong enough and obligated to say it was a tragedy.”
“It wasn’t our purpose to kill children. We are very sorry,” Weiss told a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in New York.
“It was a tragedy, it was a terrible mistake.”
But at the same time, he defended every Israeli government’s “basic and elemental responsibility to defend” its citizens.
Itamar Rabinovich, Israeli ambassador to the United States, said nothing mitigated “the loss of innocent lives.”
But, he said, the incident would not have occurred had Syria and Lebanon responded sooner to the proposal for a cease-fire.
“This operation could have been brought to an end three days ago,” he said during a conference call to the Conference of Presidents.
When asked about the impact of the attack on Arab-Israeli relations, Rabinovich said the incident was “being used by critics of the peace process in the Arab world to embarrass those who’ve moved toward normalization.”
(JTA staff writer Cynthia Mann in New York contributed to this report.)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
