Cease-Fire Slated For Monday Morning
Some of the heaviest fighting of the war raged Saturday as Israeli, Lebanese and Hezbollah leaders said they would accept a U.N. Security Council resolution to end the month-long crisis.
Lebanon's Cabinet accepted the U.N. cease-fire plan to halt fighting between Israel and Hezbollah fighters on Saturday, moving the deal a step closer to implementation, the prime minister said.
"It was a unanimous decision, with some reservations," Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said in announcing Lebanon's acceptance of the resolution after a four-hour Cabinet meeting.
A senior Israeli official said a cease-fire to go into effect either at 7 a.m. local time Monday, as Israel sent an avalanche of military power into Lebanon, dispatching thousands of troops and columns of armor into the rocky hills just north of its border.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan later said the cease-fire is scheduled to go into effect Monday at 8 a.m. in the region, or 1 a.m. Eastern time.
Annan said in a statement distributed in Lebanon that he had been in touch with Saniora and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel to discuss the exact time and date when the cessation of hostilities called for by a U.N. Security Council resolution will enter into force.
Israel's Cabinet is expected to endorse the U.N. resolution on Sunday.
Hezbollah's leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said that the Islamic militant group will abide by the cease-fire but will continue fighting as long as Israeli troops remained in south Lebanon.
Nasrallah grudgingly accepted the peace plan in a televised address as the Lebanese Cabinet was in session to vote on whether to agree to the U.N. resolution. Hezbollah has two ministers in the government.
"We will not be an obstacle to any (government) decision ... but our ministers will express reservations about articles that we consider unjust and unfair," he said.
Hezbollah's Mohammed Fneish, minister of hydraulic resources, said the two members of the Islamic militant group who are part of the Cabinet expressed reservations.
Particular concern was raised over an article in the resolution that "gives the impression that it exonerates Israel of responsibility for the crimes" and blames Hezbollah for the month-long war, he said.
The U.N. Security Council adopted a resolution seeking a "full cessation" of violence between Israel and Hezbollah on Friday, offering the region its best chance yet for peace after a month of fighting that has killed nearly 900 people and inflamed Mideast tensions.
The resolution authorizes 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers to help Lebanese troops take control of south Lebanon as Israeli forces that have occupied the area withdraw.
"Today nothing has changed and it appears tomorrow nothing will change," Nasrallah said.
The Shiite cleric said Hezbollah rocket strikes on northern Israel would end when Israel stopped airstrikes and other attacks on Lebanese civilians.
Nasrallah called continued resistance to the Israel offensive "our natural right" and predicted more hard fighting to come.
"We must not make a mistake, not in the resistance, the government or the people, and believe that the war has ended. The war has not ended. There have been continued strikes and continued casualties," he said.
Israel has tripled the number of troops to about 30,000, reports CBS News correspondent Allan Pizzey.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Israel Television the broadened Israeli offensive in Lebanon, which began Friday a few hours before a cease-fire resolution was adopted in the U.N. Security Council, had been anticipated and was normal.
"I understand that this is going on," she said of the push by Israeli soldiers to thrust deep into Lebanon where an international force will move in alongside Lebanese army soldiers.
"My understanding is that this is part of the normal operations that were contemplated. When the cease fire — the cessation of hostilities — comes into being, Israel will stop," she said.
Hezbollah rockets continued to rain into northern Israel, despite the IDF's escalation, but Pizzey reports the volume was much lower than in previous days.
In other developments:
The deadliest attack was on homes in the village of Rachaf, some 4 miles from the Israeli border, where at least 15 civilians were killed, security officials said.
The Israeli army said it targeted "the exact point from which Hezbollah fired" at its troops. "This is just another example of the fact that Hezbollah is using civilians as human shields," a spokesman said.
A woman who escaped the Rachaf bombings walked 9 miles to a village near Tyre, but rescuers were unable to reach her there because of raids on a coastal road, civil defense workers said.
Israeli missiles also hit a vehicle in Kharayeb, a village in the Zahrani region about halfway between Beirut and the Israeli border, killing three people and wounding five, officials said.
A Lebanese soldier was killed overnight in an air raid near an army base in the western Bekaa Valley, the army said.
Israel said its troops killed more than 40 Hezbollah fighters in the last 24 hours. The guerrilla group announced the deaths of three members in south Lebanon, but did not give further details on where or when they died.
Hezbollah said it killed seven Israeli soldiers and destroyed 21 tanks in heavy ground fighting in the south. The statement on Al-Manar TV did not say where they died, but another one said fighters ambushed tank columns in the Wadi al-Hujair valley southwest of Marjayoun, calling the area a "graveyard" for Israeli armor. Israel had no immediate comment.
An earlier Hezbollah statement said Israeli ground troops were trying to push west from Taibeh and Qantara, on an axis about 5 miles from the Israeli border. It said guerrillas destroyed 16 Israeli tanks and killed or wounded a "large number" of Israeli soldiers there.
An Israeli airstrike destroyed a road leading to the only remaining border crossing to Syria — Arida, on the northern coast — severing the last escape route for besieged Lebanese and for humanitarian aid entering the country.
Israeli jets targeted the highway linking Arida with the northern city of Tripoli, at a point about 5 miles from the border, officials said. The crossing remained open, but the road leading to it was impassable, and vehicles were spotted driving off-road through ditches early Saturday.
A separate raid destroyed a bridge linking the southern cities of Tyre and Nabatiyeh with Sidon.
Shrapnel from missiles fired on the village of Insariyeh, halfway between Sidon and Tyre, hit a vehicle carrying Lebanese journalists working for a Swedish television channel, and one of them was wounded, security officials said.
An airstrike hit near Mansouri on the coast, halfway between Tyre and the Israeli border, wounding seven people, civil defense officials said. Villages along the road south of Tyre endured heavy bombing on Saturday, international Red Cross spokesman Roland Huguenin said.
Warplanes struck at apartment buildings that house a Hezbollah charity organization in the heart of the eastern city of Baalbek, wounding three people. Another four people were injured in an airstrike on a house west of Baalbek, officials said.
Electricity was out in Tyre and Sidon, after Israeli warplanes struck transformers at power plants in both coastal cities. An official at the power plant in Sidon, George Makhoul, said it could be 10 days before power was restored.
Israel denied attacking any power plants in Tyre, but an army spokesman said "perhaps an electricity wire was hit" by Israeli warplanes.
Security officials reported several airstrikes in Akkar province, located about 60 miles north of Beirut.
Ground fighting was also intense throughout south Lebanon.
Israeli commando troops fought fierce battles with Hezbollah in El-Ghandourieh, about 7 miles from the Israeli border, Lebanese security officials said. It was unclear whether the commandos landed by helicopter or traveled by land to the area overlooking the Litani River — strategic ground that separates the eastern and central sectors of south Lebanon.
El-Ghandourieh is about 9 miles west of the Christian town of Marjayoun, which Israeli troops took on Thursday.
Bombardment continued in hills and villages in southeast Lebanon as well, with a flurry of artillery shells exploding in a Shiite Muslim area near the town of Marjayoun just after 8 a.m.
An Associated Press reporter in the nearby town of Ibl el-Saqi saw drones and warplanes crisscrossing the skies, too high to be seen from the ground. Explosions echoed through the area, but the fighting appeared to be less intense than on the previous day.