USA: Israel Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said the Israeli military campaign against Hizbollah could end in weeks

Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres said on Tuesday (August 1, 2006) the Israeli military campaign against Hizbollah could end in weeks despite international pressure for a ceasefire sooner. Asked by a reporter outside the U.S. State Department when an offensive would end, Peres said: "We don't have an offensive against Hizbollah. We were attacked and we are defending ourselves . . .The minute it will stop, it will stop. The minute there will be an international force that will control the southern part of Lebanon, the hostages will be released and the rockets will be controlled and Hizbollah will stop being an Army within and Army. Then we shall have peace. In my judgement it's not far away. You can count it in weeks, not months." Peres met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the State Department ahead of visiting U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. Peres said he believed there was a "turning point" in the fighting and that Israel had destroyed a lot the Hizbollah rockets and missiles. "I just had a meeting with Secretary Condoleezza Rice. I thanked her very much for her efforts. She's really in the front of a very complicated situation and we appreciate it very much her thoughtfulness, her devotion, her courage. To the point which I made are the following items. We feel there is a turning point in the fighting between Hizbollah and ourselves. We feel that our army was able to destroy a great deal of launches and missiles and it's not by accident that a number of the missiles and rockets that are being fired at Israel are going down. On the long range missiles we probably destroyed many of them if not most of them," said Peres. Israeli airborne commandos battled guerrillas near a Hizbollah-run hospital in eastern Lebanon on Wednesday, and officials in the Jewish state said the 23-day-old war could run for at least another week. Lebanese security sources said Israeli soldiers had landed by helicopter near the Hizbollah stronghold of Baalbek in the eastern Bekaa valley as aircraft launched dozens of strikes in the region. An Israeli army spokesman declined to comment. Three weeks after the war erupted when Hizbollah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid, Israel's security cabinet agreed to step up its offensive, and carry out a ground sweep 6-7 km (4 miles) into Lebanon, a political source said. But U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a ceasefire could be reached within days. "This week is entirely possible. Certainly we are talking about days not weeks," she said on the PBS Newshour. Despite growing international calls for an end to fighting that has killed at least 624 people in Lebanon and 54 Israelis, Israel was set to resume full air strikes in Lebanon early on Wednesday at the end of a partial, 48-hour suspension. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged major powers to patch up differences on the crisis and rescheduled a meeting of potential contributors to an international force for Thursday. European Union foreign ministers called for an immediate end to hostilities, watering down demands for an immediate ceasefire at the insistence of Britain and other close U.S. allies. British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned Syria and Iran, Hizbollah's main backers, they risked confrontation if they continued to support terrorism and export instability to Iraq and elsewhere. Israel's justice minister said about 300 of an estimated 2,000 Hizbollah fighters had been killed so far, and the tourism minister later said 400 had been killed. Hizbollah, which says it does not hide its dead and that it has many thousands more fighters, has announced 43 deaths in that period and said the Israeli statements were false. Israel wants to push Hizbollah back and stop it firing rockets over the border. But an Israeli minister said there was no way Israel's forces could destroy all the missiles, a remark apparently aimed at lowering his people's expectations.

ITN Source | August 2, 2006

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