Rice pays surprise visit to Lebanon

Paul Richter and Ken Ellingwood write for the Los Angeles Times.

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[jump page; the clipping begins mid-sentence] ...wants to create conditions for a "sustainable" cease-fire. The 13-day-old conflict has claimed the lives of nearly 400 Lebanese and at least 41 Israelis. Israeli troops were encountering heavy resistance as they closed in on a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Lebanon.

At least four Israeli soldiers were killed and 15 wounded in the fighting. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, Israeli shelling killed five people and wounded several others.

Israel has sent about 3,000 troops to Lebanon's border region to drive Hezbollah from a 6-mile-wide swath of arid hills and stony valleys that Hezbollah militants have been using to fire rockets at northern Israel.

Hezbollah fired more than 80 rockets yesterday at a number of Israeli communities, including Kiryat Shemona and Safed in the northern Galilee and the port of Haifa, on the Mediterranean. [...] The Israeli casualties included two soldiers killed when their tanks were hit by Hezbollah fire and two pilots who died after their helicopter was either shot down or crashed not far from the border, according to an Israeli army spokesman.

Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, head of the army's operations branch, said Israeli forces were encountering fire from a type of anti-tank missile employed by Syrian forces, which he said underscored Syria's support for Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch said Israeli forces have used artillery-fired cluster munitions in populated areas of Lebanon.

The rights group's researchers said cluster munitions were used on the village of Blida on July 19, killing one person and wounding at least 12, including seven children.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (eva-folio). Adjudicated corrected against the printed page: Same page as the companion record above: folio reads "THE SUN" at the left and "TUESDAY 07.25.2006 9A" at the right, section flag "WORLD". This record is the "Rice pays surprise visit to Lebanon" stor. Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “St. Louis Post Dispatch”. Legibility partial; any passage that could not be read is omitted rather than reconstructed.

Context added by this archive

THE EISENKOT RECORD ON THIS PAGE. Eizenkot appears here in July 2006, during the Lebanon war he would later be given Northern Command over, in a single sentence of technical sourcing about Syrian anti-tank missiles — immediately before the paragraph reporting Human Rights Watch's finding that Israel used cluster munitions on the village of Blida, wounding seven children.

The page thus carries his name and the cluster-munitions finding in adjacent paragraphs with no connection drawn. Two photographs belong to this story: the main one captioned "Israeli soldiers evacuate a wounded comrade in southern Lebanon.

Troops engaged in fierce battles with Hezbollah fighters as Israeli forces attempt to drive the Shiite militia from the area near the border." (DAVID FURST [AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE]), and a second captioned "Relatives react as they see the bodies of a Palestinian teen and his uncle as Israeli forces fired yesterday at Palestinian rocket storage depots in the Gaza Strip." (PIER PAOLO CITO [ASSOCIATED PRESS]).

Also quoted: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ("I am afraid there will be a great push toward fundamentalism, and also a message — a negative one — to all those who want to follow the course of peace"), Lebanese Speaker Nabih Berri, and Assistant Secretary of State David Welch.

Cite this clipping

"Rice pays surprise visit to Lebanon," The Baltimore Sun, 25 July 2006, p. 9A, jump from 1A (jump line reads "MIDEAST [From Page 1A]"). Covering Palestine archive, CP-2006-037. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2006-037