Israel set war plan more than a year ago

Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining military strength in Lebanon

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE July 21, 2006

By Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service

Jerusalem -- Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago.

In the six years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly.

"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.

In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.

Israeli officials say their pinpoint commando raids should not be confused with a ground invasion. Nor, they say, do they herald another occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israel maintained from 1982 to 2000 -- in order, it said, to thwart Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Planners anticipated the likelihood of civilian deaths on both sides. Israel says Hezbollah intentionally bases some of its operations in residential areas. And Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has bragged publicly that the group's arsenal included rockets capable of bombing Haifa, as occurred last week.

Like all plans, the one now unfolding also has been shaped by changing circumstances, said Eran Lerman, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence who is now director of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Committee.

"There are two radical views of how to deal with this challenge, a serious professional debate within the military community over which way to go," said Lerman. "One is the air power school of thought, the other is the land-borne option. They create different dynamics and different timetables. The crucial factor is that the air force concept is very methodical and almost by definition is slower to get results. A ground invasion that sweeps Hezbollah in front of you is quicker, but at a much higher cost in human life and requiring the creation of a presence on the ground."

The advance scenario is now in its second week, and its success or failure is still unfolding. Whether Israel's aerial strikes will be enough to achieve the threefold aim of the campaign -- to remove the Hezbollah military threat; to evict Hezbollah from the border area, allowing the deployment of Lebanese government troops; and to ensure the safe return of the two Israeli soldiers abducted last week -- remains an open question. Israelis are opposed to the thought of reoccupying Lebanon.

"I have the feeling that the end is not clear here. I have no idea how this movie is going to end," said Daniel Ben-Simon, a military analyst for the daily Haaretz newspaper.

Thursday's clashes in southern Lebanon occurred near an outpost abandoned more than six years ago by the retreating Israeli army. The place was identified using satellite photographs of a Hezbollah bunker, but only from the ground was Israel able to discover that it served as the entrance to a previously unknown underground network of caves and bunkers stuffed with missiles aimed at northern Israel, said Israeli army spokesman Miri Regev.

"We knew about the network, but it was fully revealed (Wednesday) by the ground operation of our forces," said Regev. "This is one of the purposes of the pinpoint ground operations -- to locate and try to destroy the terrorist infrastructure from where they can fire at Israeli citizens."

Israeli military officials say as much as 50 percent of Hezbollah's missile capability has been destroyed, mainly by aerial attacks on targets identified from intelligence reports. But missiles continue to be fired at towns and cities across northern Israel.

"We were not surprised that the firing has continued," said Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "Hezbollah separated its leadership command-and-control system from its field organization. It created a network of tiny cells in each village that had no operational mission except to wait for the moment when they should activate the Katyusha rocket launchers hidden in local houses, using coordinates programmed long ago to hit Nahariya or Kiryat Shemona, or the kibbutzim and villages."

"From the start of this operation, we have also been active on the ground across the width of Lebanon," said Brig. Gen. Ron Friedman, head of Northern Command headquarters. "These missions are designed to support our current actions. Unfortunately, one of the many missions which we have carried out in recent days met with slightly fiercer resistance."

Israel didn't need sophisticated intelligence to discover the huge buildup of Iranian weapons supplies to Hezbollah by way of Syria, because Hezbollah's patrons boasted about it openly in the pages of the Arabic press. As recently as June 16, less than four weeks before the Hezbollah border raid that sparked the current crisis, the Syrian defense minister publicly announced the extension of existing agreements allowing the passage of trucks shipping Iranian weapons into Lebanon.

But to destroy them, Israel needed to map the location of each missile.

"We need a lot of patience," said Hanegbi. "The (Israeli Defense Forces) action at the moment is incapable of finding the very last Katyusha, or the last rocket launcher primed for use hidden inside a house in some village."

Moshe Marzuk, a former head of the Lebanon desk for Israeli Military Intelligence who now is a researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, said Israel had learned from past conflicts in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza -- as well as the recent U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq -- that a traditional military campaign would be counter-effective.

"A big invasion is not suitable here," said Marzuk. "We are not fighting an army, but guerrillas. It would be a mistake to enter and expose ourselves to fighters who will hide, fire off a missile and run away. If we are to be on the ground at all, we need to use commandos and special forces." Since fighting started

-- Israeli air strikes on Lebanon have hit more than 1,255 targets, including 200 rocket-launching sites.

-- Hezbollah launched more than 900 rockets and missiles into northern Israel.

-- At least 330 Lebanese have been killed, including 20 soldiers and three Hezbollah guerrillas. Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora says 1,100 have been wounded; the police put the number at 657.

-- 32 Israelis have been killed, among them 17 soldiers, according to Israeli authorities. At least 12 soldiers and 344 civilians have been wounded.

-- Foreign deaths include eight Canadians, two Kuwaiti nationals, one Iraqi, one Sri Lankan and one Jordanian.

Israel hits Hezbollah stronghold

Militants say Beirut bombing missed leaders

BOSTON GLOBE | July 20, 2006
By Matthew Kalman and Thanassis Cambanis,
Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff

BEIRUT -- Israeli warplanes last night dropped bombs on a bunker in south Beirut where Israel said Hezbollah leaders were meeting, dramatically escalating the conflict on the deadliest day yet in Israel's week-long offensive against the Islamic militant group.

Residents of the Lebanese capital heard three huge explosions just after 10 p.m. Hezbollah said early today that none of its leaders had been killed or wounded in the air attack in the Bourj al Barajneh section, located in the Shi'ite zone where Hezbollah has significant strength.

It was unclear whether Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, was in the bunker at the time. The Israeli military said early today only that its forces had attacked a bunker ``where senior Hezbollah members were gathered."

Even if unsuccessful, the attack demonstrated Israel's willingness to ratchet up the scale of its campaign to drive Hezbollah from southern Lebanon and destroy its ability to attack Israel. The airstrike occurred on a day of fierce fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants in the first serious Israeli ground engagement inside Lebanon in the current offensive.

Israeli warplanes continued to pound Hezbollah targets across southern Lebanon, fueling a wave of refugees fleeing their homes and heading north toward safety.

Lebanon's prime minister, Fouad Siniora, said Israeli attacks had killed 300 people and caused ``unimaginable losses" in Lebanese infrastructure since last Thursday, and he called for an immediate cease-fire. International pressure mounted for Israel to halt its campaign, but Israeli officials showed no sign of easing pressure on Hezbollah, which ignited the current offensive with a deadly cross-border attack against an Israeli patrol July 12 in which two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped.

Two Israeli soldiers and two Hezbollah fighters were reported killed in a firefight yesterday just inside Lebanon when the soldiers discovered a Hezbollah munitions cache on the site of an abandoned Israeli outpost dating from the occupation of southern Lebanon.

Israel wants to avoid a messy ground war, which would undercut its military advantage against Hezbollah and might provoke major internal debate among Israelis still smarting from the 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that ended with a withdrawal in 2000.

At least 55 Lebanese were reported killed in Israeli airstrikes and ground operations on Wednesday alone, making it the deadliest day so far.

Two young Israeli-Arab brothers also were killed in the first rocket attack on the old city of Nazareth, site of the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Hezbollah also fired about 100 rockets in an arc across northern Israel from Haifa in the west to Tiberias in the east.

