U.S. AND FRANCE BACK PLAN TO END LEBANON FIGHT

By WARREN HOGE

Published: August 6, 2006

UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 5 — France and the United States reached agreement Saturday on a Security Council resolution to halt the war in Lebanon, as the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah raged for a 25th day.

The draft resolution, which is unlikely to come up for a vote until early next week, calls for a truce, asked the current United Nations peacekeeping force to monitor the border area, and laid out a plan for a permanent cease-fire and political settlement.

The text called for “immediate cessation of all attacks by Hezbollah,” and of “offensive military operations” by Israel.

But it did not include a prisoner exchange or require Israel to immediately withdraw from Lebanon, which immediately raised dissent among members of the Security Council as they met Saturday afternoon to consider the text.

Nouhad Mahmoud, a Lebanese Foreign Ministry official appearing before the Council, said, “It lacks a call for the withdrawal of Israeli forces who are now in Lebanon, and that’s a recipe for more confrontation.”

Nassir al-Nasser, the Qatari ambassador who is the Arab representative on the Council, said, “What about the Lebanese prisoners? We need more clarification on these points.”

On Saturday, Israel mounted a commando raid in Tyre and kept up heavy airstrikes, and Hezbollah unleashed a flurry of deadly rocket fire into northern Israel.

The draft resolution was agreed on after a week of intense meetings between the French ambassador, Jean-Marc de la Sablière, and John R. Bolton, the American ambassador.

Despite the negative reactions of some other ambassadors, both said they were encouraged after the Security Council meeting on Saturday.

“My impression,” Mr. de la Sablière said, “is that the text was well received and that the reactions were positive.”

Mr. Bolton said, “I didn’t hear anything that was particularly discouraging.”

A senior Bush administration official, asked about the dissenting comments, said that Washington had been in constant and close contact with the Lebanese government throughout the days of talks.

“They should not be surprised by what we produced today,” he said, asking not to be identified since he had been a participant in the high-level talks.

In Beirut, the Lebanese cabinet met for more than four hours to discuss the resolution, but there was no statement afterward. Aides to key political figures and Western diplomats based there expressed doubt that Hezbollah or the government, which negotiators relied on to communicate to Hezbollah, would accept the resolution in its present form.

The accord envisaged a second resolution, to create a new international force to patrol a zone to between the “Blue Line” at the Lebanon-Israel border and the Litani River to keep it free of all military personnel and weapons, except those of the Lebanese Army and United Nations-mandated forces.

That resolution would also set established borders for Lebanon, including in the disputed Shebaa Farms area, lay out the procedure for disarming Hezbollah, order an international embargo on arms shipments into Lebanon, and empower the Lebanese military to extend its authority throughout Lebanon, particularly in areas in the south controlled by Hezbollah.

Mr. de la Sablière estimated it would take two to three weeks to prepare the second resolution.

Judging by the comments of ambassadors emerging from the Council meeting on Saturday, the resolution is days away from a vote. Nana Effah-Apenteng, the ambassador of Ghana, who is the Council president for August, said the envoys would send the text to their capitals to get instructions, and might gather again on Sunday to discuss it further.

For passage, a resolution needs the support of at least 9 of the Council’s 15 members and not be vetoed by any of the five permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

Two Bush administration officials involved in the French-American talks said the White House recognized that the agreement represented a significant backing away from its earlier insistence that no cease-fire be declared before there were clear lines on how to enforce it.

“There is considerable risk in this two-stage approach,” one said, requesting anonymity because of his involvement in confidential negotiations. Among those risks, he said, is that a second resolution might not be adopted or that Hezbollah could use any cessation of hostilities to resupply. That in turn could prompt the Israelis to bomb or seize supply routes, provoking counterstrikes by Hezbollah and reigniting the conflict.

By calling upon Israel to cease only offensive military operations, the measure appeared to meet Israel’s demands that it be allowed to leave soldiers in southern Lebanon at the outset.

An Israeli official in Jerusalem said the condition was crucial to Israel’s agreeing because it was the only way of ensuring that Hezbollah would not return to the south.

On Saturday, before the text of the draft resolution was made public, a Hezbollah cabinet minister, Mohammed Fneish, reiterated the militia’s position on any cease-fire. “We will abide by it on condition that no Israeli soldier remains inside Lebanese land,” Mr. Fneish said. “If they stay, we will not abide by it.”

The Israeli official, who said he could not be identified discussing security matters, said Israel fully expected Hezbollah to attack the Israeli soldiers remaining in southern Lebanon. He argued that such an attack would give Israel the right to retaliate and return to the offensive.

But one disappointment for Jerusalem would be the absence of any order to return its two captured soldiers, an original reason Israel cited for going to war. The only language addressing that is in the preamble to the resolution, which “emphasizes” the need to release unconditionally the abducted Israeli soldiers.

As for the Hezbollah demand for a prisoner exchange, the resolution “encourages the efforts aimed at settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel.”

The resolution says responsibility for monitoring the initial truce would rest with Unifil, the United Nations monitoring force. The Israeli official said Israel believed that French rapid-reaction troops would be sent into the area right away to beef up the 2,000-member Unifil, which has been long faulted for being too weak.

In other sections, the resolution expresses its “strong support” for giving full respect to the “Blue Line” border between Lebanon and Israel and called upon Unifil to enable aid workers to get assistance to the area and help the hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese to return home. The resolution calls upon “the international community” to extend aid to the government of Lebanon to help people return and begin the process of reconstruction.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, involved himself personally in the negotiations, and the Élysée Palace Web site on Saturday carried a log of his meetings and phones calls since the crisis began.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Chirac, who by custom could not be identified, said the most difficult part of the French-American talks centered on defining the halt to the fighting.

“The question of a cease-fire was a problem of words, because behind the cease-fire we intended to get a political agreement,” she said. “The cease-fire for us is not just words, it’s the beginning of a process.” The United States, she said, resisted calling for a cease-fire before the political solution had been worked out.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who has frustrated some European leaders by his alliance with the United States in support of Israel’s security goals, said in a televised statement, “The priority now is to get the resolution adopted as soon as possible and then to work for a permanent cease-fire and achieve the conditions in Lebanon and Israel which will prevent a recurrence.”