JERUSALEM – Israel announced yesterday that it would lift its air and sea blockade of Lebanon today, three weeks after the cessation of hostilities, because international forces were ready to move into place to impose an arms embargo on the Hezbollah militia.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would yield its “control positions over Lebanon's seaports and airports” at 6 p.m. today to international supervision.
French, Greek, British and Italian ships will patrol Lebanon's coast until German ships arrive in two weeks. German monitors will also help patrol Lebanon's airport to prevent the resupply of rockets, launchers, and heavy weapons to Hezbollah from its main supporters, Syria and Iran.
Preventing weapons from moving across the land border from Syria remains the main issue. A senior Israeli official said Israel had “an understanding” that international forces would deploy alongside the Lebanese army to monitor that border.
But Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Olmert, said the land border was “still an open issue – it's not resolved so far as Israel is concerned.”
Olmert wants Lebanese forces with U.N. forces at each of the nine crossing points along the mountainous 205-mile border with Syria, Eisin said. While the border is unfenced and largely unmarked, large rockets and truck-based launchers cannot be brought overland by donkeys, she said, so the crossings are crucial.
Israeli military officials have said that if they have evidence of continuing supplies of rockets and launchers to Hezbollah on trucks from Syria, Israel will feel justified in bombing those trucks.
Israel has been pressed hard to lift its air and sea embargoes by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had suggested it might be lifted within 48 hours.
In Cairo, Egypt, the Lebanese foreign minister, Fawzi Salloukh, said Lebanon “would wait for the 48 hours given by Kofi Annan, and if the situation is resolved, we will thank him.”
“If it is not,” Salloukh added, “the Lebanese government will take the necessary measures and break the blockade with all our might.”
Israel is depending on Lebanon to help bring about the return of two soldiers captured by Hezbollah on July 12; those seizures led to the war. And with various Arab airlines vowing to land in Beirut anyway, Israel clearly decided that it was time to lift its restrictions. Israel has already granted permission for most civilian aircraft and aid shipments to land in recent days.
It also was reported that videotape of an Israeli airman captured 20 years ago has surfaced in a Lebanese television documentary.
The grainy image of a bearded and hollow-eyed Capt. Ron Arad speaking to his captors was broadcast in both Lebanon and Israel this week. Arad, an air force navigator whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986, is said by Hezbollah to be dead, and the failure to conduct successful negotiations for his return has weighed heavily on Israelis. Israeli intelligence officials said that the tape appeared to have been taken about a year and a half after his capture.
The film surfaced as part of a documentary called “The Captured,” covering three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah in 2000 and the Arad case, that was produced for a private mainstream Lebanese television station. The film, which does not address the current case, includes videotape of the capture of the soldiers in 2000.