The four Israeli casualties brought the Israeli death toll for the week to 29.

In Beirut, a luxury American cruise liner and two Chinook helicopters joined the international flotilla evacuating thousands of foreign nationals from Beirut, where Siniora, the prime minister, angrily rejected international claims that Israel was acting in self-defense.

Siniora said Lebanon would seek compensation from Israel for the widespread destruction of the past week, which has forced about half a million people from their homes.

``Is this what the international community calls the right of self-defense? Is this the price to pay?" Siniora demanded of ambassadors gathered in Beirut. ``We will spare no avenue to make Israel compensate."

Israel said its forces repelled an attempt by Hezbollah fighters to infiltrate across the border near Metulla.

In Jerusalem, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana discussed possible diplomatic solutions to the crisis in talks with Israeli leaders, but Syria denied entry to a United Nations team trying to put together a cease-fire.

In Geneva, the top UN human rights official warned that the scale of civilian casualties inflicted in the current conflict could constitute war crimes, though she did not make specific accusations.

``The scale of the killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control," said Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Israeli security chiefs said they had now destroyed about half of Hezbollah's military capacity, with fighter jets and helicopter gunships flying about 150 sorties each day, attacking Hezbollah's rocket launchers, military outposts, and weapons depots as well as communication and transportation arteries.

The victims yesterday included civilians on both sides of the border.

Five people were killed when an Israeli missile hit a neighborhood in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh, police and hospital officials said.

The target was a commercial office of a firm belonging to Hezbollah, but those killed were residents.

In the village of Srifa, near Tyre in southern Lebanon, the airstrikes flattened 15 houses. The village's headman, Hussein Kamaledine, said 25 to 30 people lived in the houses, but it was not known if they were at home. Many people have fled southern Lebanon.

``This is a real massacre," Kamaledine told Al-Manar TV as fire engines extinguished the blaze and rescuers searched for survivors.

In Nazareth in northern Israel, 3-year-old Rabia Abed Taluzi and his brother Mahmoud, 7, were playing close to their family home when they were killed by a direct hit from a rocket which landed in the street nearby.

``It's a vacation and it's afternoon, so where will they go if not to play in the streets?" Mohammed Assawi, a neighbor, told Israel's Channel 10 News.

``It is unpleasant to say what we saw."

Moments later, a second strike hit a building in the town center, sending black smoke billowing into the air.

It was the first attack on the mainly Arab city. Upper Nazareth, the predominantly Jewish new town nearby, was hit over the weekend.

Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told Solana that Israel insisted on three conditions to end the fighting: the return of its kidnapped soldiers, an end to Hezbollah rocket attacks, and the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming Hezbollah and the deployment of Lebanese government forces up to the border.

``Israel is fighting to end the control of the Hezbollah over the lives of both Lebanese and Israelis and to bring an end to its attempts to destabilize the region," Livni told reporters after her meeting with Solana.

``Israel and the international community have a common goal, to promote a process that will bring about a long-term and fundamental change in the political reality in the region, and that will eliminate the threat of terrorism facing both Israelis and Lebanese," she said.

Cambanis reported from Beirut, and Kalman from Jerusalem. Material from Associated Press also was used.

Amid barrage, a Holocaust heroine shakes off fear

By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent
BOSTON GLOBE | July 19, 2006

NAHARIYA, Israel -- Orna Shorani, 76, was named a ``Righteous Among the Nations" for her bravery in rescuing Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. This week her character was on display once again when she brushed off a direct hit by a Hezbollah rocket on her house in this town in northern Israel.

Orna was fast asleep last Thursday morning when a Katyusha rocket fired by militants from Lebanon struck her home, crashing through the roof of her grandson's apartment upstairs and sending her bedroom door flying across the room, where it hit her on the head.

But she refused to go to the hospital, and yesterday she was back at home while workers patched up the damage. All the windows in the front of her house were smashed, the doors were blown off their hinges, and the roof had a gaping hole.

``There was a huge boom, and I got a crack on the head," said Orna, who sees and hears with difficulty and walks with a cane.

``My grandson came running down to see I was OK, but I told him to go away and let me go back to sleep," she said.

Orna lives in Nahariya, a few miles from the border with Lebanon, and the target of attacks by Hezbollah in the past few days. Half the town's residents have left, but Orna said she had no intention of leaving.

``I lived through the Second World War and all of Israel's wars," she said. ``I think I'll survive this one, too."

Orna did more than survive World War II. With her mother and sisters, she hid 25 Jews from a Nazi labor camp next to their home in Hungary and smuggled them to safety. One of them, Ladislav Shorani, jumped over the fence into her garden, kissed her, and declared:

``You will be my wife!"

``He went off to fight with the Russian Army," Orna recalled. ``Three years later, he came back and married me. After the war, we moved to Israel."

Orna had a simple explanation for why she saved Jews from the Nazis back then.

``God said `Thou shalt not kill.' We couldn't stand by and let the Nazis kill these innocent Jews," she said.

And, said Orna, she still believes the same today.

``We need peace in all the world," she said. ``Every person, wherever they live, is entitled to live in peace and good health. This is what I wish for our side, for the other side, and for all the countries of this region."

Underground city endures barrage

By Matthew Kalman Globe Correspondent / July 18, 2006

ACRE, Israel -- The underground city in the ancient port of Acre was built by the Crusaders and at this time of year is usually thronged with tourists. But against the background of wailing air-raid sirens and the dull thud of exploding rockets, Mayor Shimon Lankri said yesterday that the compound was now open 24 hours a day as a makeshift bomb shelter.

``We have been hit by five missiles so far, but no one has been badly hurt," Lankri told the Globe.

He said the mixed Jewish and Arab town had 50 public shelters and 500 private shelters beneath apartment houses, but many were full of junk and had not been cleaned in years.

The residents of Acre, which is just north of the modern port city of Haifa, have been confined to their homes for six days because of continuing rocket attacks from Hezbollah missile batteries across the border with Lebanon, about 10 miles to the north.

People here say they cannot remember the last time Acre was attacked in this way. Yesterday, several missiles fell in and around the town. One fell harmlessly in the holy garden shrine of the Baha'i Temple . There were no casualties.

Lankri and his staff, who are working around the clock to deliver essential supplies of food, milk, and diapers to families afraid to venture out, have prepared a bomb-proof bunker in the basement of City Hall to direct operations if things get worse. From there, municipal officials backed by army, police, and emergency services will direct the running of the town. Taped to a wall in the bunker yesterday were hastily assembled lists of bomb shelters, possible evacuation centers and key personnel.

One room contained numbered metal trunks full of fresh medical equipment. A large generator has been installed to provide electricity should the missiles take out the power supply.

Lankri said Acre's Jewish and Arab residents are facing their ordeal together. Half the town's population of 52,000 is Jewish, while the other half are Christian and Muslim Arabs.

``Arabs and Jews all live together in Acre," said Lankri. ``We are like a model of co-existence for the rest of Israel. . . . Everybody is afraid, Arabs and Jews together, when missiles are falling down from the skies," he added.

``All the people here support the government campaign against Hezbollah," he said. ``We hope they can solve the problem quickly because if there is peace there will be lots of tourists and lots of money to help all the people whose businesses have been closed for the past week."

