UN General Warns Against 'iraq Situation'

Any attempt to deploy international troops to disarm Hizbullah by force would turn Lebanon into another Iraq, according to the head of Unifil, the UN's monitoring mission in Lebanon.

"It is always the same when you have to fight against guerrillas. You will have a kind of Iraq situation," Major General Alain Pellegrini said at the weekend.

The French general, who has commanded the contingent of 2,000 armed monitors from eight countries for two years, said Israel's air campaign had failed to destroy all of Hizbullah's installations. "On the ground the Israelis are pushing slowly towards the Litani river. They're clearing the area between the Blue Line [the de-facto border] and the river to destroy all known Hizbullah positions and stockpiles, but not to occupy it," he said.

Israel had not expected the amount of resistance Hizbullah had put up, he said. He was sceptical of the optimism coming from the UN that Israel would accept a ceasefire soon. "It is not yet evident that they will accept a cessation of hostilities rapidly," he said. "They want to reach their goals, and this is not yet done."

Unifil was set up in 1978 to confirm the withdrawal of Israeli troops who had invaded Lebanon to try to destroy Palestinian guerrillas. Hizbullah did not yet exist. The Bush administration and Israel claim Unifil has failed because it has done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from building a network of tunnels and caves in the Lebanese hills and inserting huge caches of rockets, mines and other weapons.

Gen Pellegrini vigorously rejected the accusation. "Unifil is a peace-keeping force. It was set up to monitor respect for an agreement between two parties. As long as the parties respect it, it works. When you are in a state of armed confrontation, Unifil cannot work," he said.

Unifil occupies dozens of posts on hilltops around south Lebanon. They are helped by 50 military observers from the UN truce supervision organisation, Untso. A memorial plaque in Tyre records the names of 244 UN peacekeepers who have died over the last 28 years, one of the highest tolls of any UN mission. Since the end of its last invasion in May 2000, Israel has violated the agreement more often than Hizbullah. But Gen Pellegrini declined to compare violations by number or gravity. He accused Hizbullah of firing rockets from close to UN positions. "Three days ago ... in Srifa, Hizbullah ... fired rockets from 200 yards from our men," he said. "One Unifil armoured personnel carrier came under Israeli retaliation and 10 shells landed close by."