Israeli ground forces already have begun conducting "pinpoint" operations inside southern Lebanon, Israeli officials said, amid a buildup of forces near Israel's northern border that could signal a larger ground offensive.

Israeli Brigadier General Michael Herzog, a visiting military fellow at a Washington think tank, said Israel's objective in the south was to clear a kilometer wide strip along the rugged border.

Israel envisions the strip as the first layer of a buffer zone about 12 miles wide that would be occupied by Lebanese army and international forces, he said.

However, heavily armed Hezbollah fighters entrenched in heavily fortified bunkers in the difficult rugged terrain were putting up fierce resistance in the border area, he said.

"There is no Israeli intention of a wide-scale invasion of Lebanon on the scale of '82 or '78. But it's clear to me that Israel may require more forces to uproot Hezbollah," he said in an interview.

The risks of a ground offensive are not lost on the Israelis. They failed to pacify southern Lebanon in a bloody 18 year campaign that ended in 2000 with the withdrawal of Israeli forces and Hezbollah as the uncontested power in the south.

"If you're thinking about being decisive, in some sense it's got to be an appealing strategy," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "But it's a high risk roll of the dice."

James Corum, a military expert at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, said he doubted the Israelis "would do anything more than send raiding teams and very short-term ground forces."

"And if ground forces do move, it would be for a very short period to basically destroy every piece of Hezbollah infrastructure within 20 miles of the border, within rocket range of Israel, and then withdraw fairly quickly," he told AFP.

Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, killing 15 people, in the 10 days since its capture of two Israeli soldiers in a raid set off waves of retaliatory Israeli air strikes across Lebanon.

The Iranian-backed militia has reached deeper into Israel with longer range missiles than ever before, and it struck an Israeli naval vessel early in the conflict with an anti-ship missile believed to be of Iranian manufacture.

Israeli fighter jets responded by targeting missile launchers and other military targets -- bunkers, storage areas, communications sites, headquarters.

They have also bombed the Beirut International Airport, roads leading to Syria, and roads and bridges in southern Lebanon to interrupt the flow of supplies and missiles to Hezbollah and put pressure on the Lebanese government. Israeli warships clamped on a naval blockade.

Lebanese officials have said nearly 340 people have been killed in the air strikes.

Herzog estimated that 80 percent of the targets were military while the remaining 20 percent hit civilian infrastructure that the Israelis regarded as supporting or potentially supporting Hezbollah.

"The focus was, is on Hezbollah. Anything that can strengthen Hezbollah, enhance Hezbollah's capabilities, that will be targeted," he said.

But the attacks have not stopped Hezbollah missile launches from the south, underscoring the difficulty of taking out fleeting short-range missile launchers from the air.

Corum, author of "Air Power in Small Wars," published in 2003, said Hezbollah has proved to be "emminently resistant to being coerced by firepower."

"Any time you punished Hezbollah, killed some of their people, they had people lining up to volunteer to be suicide bombers," he said.

O'Hanlon estimates that past air campaigns suggests that Israel may succeed in reducing Hezbollah's military capability by a quarter through air strikes.

But the longer the air campaign goes on, the more Hezbollah is likely to benefit from international outcry over civilian casualties in air strikes captured by the world's media, he said.

The military gain is "not enough to warrant much more of something that already has probably gone too far in terms of Israel's strategic interests."

Corum, however, suggests that Israel is attempting to use air power to create conditions on the ground for a favorable political settlement.

"No, I don't think the Israelis think they can defeat Hezbollah," he said.

"However, if they knock out a major proportion of Hezbollah's military infrastructure, and damage them severely, it will be somewhat easier for the Lebanese to assert control.

"And it will also be a lot of easier for a much more serious peacekeeping force to come in and cover the southern border of Lebanon," he said.

Related Links