Hezbollah makes its deadliest strike

Police and religious rescue workers in Haifa, Israel, tended to those killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack. (Oded Balilty/ Associated Press)

BOSTON GLOBE | July 17, 2006

By Anne Barnard and Matthew Kalman, Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent

HAIFA, Israel -- A Hezbollah rocket struck a railway repair shed in the city yesterday, killing eight engineers and wounding 30 people in the deadliest blow to Israel in five days of fighting with the Lebanese-based militant group.

Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon yesterday and early today killed at least 24 people, including eight Lebanese soldiers at a radar station in the north of the country.

As the leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations warned that the fighting could ``provoke a wider conflict," Israeli officials ratcheted up their rhetoric against Syria, declaring that some of the 30 rockets that hit Haifa yesterday were Syrian-made, of a type that was exported to Lebanon in 2001. Syrian officials denied the accusation.

Last night, Hezbollah rockets fired from Lebanon penetrated farther than ever into Israel, hitting Afula, 33 miles south of border, and landing on the outskirts of Nazareth. Israeli officials said Hezbollah possessed rockets that could fly more than 40 miles and warned residents of Tel Aviv, the country's metropolitan hub about 70 miles from the border, to be alert.

The blast in Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, brought the Israeli death toll to at least 24, half of them civilians. Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 148 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that Israel ``will not return to the status quo" that existed before Hezbollah guerrillas sparked the crisis by launching a cross-border raid Wednesday, capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing three.

Since 2000, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after an 18-year occupation, Hezbollah outposts overlooked Israeli towns on the border and Hezbollah forces operated freely in the Lebanese south, outside government control.

``The situation was intolerable," Olmert told his Cabinet at a weekly meeting, adding that the fighting would not stop until the threat is removed.

Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, touring the shrapnel-scarred scene of the deadly Haifa blast, went further, saying, ``We must continue to attack Hezbollah until its infrastructure, which has been built up over the years in the heart of Beirut, is wiped out."

Defense Minister Amir Peretz declared that Israel would achieve its goals without sending ground troops into Lebanon. The prospect of a ground war troubles many Israelis after the previous Lebanese war, which is often described as Israel's Vietnam and ended when domestic opposition forced the pullout six years ago.

A senior military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the mission could stop short of eradicating the militant group, estimated to have about 6,000 fighters.

``I'll be modest -- we will not eliminate Hezbollah in a week or two," he said. ``We just need to weaken it enough so the Lebanese government can deal with them" and implement United Nations Resolution 1559.

That measure calls for the government to assert control over the whole country -- including deploying along the border with Israel -- and disarm militias.

Hezbollah enjoys the support of Shi'ite Muslims while the weak army is backed by a coalition of Christians and moderate Sunnis opposed to Syrian influence. Since the bloody Lebanese civil war ended in 1990, Lebanon has operated with a fragile consensus government that avoids confrontation.

Haifa, a city of 220,000 that slopes down Mount Carmel to the Mediterranean Sea, was reduced to a ghost town yesterday.

The missile left a large hole in the roof over the railway sidings. It hit a platform between the trains, scattering bits of metal and ball bearings everywhere that left small holes and shattered windows on the train cars. Pools of blood covered the floor.

At the scene, Mofaz, a former military chief of staff, said the missile that hit the shed was provided to Hezbollah by Syria, an accusation laid out in more detail by a senior military officer who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

The rockets that hit Haifa included 122mm Katyusha rockets, of which Hezbollah has 12,000 and has fired 800 in the last five days, the officer said. But they also included at least one Fajr rocket, made in Iran, and one 220mm rocket made in Syria, he said.

Imad Moustapha, the Syrian ambassador to the United States, told CNN, ``Syria does not provide military training or military equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon."

Israel Air Force Brigadier General Yohanan Locker said Israel would continue to target Hezbollah missile launchers placed on the roofs of residential buildings.

At the briefing, the senior Israeli officer said the military has hit four Fajr launchers in south Lebanon. He said that on Thursday, Israel attacked more than 40 launchers, most in civilian houses.

In Haifa, Avraham El-Hayani, an air-conditioning engineer for Israel Railways, said he survived the attack because he was working inside one of the train cars when the rocket hit, killing workers on the platform.

``I heard a huge explosion. There was a flash of bright blue light and then silence. Then I heard water and I realized the automatic sprinklers had come on," he said while recovering from shock at Rambam Hospital.

After a few seconds, Hayani said, he recovered and tried to give first aid, as two more rockets crashed down outside.

``My friends had blood pouring from wounds all over their body," he said. ``Their limbs were smashed. It was horrible."

Police ordered Haifa residents to stay indoors, fearing further attacks. The streets of the bustling port city emptied within minutes.

Banks, shopping centers, and restaurants closed, and Haifa's two universities canceled all classes and exams. Cinemas and theaters shut their doors and a dance festival planned for last night was canceled. Police said all factories in northern Israel were shut.

The Baguette Bar-Café on HaMeginim Street downtown was one of the few businesses open.

``I want to work. I'm scared, but I have to support my family," said proprietor Nadr Shehadeh, a Christian Arab who said he was proud to live in this mixed Jewish-Arab city.

``No one, neither Israel nor Hezbollah, is doing the right thing, but most people here support the Israeli government," Shehadeh said. ``I didn't serve in the army, but I feel that by staying open I'm serving the people of this city, Jew and Arab alike."

Matthew Kalman reported from Haifa, Anne Barnard from Jerusalem, and Globe correspondent Alon Tuval from Tel Aviv.

WHY ISRAEL HIT BACK SO HARD 'THIS IS A WAR': Kidnappings and the perceived hand of Iran demand response, leaders say

San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, July 14, 2006
Page A - 1

Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service

Jerusalem -- For Israel, Wednesday's raid was a kidnapping too far.

The cross-border raid by Hezbollah gunmen on an Israeli army patrol in northern Israel and the abduction of two soldiers whom the captors declared to be bargaining chips for the release of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners held by Israel prompted a response that threatens the stability of the region.

"The notion that this is a limited operation is wrong -- this is a fundamentally new situation," Gen. Gershon Yitzhak, head of the Israeli Army Home Front Command, said in an interview. "This is not an operation. This is a war for the sake of our home, what it will look like in the future and how we will be able to live in the region. This operation will continue to expand, and it is only just beginning.

"We must remove this threat once and for all," the general added.

In the six years since the Israeli army withdrew from southern Lebanon, ending 18 years of occupation, the government in Jerusalem has responded to similar kidnappings and kidnap attempts with minor displays of force and the occasional limited bombing of targets in Lebanon and Syria.

This time, Israel bombed Lebanese bridges and military bases. Its attacks ignited fuel reserves and destroyed runways at the Beirut airport, sending flames and a pall of black smoke floating over the capital. Early this morning, Israeli bombers damaged the major road leading from Beirut to Damascus, Syria, and launched at least four missiles at the southern suburbs of Beirut where Hezbollah officials live. Three people were killed and dozens wounded, Lebanese police said. Anti-aircraft fire echoed as Israeli jets roared over the capital. It was not immediately clear who was firing at the planes as both the Lebanese army and Hezbollah have anti-aircraft artillery.

The all-out Israeli response could be measured against factors that changed the usual calculation of action and reaction.

