“The Security Council shares the view that the full implementation of resolution
1559 (2004) would contribute positively to the situation in the Middle East in general.”
SOURCE:United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/
9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/ee059592a598f41285256ff80051dacc!OpenDocument.The Hizballah-Israeli War
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
A relatively minor incident along the Israel-Lebanon border in July 2006 developed
into a month-long war causing severe damage in Lebanon, undermining the political
leaderships of Israel and Lebanon, and eroding the already sagging prestige of the
United States in the Middle East. The self-proclaimed winner, the Islamist group
Hizballah, provoked the war and scored at least a partial victory by not losing against
the overwhelming military force of Israel.
The war began on July 12, when Hizballah launched rockets into Israel and in a
cross-border raid captured two Israeli soldiers and took them back into Lebanon. Eight
other Israeli soldiers were killed in subsequent skirmishes that day. Hizballah had
planned to use the captured soldiers as bargaining chips to bolster its demand that
Israel release several Lebanese prisoners, some of them Hizballah members. Calling the
attack an “act of war,” Israel responded not with bargaining but with a military assault
of aerial bombing runs and artillery strikes against Hizballah military positions in
southern Lebanon and, eventually, its command post and other targets in the Beirut
suburbs. Although Israel insisted that it was attacking only military or “terrorist” tar-
gets, thousands of bombs landed in civilian areas, destroying houses and apartment
buildings and killing noncombatants. The United Nations estimated that, within one
week, about 400,000 people had been left homeless or had fled their homes to avoid
the bombardments. Also according to the United Nations, by the time the war ended
three weeks later, about 900,000 people, one-fourth of Lebanon’s population, had fled
their homes at least temporarily.
Israel relied initially almost entirely on aerial bombing and artillery strikes to
achieve its stated goal of destroying Hizballah’s military infrastructure in Lebanon.
Hizballah responded with flurries of rocket attacks against cities and towns in north-
ern Israel. Some of the rockets reached as far as Haifa, a coastal city twenty-five miles
south of the border. Several dozen Israeli civilians died in the attacks, and thousands
of Israelis spent much of the war in underground bomb shelters. Israel launched a
large-scale ground invasion of Lebanon on August 2, after its aerial campaign had failed
to halt the Hizballah rocket launches—which at times exceeded 200 a day—much less
destroy Hizballah militarily.
LEBANON AND SYRIA 365