Rabin Refuses to Give Specific Deadline for Total IDF Withdrawal

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said today he anticipated no delays or blockages at the Cabinet level in the decisions to complete the Israel Defense Force’s withdrawal from Lebanon. But he cautiously refused to cite a specific deadline for the completion. However, Premier Shimon Peres, speaking yesterday in Upper Nazareth, said the withdrawal would be completed “much quicker than a lot of people think.”

Informed sources have spoken of early-to-mid-May as the likely timing for the final pullback across the international border.

Rabin repeatedly reiterated his stern warnings this week that his policy after the withdrawal would be one of “live and let live — or the reverse.” Addressing the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee yesterday, he spoke of a “scorched earth” policy which Israel would not hesitate to institute vis-a-vis south Lebanon, and specifically the Shiite population there, if the terrorist attacks continued after the pullback.

Rabin said he would envisage hitting at targets “forty or even eighty kilometers” inside Lebanon if the operational requirements of the fight against terrorism dictated this.

The Defense Minister has been speaking with an increasingly dour and somber tone about the future outlook. He told the Knesset committee yesterday that the Shiite terror danger now was more of a challenge than the PLO threat had been before 1982.

Peres, however, has taken a more upbeat approaching his public statements. In Nazareth, he told hundreds of local high schoolers he was “not disturbed” by the bleak prognoses of ongoing Shiite terror after the IDF withdraws. He said the Shiites would “have plenty to occupy themselves with” inside Lebanon and would therefore not continue their attacks.