First, it came barely two weeks after a similar cross-border raid by Hamas guerrillas from Gaza ended in the deaths of two Israeli soldiers and the abduction of a third. Israel has failed to secure the release of missing Cpl. Gilad Shalit despite reinvading the Gaza Strip for the first time since Jewish settlements were vacated and Israeli army posts closed in September.

Israeli leaders cannot afford such incidents to become commonplace, and the harsh response was intended at least in part to deter similar kidnappings in the future.

"We reached the point where we had to tell the Hezbollah, in a language that the Hezbollah can understand, that there is a limit to everything," Shimon Peres, Israel's deputy prime minister told reporters in Tel Aviv.

"The Israeli government is determined to hit Hamas and Hezbollah and destroy their infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, and to reach the point where the Palestinian Authority on the one hand and the Lebanese government on the other hand, probably with the support from the world community, will ... make sure that the use of weapons will be the monopoly of the state," said Ehud Barak, the former prime minister who initiated the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in May 2000.

Second, Israeli intelligence believes that Iran -- Hezbollah's main bankroller -- initiated Wednesday's raid. Israeli leaders believe the time has come to clip Hezbollah's wings before the Iranian influence grows even stronger. Iran is passionately committed to the destruction of the Jewish state and provides funding, training and arms for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.

According to Israeli intelligence sources, Iran gave Hezbollah the green light for the raid. These sources said Hezbollah's extensive rocket barrage on northern Israel followed talks in Damascus between Hezbollah officials and Ali Larijani, head of Iran's supreme national security council, who arrived in the Syrian capital on Wednesday morning.

During his stopover in Damascus, Larijani also met with Syrian President Bashar Assad and the leaders of radical Palestinian groups that are given sanctuary in the Syrian capital, including Khaled Mashaal, the supreme leader of Hamas.

Israeli Foreign Ministry Deputy Director General Gideon Meir said the government had "specific information that Hezbollah is planning to transfer the kidnapped soldiers to Iran."

Larijani was returning to Iran after fruitless talks with European leaders in Brussels, which failed to break the deadlock over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Lebanese commentators expressed fears that Hezbollah's raid on the Israeli patrol and the rocket barrage that followed were designed to divert attention away from the increasing international pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program.

"Was yesterday's operation aimed at easing the considerable pressure being brought to bear by the international community, headed by the U.S., on the Islamic Republic of Iran regarding its nuclear dossier?" asked Sarkis Na'um, a columnist for the Christian Lebanese daily Al-Nahar.

Hezbollah's Al-Manar Television broadcast pictures of the new Iranian-supplied 333mm Raad-1 rocket, which it said was used in Thursday's attack on an Israeli army base near Safed, about 10 miles from the Israel-Lebanon border. The Raad-1 carries 200 pounds of explosives.

Israel targeted Beirut's airport because, Israeli military officials said, it was regularly used to transport Iranian weapons, often flown via Syria, to Hezbollah and to Palestinian militants in Lebanon.

The same Israeli planes, flying over the southern Beirut suburb of Dahiya, showered the area with Arabic-language leaflets warning residents to leave their homes or suffer the consequences of living as neighbors to Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hezbollah, and other members of the radical Shiite group's leadership, most of whom occupy heavily fortified residences in the area.

"The story of Nasrallah and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is not a local matter," said Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. "It's not connected just to the north of Israel. He wants to influence the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must not let him assume greater importance than he has."

Hezbollah's gamble to launch a cross-border attack was risky, but Israel is also playing with fire.

"The logic of the current situation is likely to move Israel in the direction of abandoning restraints, broadening objectives and expanding the scope of its operations -- perhaps to include military action against Syria -- in order to end the crisis on terms that it considers acceptable," warned Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow and director of security studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Einstein letters reveal a turmoil beyond science

BOSTON GLOBE
July 11, 2006

By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent

JERUSALEM -- Albert Einstein made bad financial investments, revealed details about his mistresses to his wives, and was plagued by doubts about his relationship with his two sons.

Those were among the intimate details of Einstein's life that emerged yesterday in a trove of more than 3,500 pages of letters, papers, postcards, and other documents unsealed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

They include notes and drawings to and from his children and his two wives, Mileva and Elsa. In one note to his stepdaughter written in 1928, Einstein drew a small cartoon of himself lying ill in bed, reading a book with a chamber pot at the ready.

Researchers say the newly available papers offer few insights into Einstein's science, but do shed light on the personal life and the character of the creator of the special theory of relativity.

Einstein bequeathed his personal papers to Hebrew University when he died in 1955. The letters released yesterday were an additional bequest added to the collection by his stepdaughter Margot Einstein on condition that they be sealed for 20 years after her death. She died in July 1986.

The letters reveal how Einstein lost most of his Nobel Prize money in bad bond investments on Wall Street, and provide details of how he was showered with affection and gifts by his many mistresses.

``It added colors to the image we had of Einstein before," said Barbara Wolff, an archivist at the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University who has read and indexed the newly released material. ``Now we have a high-resolution picture."

The material unsealed in the archives includes documents from 1912 to 1955. A handful of the items were available for view at a press conference yesterday at Hebrew University announcing the collection. Some will be included in the 10th volume of the Einstein Archive, covering Einstein's correspondence from May to December 1920. The series is published by Princeton University Press and edited by the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology.

Einstein achieved world fame in 1905 after publishing his special theory of relativity while he was living in Bern, Switzerland. He settled in Berlin in 1914 but traveled extensively, lecturing and working in many places including three stints as a scholar in residence at Oxford University. Threatened by the Nazis, who put a bounty on his head, he left Berlin for good in 1933 and settled in Princeton, N.J., from where he continued to correspond with his sons and former wife in Switzerland.

He became involved with Elsa, a cousin, in 1912 when he was still married to his first wife Mileva, a fellow scientist with whom he had two boys, Hans Albert and Eduard. Before he and Mileva married, they had a daughter, Lieserl, who was given up for adoption.

In 1919, Einstein divorced Mileva and married Elsa, but within four years he was in love with Bette Neumann, his secretary who was also the young niece of one of his friends. Many more liaisons followed.

The letters reveal that a beautiful Berlin socialite named Ethel Michanowski followed him to Oxford, only to discover that he was involved with a third woman.

According to excerpts of letters made available to reporters, Einstein discussed his extra-marital affairs openly with his family.

``It is true that M. followed me and her chasing after me is getting out of control," wrote Einstein to his stepdaughter in May 1931 of Michanowski's infatuation. ``I will tell her that she should vanish immediately. . . . Out of all the dames, I am in fact attached only to Mrs L. who is absolutely harmless and decent, and even with this there is no danger to the divine world order."

``I don't care what people are saying about me, but for mother and Mrs M. it is better that not every Tom, Dick and Harry gossip about it," he wrote.

``Mrs L." was Margarete Lenbach, another wealthy woman who used to send a chauffeur-driven car to collect Einstein for their late-night trysts.

But Einstein valued Michanowski's discretion, as he wrote to his second wife Elsa in 1931.

``Mrs. M. definitely acted according to the best Christian-Jewish ethics: 1) one should do what one enjoys and what won't harm anyone else; and 2) one should refrain from doing things one does not take delight in and which annoy another person. Because of 1) she came with me, and because of 2) she didn't tell you a word. Isn't that irreproachable?"

