Israel Attack Early Start to Long Beirut Summer

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Sporadic -- and familiar -- shelling resumed across the Israeli-Lebanese front on Saturday, a day after Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas exchanged their worst cross-border attacks in almost a year.

But few expected the relative calm to last with the prospect of Israel pulling out from south Lebanon by July without a peace agreement that satisfies Syria, the dominant force in Lebanese polity.

``The latest flare-up gives another measure of the importance of a Syrian-Israeli agreement for the stability not only of south Lebanon but of the whole area,'' Chibli Mallat, a leading scholar and lawyer, told Reuters.

``I am afraid more people will die unnecessarily in the absence of a substantially larger framework of understanding,'' Mallat added.

He pointed to a recent, large advert in a local newspaper for a boarding school in Cyprus, which recalled the days when the Lebanese would send their children to escape the 1975-1990 civil war.

There was occasional shelling on Saturday on areas facing the eastern sector of the Israeli occupied zone,a routine occurrence unlike the violence which started last week and reached a peak on Friday.

Syrian-backed Hizbollah fired Katyusha rockets onto northern Israeli settlements on Thursday, killing one soldier and wounding five Israelis, after Israel and its militia killed two Lebanese women and hurt another 12 civilians.

Hizbollah launched more rockets on Friday without killing anyone, after Israel retaliated to its earlier attack by destroying two power stations, a section of the Beirut-Damascus highway and a Hizbollah arms depot.

Signs Of Things To Come

``Israel and Syria are setting the ground rules and tempo for the coming months,'' said political commentator Michael Young.

``Syria showed, through the Hizbollah attacks, that the possibility of border tension exists during and after an Israeli withdrawal. Israel warned the Lebanese and Syrians, and assured its public opinion it will retaliate,'' Young said.

The Lebanese government has repeatedly warned that an Israeli withdrawal without a deal that returns the Golan Heights to Syria will subject Israel to cross-border attacks.

Chances of a trouble-free Israeli withdrawal appear to be diminishing, even with U.N. cooperation. Beirut has been criticized for its reluctance to fill the vacuum left if Israel leaves by July as it told the United Nations.

Syria backed the deployment of U.N. troops in the areas that could be vacated by Israel on the same day that its Hizbollah allies fired into Israel.

Beirut also widened its definition of an acceptable Israeli pullout to include areas the United Nations does not recognize as Lebanese.

``Any violation of the borders (as defined by Lebanon) means that Israel did not withdraw. Its retreat in this case would be a redeployment, not a withdrawal,'' the official Syrian newspaper Al-Thawra said.