Einstein's distance from his two sons after the divorce from Mileva clearly troubled him. He wrote how much he enjoyed taking the boys on holiday but at times expressed despair over his younger son, Eduard, who suffered from schizophrenia. On more than one occasion he suggested it would have been better if Eduard had never been born.

But things were troubled even before the split with Mileva, not least because of Einstein's womanizing. In June 1915, Einstein went on holiday with Elsa after his older son, Hans Albert, curtly rejected an invitation to join him.

``Dear Papa, You should contact Mama about such things, because I'm not the only one to decide here. But if you're so unfriendly to her, I don't want to go with you either," wrote the boy, then just 11 years old.

The divorce settlement with Mileva contained a unique clause in which Einstein agreed that if he were to win the Nobel Prize he would deposit the money in a Swiss bank account in Mileva's name, and she could use the interest to finance the upbringing of the children. Einstein indeed won the prize for physics in 1921, but failed to fulfill this promise, and biographies have said that Mileva always felt betrayed.

The newly released papers reveal that he invested three-quarters of the money, about $24,000, in long-term bonds via the Ladenburg and Thalmann Bank in New York. Mileva was supposed to receive the interest. But the value of the bonds was wiped out in the Depression of the 1930s and Mileva's income dried up.

On June 12, 1932, Mileva asked her former husband for more money to help pay the mortgage on properties she had bought. ``Not so much is left for us to live on, especially since our income in any case has been reduced because of the loss from the papers in America," she wrote.

But Professor Hanoch Gutfreund, who is responsible for the Einstein bequest at Hebrew University, said Einstein made amends: ``Over the course of his life he sent Mileva and the boys regular sums of cash, much more than if he had only given them his Nobel Prize award."

8 new species found in a cave

A sealed ecosystem deep below ground

By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent | June 1, 2006

JERUSALEM -- A chance discovery by a teenage spelunker has revealed the existence of eight new animal species in an underground cave in Israel, including the first terrestrial animal with no known relative found only in a cave , scientists announced yesterday.

The new life-forms were discovered in a huge limestone cavern more than 300 feet below ground that experts said had probably been undisturbed for millions of years.

Scientists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem said at a press conference four aquatic species and four terrestrial species were found in the cave and that they were probably unique to the undisturbed ecosystem. Seven of the species were thought to be related to other known species, they said.

Matan Avital, 18, from Beit Horon, a West Bank settlement near Jerusalem, stumbled across the animals earlier this month as a member of a small team of volunteer spelunkers exploring a newly discovered network of natural underground tunnels exposed near a cement quarry alongside the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway.

``I went down to check out an underground lake we found in this huge cavern when I noticed there were tiny animals swimming around in the water," Avital said in an interview. Avital said he called to Israel Naaman, a master's student in geography at Hebrew University who was directing the cave exploration. Naaman caught the swimming creature in a plastic container.

``It was very difficult to catch it because it was swimming so fast," Avital said. ``It took us five or six minutes to catch this little thing. . . . We had no idea what it was. Israel took it to the experts. The more they examined it they realized it was something out of the ordinary, a new discovery," Avital said.

Joel Despain, a cave management specialist for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, who helped discover 27 new species in a network of California caves earlier this year, called the discovery ``a big deal."

``It's definitely quite significant," he said in a telephone interview when told of the Israeli scientists' discovery. ``It could have important ramifications for taxonomy, the science of classifying animals and plants. Biologists are constantly revising the family trees. Finding something very new and unique will have an impact on how things are classified in that branch of the tree."

Avital, who said he has ``always loved exploring since I was a small boy," is volunteering at the cave research unit in the Geography Department of Hebrew University during a year off between high school and service in the Israeli Army. He said some of the underground tunnels were barely large enough to crawl through, while others had perilous drops which could only be negotiated using climbing gear.

Avital's find led university scientists to explore the 1.5-mile-long underground network where they discovered the eight species in and around the underground lake.

The largest of the aquatic animals is an albino crustacean about two inches long with a cigar-shaped body, six legs, and two pincer-like claws.

The creature appears to be related to a species found in only three other places -- southern Italy, the coast of Libya, and the northern corner of the nearby Sea of Galilee.

But tests show the newly discovered animal has a different DNA and a different physical structure.

Like all the species discovered in the cave, it has no eyes.

Two of the aquatic crustaceans found in the brackish lake were saltwater species, while the other two were freshwater, suggesting they arrived in the cave from different sources at different times. All but one of the life forms -- a tiny scorpion -- were found alive. The scientists said they were confident further exploration would yield live examples of this creature as well.

The scientists said yesterday the animals have been sent to specialists around the world for laboratory testing. The animals have not yet been named.

The sealed cavern, dubbed the Ayalon Cave by the scientists, lies 300 feet below ground level and is impermeable to rainwater because of a thick layer of chalk above the roof. It appears to have been isolated from the outside world for millions of years, creating a unique ecosystem.

``Normally, chalk is slightly porous, but a layer tens of meters thick as this was would not have allowed surface water to penetrate into the cave," said professor Amos Frumkin of the Hebrew University Department of Geography.

The temperature of the cave water was 88 degrees, 13 degrees warmer than surface water would be in that area, suggesting it was fed by sources from deep inside the earth, said scientists.

``This is the first discovery of terrestrial animals found only in a cave and not on the surface," said Hanan Dimentman of the Hebrew University Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences.

``Ecologically, this is a unique cave unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Water, nutrients, and animals cannot enter from above. It has been isolated from above for millennia," he said.

He said there were no plants in the cavern because the lack of sunlight ruled out photosynthesis, but he had identified several bacteria which served as the basic food which supported the unique life system inside the cave.

``The eight species found thus far are only the beginning" of what promises to be ``a fantastic biodiversity," said Dimentman, adding that he expects further exploration to reveal more unique life forms.

The cave was uncovered during routine digging in a cement quarry near the central Israeli town of Ramle. It has now been closed off to prevent contamination while scientists continue to explore for more life forms.

Despain, the American scientist, said the Israeli find was unusual because the cave was isolated from the outside world and had a unique source of energy.

``There is a similar cave in Romania which is also cut off from the outside though not as deep, which like the Israeli cave also has food sources which come from sulphur compounds in the water. They discovered 20 unique species in that cave," he said.

``It's probably only the second time that an ecosystem of this type has been found intact and functioning. We have indications of similar systems in disused caves but to find them still functioning is extremely rare. They are tremendous laboratories for scientific study."

Trial sheds light on shadowy antiquities world

By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent | May 16, 2006

JERUSALEM -- Testimony in a Jerusalem District courtroom is giving a rare glimpse into the shadowy world of biblical antiquities.

Three of Israel's most respected experts in ancient archeological treasures are on trial, charged with 18 counts of fraud, receiving money through deception, damaging antiquities, and violations of Israeli antiquities laws.

The defendants -- collector Oded Golan, dealer and writer Robert Deutsch, and former Israel Museum conservator turned dealer Rafi Brown -- are accused of faking a range of artifacts, including the burial box of Jesus's brother, a wine decanter used in Solomon's Temple and ancient seal impressions and inscriptions, some of which were sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Since the trial began in September 2005, witnesses have described furtive encounters with Arab graverobbers, international smuggling, and transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars based on a handshake.

Lawyers involved in the case expect court proceedings to continue for at least another year.

Oded Golan, the first accused, shot to worldwide attention in November 2002 as the man behind a sensational discovery that rocked the world of biblical antiquities: a first-century stone ossuary, or burial box, with an ancient Hebrew inscription identifying it as the last resting place of ''James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

The ossuary was exhibited in Toronto and hailed by scholars as the first physical link ever discovered to the family of Jesus. But when the 2-foot long limestone box returned to Israel in March 2003, it was seized by the Israel Antiquities Authority and submitted to a committee of experts to determine its authenticity.

Meanwhile, the Antiquities Authority was already investigating Golan in connection with another item, the Joash stone. This was a black stone tablet with an ancient Hebrew inscription that appeared to record the renovation of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem by King Joash in the ninth century BC. If genuine, it would be the first physical evidence of the temple ever recovered.

The committee of experts was asked to rule on both items and in June 2003 announced that both were modern fakes. Golan was arrested on suspicion of violating Israel's antiquities laws and repeatedly interrogated while police raided his apartment and two other properties in Tel Aviv. There they seized a range of tools and materials that they said could be used to fake ancient artifacts.

In December 2004, the Israeli police indicted Golan, Deutsch and Brown. Charges against two others were later dropped.

Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority, described the charges against Golan and his alleged colleagues as ''the tip of the iceberg."

''These forgeries have worldwide repercussions," Dorfman said. ''They were an attempt to change the history of the Jewish and Christian people."

Commander Shaul Naim, head of the two-year police investigation, said: ''This was fraud of a sophistication and expertise which was previously unknown. They took authentic items and added inscriptions to make them worth millions."

Naim said forgers managed to fake inscriptions, decorations, and even the patina -- the thin sediment created over centuries by moisture collecting on the item underground or in a cave. ''We believe that there are many more items in museums and collections around the world which are yet to be identified," he said.

The opening days of the trial were devoted to four days of testimony from multimillionaire collector Shlomo Moussaieff of London, a key prosecution witness. He described extraordinary scenes where dealers, experts, and even Israeli diplomats came to his home, produced rare antiquities from their pockets and negotiated sales worth many thousands of dollars.

Prosecutors said Moussaieff was swindled out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for fake items by all three defendants.

Moussaieff's purchasing power is legendary. He once paid $1.5 million for a single clay impression of a royal seal used by one of the early kings of Israel. No one has questioned the authenticity of that item, but a collection of 28 seal impressions he bought for $200,000 is now said by the Israeli police to be mostly fakes, fabricated by Golan and Deutsch.

Moussaieff, 82, told the court he bought the temple decanter from Deutsch for $150,000. Police said it was an authentic item but the inscription was faked with the help of Golan, who received half the money. Moussaieff also described buying several inscribed pieces of pottery from Golan and Deutsch for $200,000, and similar pottery from a dealer acting for Rafi Brown for $180,000. Police said those items were also fakes.

Moussaieff told the court he stood by the authenticity of every item in his collection but said if he had been fooled, he only had himself to blame.

''I'm not stupid, I don't throw money away just because someone has come to sell me something," Moussaieff said in an interview during a break in the trial. ''I'm suspicious of everything and everybody, particularly when there are large amounts of money involved. I still believe these items are genuine. I think the James ossuary is genuine."

Moussaieff said he had spent millions of dollars on his collection of antiquities intending to prove the truth of the Bible.

Both Golan and Deutsch reject all the charges against them and accuse the Israeli authorities of a witch hunt, insisting that all the items are genuine.

''There is not one grain of truth in the fantastic allegations relating to me," Golan, who has been under house arrest at his parents' home for more than a year, said in an interview.

Deutsch also denies ever faking antiquities. ''The authorities have ruined my reputation and I have lost my university teaching position because of the baseless charges," he said during a break in the proceedings.

The court will have a hard time deciding between the experts who are due to give evidence. The findings of the committee appointed by the Antiquities Authority have been questioned by geologists, epigraphers and archeologists.

In his defense, Golan is planning to call Dr. Wolfgang Krumbein, a world expert in ancient stone from Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany. Krumbein carried out extensive tests on the items in Jerusalem and said in a written report that he found ''no indisputable evidence confirming the claim that any or all of the items had been produced in the last several decades."

Unique restaurant reflects Israeli social issue

Gap between rich and poor growing wider

By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent | May 12, 2006

JERUSALEM -- The widening gap between rich and poor in Israel is nowhere more apparent than on Agrippas Street in downtown Jerusalem near Mahane Yehuda, the colorful fruit and vegetable street market.

Upscale restaurants and workers' eateries jostle for space along the crowded street, including the Carmei Ha'Ir restaurant, where this week David, a regular diner, was at his usual table next to a large fish tank.

''The food here is very good, first class, and the service is good," said David, who preferred not to give his last name. ''Please will you join me for some lunch? It's on me."

There was no check for David at the end of the meal because this unique restaurant is a soup kitchen where diners can expect courteous waiter service and a cheery welcome whether they can afford to pay or not.

The growing clientele of Carmei Ha'Ir reflects a worsening social crisis in Israel, which figured large in the general election.

Newly elected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's centrist Kadima Party won only 29 seats in the 120-member Knesset, far less than predicted. Voters gave unexpected support to the economic program of the Labor party, which promised a 33 percent rise in the minimum wage to $12,000 and more money for health, education, and social welfare.

What's more, a stunning seven seats also went to the new-born Pensioners' Party, whose platform demanded mandatory pensions for workers, a raise in the state pension, and dignified compensation for elderly Holocaust survivors.

''We will have to change priorities regarding social issues and this is of utmost importance for economic stability," Olmert told reporters after the election. ''We want to bring about a reduction in social gaps, an increase in employment and a reduction in the number of people in distress."

At Carmei Ha'Ir, the homeless and unemployed and families on welfare share tables with workers from the local market. Tourists are stunned to discover they pay whatever they like. According to Yair Harosh, the soup kitchen's founder and director, one man recently left a check for $5,000 in the box by the door, which serves as a cash register.

David says he lost his regular job as a janitor at a rabbinical college three years ago, and he's had trouble making ends meet ever since. His hands are disabled, so he eats directly off the plate and drinks soup through a straw. None of that is a problem at Carmei Ha'Ir, where he's welcomed by staff and fellow-diners alike as an old friend.

''Before, I was kind of ashamed to go into a soup kitchen. I had my pride. But the food here is like you'd buy in a restaurant. And the people here are very nice. They help you whenever they can," said David, who immigrated to Israel from his native Indiana 31 years ago.

''These are very tough times," said David. ''There was the bombings, the security situation, and with the security situation a lot of economic and social programs went down. . . . They could start that bombing again and everything will turn back to security. It got so bad. Now the people are saying so much for security. Let's get to the basic things of people eating. Food."

Carmei Ha'Ir opened three years ago serving 100 meals a day. As Israel's economy has declined, the kitchen's work has expanded. Each day its volunteer staff serves 500 diners in the restaurant, prepares and distributes 400 sandwiches for poor schoolchildren and makes 200 weekly supermarket-style deliveries of fruit and vegetables to impoverished families.

Internal Revenue inspectors turned up recently demanding to see the books. Harosh explained to the disbelieving civil servants that the meager earnings paid only a fraction of the expenses. Carmei Ha'Ir is currently half a million dollars in debt, owed to their bank overdraft and suppliers, Harosh says, and are looking for donors to help out.

After eating lunch, the inspectors each dropped a 100-shekel bill (about $20) into the box.

''It's the first time anyone ever got any money out of the Israeli Internal Revenue," laughed Harosh.

From the outside, Israel's economy looked in good shape even before Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed last Friday to pay $4 billion for 80 percent of Iscar, an Israeli machine tools manufacturer. The deal, which sent the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange soaring to record levels, also created a $1 billion tax windfall for Olmert's new government, and nearly equaled the entire foreign investment in Israel for the whole of 2005.

''In 2005, Israel's economic recovery continued and became even more firmly based. GDP grew rapidly by 5.2 percent," said Stanley Fischer, governor of the central Bank of Israel, presenting his annual report on the Israeli economy last month.

Foreign investment in Israel is at an all-time high, last year topping $5 billion. The shekel is steady against the dollar and other major currencies, and unemployment which soared in the early years of the intifada is back down to around 9 percent after peaking at 10.7 percent in 2003. More than 1.9 million tourists arrived in Israel in 2005, a 27 percent rise over 2004. And per capita GDP rose from $5,612 in 1980 to $16,452 in 2003.

But the headline figures hide a growing ''social gap" between rich and poor that has been troubling commentators for some time.

The same day the Iscar deal was announced, Olmert increased bread prices by 7 percent. The Pensioners' Party threatened to quit the government, saying the measure disproportionately hurt the poor and the elderly. The showdown imperiled Olmert's thin parliamentary majority.

Highlighting the growing gulf in incomes, the Israeli financial daily The Marker reported that in 2005, salaries of the 120 most senior executives of public companies listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange rose an average 48.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average Israeli wage remained stuck at around 90,000 shekels ($19,500).

According to figures compiled by the Adva Center, which compiles information on equality and social justice in Israel, child poverty levels rose sharply from 1977, when 22.9 percent of children were beneath the poverty line to 2005, when 34.1 percent of children were in that bracket.

According to Shlomo Swirski and Etty Konor-Attias, authors of ''Israel: A Social report 2005," the widening gap between rich and poor occurred even as Israel was experiencing steady economic growth.

''Growth alone does not guarantee general prosperity," they wrote. ''During the 1990s, the fruits of growth in the Israeli economy were unevenly distributed. . . . The income of persons in the top income bracket continued to grow during the first years of the second intifadah, 2001 and 2002, whilst most of the population experienced a drop in their standard of living."

The man most popularly blamed for the widening gap is Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud party took a drubbing in the election. He was finance minister from 2003 to 2005 and oversaw a series of budget-slashing measures, which many agree saved the Israeli economy from collapse, but whose burden fell mostly on the poor.

Netanyahu also championed the privatization of a series of state monopolies. The result was increased competition and lower prices, but ownership of the major industrial companies in Israel became concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite of wealthy families.

Ari Shavit, commentator for the Haaretz daily, said the election results showed Israelis voting to roll back Netanyahu's initiatives.

''Social-democracy is back. After a long period of moral coma, the Israeli nation is once again demanding justice," wrote Shavit.

According to social activist Eliezer Yaari, director of the New Israel Fund, there is a clear link between the acceptance of Olmert's diplomatic initiative to dismantle settlements and his social policy.

''This election showed that there is a readiness for concession and a deep understanding that growth, personal security and economic stability cannot go with occupation," said Yaari. ''If people want to assure a certain well-being to their children, certain things have to be given up, including occupation."

Palestinian medical crisis looms

As funds cut, many patients worsen, die

By Matthew Kalman and Sa'id Ghazali, Globe Correspondents | May 7, 2006

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Palestinian doctors say the cutoff of funds to the new Hamas-led government is causing a growing crisis in the Palestinian healthcare system, and has already contributed to the deaths of some patients.

For the first time since he became director of the Ramallah Hospital in 1998, Dr. Husni Atari said, the facility is running out of medicines, sterile dressings, and other disposables. None of his 346 doctors, nurses, and ancillary staff has received salaries from the Palestinian Ministry of Finance since February, he added in an interview.

Ramallah Hospital is the main medical referral center for the West Bank, with 155 beds, treating 20,000 in-patients and 70,000 emergency cases each year.

''The doctors and other staff are still coming to work even though they have not been paid. Soon they will have no money to get to the hospital. When I look at my store cupboards, I see things are in danger of collapse. If this goes on, we will have to close," Atari said.

Many Western countries, led by the United States, have banned financial transactions with the Palestinian government because they consider Hamas a terrorist organization. The United States and other countries have said they will continue to provide humanitarian aid, and some Arab governments have offered to make up the lost funding. But international banks have been unwilling to transfer the funds to Palestinian organizations for fear of being accused of violating the ban.

At the Shifa Hospital in Gaza, dozens of kidney patients have seen their dialysis sessions cut because of dwindling supplies because of the cutbacks in funding, and five patients have already died, doctors and nurses say.

''More than 160 patients who have kidney failure eventually will die," said Ayman al Sisi, a senior nurse in charge of the renal department. He said five patients had died recently because of a lack of proper treatment resulting from the drop in resources.

At the same hospital, Asmaa al Saidi, a 56-year-old breast cancer patient, was lying unconscious and close to death because the hospital has run out of supplies to perform chemotherapy, which doctors said had been readily available until the funding freeze.

''What crime has my mother done to be punished by Israel and the US?" asked her son, Ismail Siyam, 38. ''I blame any one with a sense of humanity who does not help us."

At the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, the outlook also is bleak. Dr. Anan Masri, a pediatric cardiologist who has been deputy minister of health for the past 18 months, said supplies were so sparse that he feared for the lives of 800 dialysis patients in Palestinian facilities throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

''We have an emergency here," Masri said. ''It is like a war but even worse, because the people do not understand why the situation is so bad when it seems to them like an ordinary day."

The alarms are not just coming from the Palestinians. On Friday, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, declared that a ''crisis is on our doorstep," warning of a shortage of medical supplies at hospitals and a large increase in the number of refugees coming to its centers seeking food aid and cash assistance, Agence France-Presse reported.

Israeli officials said they are doing their best to avert a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian Authority and are allowing a free flow of medical and humanitarian supplies.

''We regularly allow medical supplies into Gaza through the Karni crossing with priority for the solution needed to treat dialysis and cancer patients," said Yossi Temach, a spokesman for the Israeli administration responsible for links to Gaza. ''We don't know which address this is going to, we simply allow the supplies to pass into Gaza."

The United States says it is sensitive to the hardships the Palestinians face and that it has recently increased humanitarian assistance through nongovernmental organizations and through the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees.

''We don't want the Palestinian people themselves to suffer from a lack of assistance from the international community," Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, said Friday in Boston during a meeting with reporters and editors from The Boston Globe. He stressed that isolating Hamas ''is a very principled issue that we will not compromise on."

The Palestinian Authority government is bankrupt and has been unable to pay March or April salaries to its 167,000 civil servants, whose pay supports about one quarter of the 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel suspended some $950 million in annual payments to the Palestinians of customs and taxes for goods and services conducted through Israel. The European Union suspended about $600 million in annual budgetary assistance.

Hamas ministers have managed to raise some funds from Gulf states and other supporting nations, but the bank-transfer problems have held up donations.

''The problem is not with raising money," Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas told reporters in Gaza City last week. ''The problem is how to transfer this money to the Palestinians."

In Jenin, Palestinian activist Adnan al Sabbah, 56, and two other local men have begun a hunger strike to protest the international sanctions. ''I do not want to stay alive watching the Palestinian children, men, and women die from cancer and kidney failure," Sabbah said in a telephone interview.

The US sanctions are also threatening charities providing Palestinians with healthcare, said Steve Sosebee, founder and director of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, an Ohio-based organization that treats more than 2,000 critically ill children each year.

As part of the group's efforts, Dr. Walid Yassir, an orthopedic surgeon from Tufts New England Medical Center, is scheduled to come to Bethlehem in June to perform spine surgery for children with scoliosis and to train local doctors. But Yassir's visit is now pending clarification of the US rules, Sosebee said.

''It's better for the children not to leave their families, and taking family members along makes it very expensive. We get more bang for the buck bringing the doctors here, and we get the added benefit of local physicians working alongside them and learning from them," Sosebee said.

Under guidelines issued by the US Treasury Department last month, US citizens and organizations must conclude all direct transactions with the Palestinian Authority by May 14 unless specifically permitted to continue. The order does not apply to contact with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, or non-Hamas members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Molly Millerwise, spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, said by telephone from Washington that the PCRF missions would have to be judged case by case, depending on ''the precise terms of the proposed activity."

But for Palestinian doctors, the sanctions feel like a death blow.

''If this goes on more than a couple of weeks, the healthcare system will collapse in Palestine," said Mahmoud Nashashibi, a Palestinian pediatric cardiologist who operates a heart clinic funded by Sosebee's organization at the El-Mokassed Hospital in East Jerusalem. ''The healthcare issue should be viewed differently from the political question of Hamas."

Roy Greene of the Globe staff contributed to this report from Boston.

Abbas seeks dialogue in a divided society

Palestinians' internal rifts deepen crisis

By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent | May 4, 2006

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- As conflict between Palestinian factions worsens and an economic crisis deepens, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has invited 120 political, business, and community leaders to meet and find solutions to end the turmoil.

Abbas's ''national dialogue conference," which was to have started Tuesday, has been postponed until mid-May. Some analysts said it could be the last chance to avert civil war -- and they said the delay suggests Hamas, Fatah, and other groups are so divided that they cannot even agree on how to talk through their deep differences.

Abbas is hoping the delegates can solve three major issues: the current political divisions within Palestinian society; relations with Israel; and reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group founded by the late Yasser Arafat, so it can embrace Hamas for the first time and resume its role as the diplomatic representative of the Palestinians.

Two elections have left power in the Palestinian Authority divided between Abbas, the president, who is from the Fatah Party, and Hamas, which won a large majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council election in January and now controls the newly appointed Cabinet.

Abbas and the Fatah Party favor peace talks with Israel that would lead to a two-state solution, while Hamas refuses to recognize the Jewish state and seeks its total destruction. Hamas favors continued ''armed resistance" against Israel, although it has largely observed an informal truce for 15 months. Fatah wants a total cease-fire.

Hamas's surprise victory has prompted Western governments and Israel to cut off most funding of the Palestinian government, producing a dire financial crisis in the authority.

Abbas is proposing that Hamas run the internal affairs of the Palestinian Authority, with the PLO handling diplomacy. To achieve this power-sharing, he must persuade Hamas to join the PLO and then agree on a program acceptable to both sides.

Technically, the PLO remains the supreme representative of the Palestinians, a status that became blurred after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. Israel and the international community found themselves negotiating with PLO leaders including Arafat and Abbas himself, some of whom also held positions in the Palestinian Authority and most of whom were also Fatah loyalists.

The crisis has been made more urgent by growing economic problems, triggered by past Fatah government corruption and exacerbated by an international boycott since Hamas's victory that has cut off international aid and left the Palestinian Authority bankrupt. More than 160,000 civil servants, whose salaries support one quarter of the population, have not been paid since February.

Walid Awad, Abbas's spokesman, wrote in the daily Jerusalem Post this week that if the suspension of financial assistance to the Palestinian government continued, ''it is likely that unemployment will skyrocket, the Palestinian education and health sector will crumble, crime rates will increase, chaos and civil disorder may engulf the Palestinian territory and perhaps beyond."

Salah Bardawil, spokesman for the Hamas parliamentary faction, said in an interview that Hamas would join Abbas's national dialogue and suggested that Hamas could work with the PLO, but that the differences were ''deep and serious."

''We don't want a confrontation with them," Bardawil said. ''We are prepared to recognize the PLO, but we want to see real reforms and changes in the PLO, which should be done through national dialogue."

He added: ''We are opposed to negotiations with Israel that do not produce anything and are a waste of time while Israel is carrying out its attacks and aggressions against the Palestinians and taking unilateral measures in the Palestinian areas."

One sign of the international community's growing despair was the resignation on Monday of James Wolfensohn as a special envoy representing the Middle East ''Quartet" of the United States, United Nations, European Union, and Russia.

''The Palestinians need to understand that it is not business as usual," Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president, said during a news conference in Washington with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. ''With the government of Hamas having taken over with the Palestinians, it's a very difficult moment to be able to try and negotiate any independent type of arrangements that would affect the future of Gaza and the West Bank, because of the emphasis that Hamas puts on the destruction of the state of Israel and the less than communicative relationship with that state."

Some Palestinian commentators share Wolfensohn's criticism of Hamas.

''The real problem is with those who are sitting in Damascus and who are pushing their noses into our affairs," said Yusef Kazaz, director of the Voice of Palestine radio station, which is affiliated with Fatah, referring to the exiled Hamas leadership based in Syria. ''Instead of trying to find solutions, they are busy fragmenting the Palestinian issue and putting it in the deep freeze after we've already been waiting for 50 years."

Wolfensohn's brief was to help the Palestinian economy after Israel's pullout from Gaza last year. But the entire agricultural export market from the Gaza Strip has been brought close to collapse by the repeated closure of the Karni border crossing, the main transit point for goods, food, and medicine between Gaza and Israel. Israel insisted it had warnings of another impending terrorist attack at the site, where a bombing in January 2005 killed six Israelis.

Last Wednesday, Palestinian police said they thwarted a major attack at Karni, stopping a car packed with explosives that was approaching the crossing from within Gaza.

Israel's Shin Bet secret service said the attempted attack was masterminded by Hamas military chiefs -- a claim strongly denied by Hamas leaders, who say they are still observing a year-long period of calm. Privately, Hamas leaders blamed Fatah for staging the incident.

Meanwhile, Fatah leaders have blamed Hamas for a leaflet distributed in Gaza last weekend signed by ''the Unification and Jihad of the Levant and Egypt," an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that claimed responsibility for last week's suicide attacks in Dahab and last year's bombings in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, and Amman, Jordan.

In the leaflet, the group threatened the lives of members of Abbas's inner circle, accusing them of being apostates. It was the first time such explicit threats had been issued against Palestinian leaders. Security was immediately stepped up around Abbas's home in Ramallah.

But Bardawil said Hamas would not let the crisis reach that point.

''Civil war is not a possibility," he said. ''It's a red line for both of us, no matter how deep our differences are. There will not be civil war. We haven't reached that level yet. And I hope we won't."