DARK WITH BLOOD

By Bruce W. Nelan

Just surgical strikes, Israel's army commanders proudly proclaimed as they showed off video images of smart bombs intersecting cross hairs. This little war against Hizballah guerrillas in Lebanon was only a high-tech blitz on a bunch of terrorists, targeting specific buildings and vehicles hiding the enemy, avoiding nasty civilian casualties. In fact, two ambulances had been hit, three power plants had been damaged, and several hundred Lebanese, most of them noncombatants, had been killed or wounded. Still, for the first seven days, Israelis applauded the offensive, and much of the world tolerated it. But even the vaunted Israeli military machine proved no better than its crudest cog. On the eighth day, when 155-mm howitzer shells crashed into a U.N. post and slaughtered more than 100 Lebanese refugees, wounding at least 100 others, it was a shattering reminder that there are no such things as truly smart weapons--or wars.

The artillery was, to be sure, directed by modern U.S.-made counterbattery radar, which artfully tracked the trajectory of Hizballah's Katyusha rockets raining onto the soil of northern Israel and spotted the exact place in Lebanon from which they had been fired. But in this case, by the time the Israelis had aimed their guns and let fly from less than six miles away, the Shi'ite guerrillas and the Katyusha launcher had gone. Instead the shells slammed down across the area and exploded inside the compound of a battalion of Fijian peacekeepers, where more than 600 refugees had been sheltering for a week, hanging out their laundry on the fences and tethering their livestock nearby.

The shells--at least a dozen--fell on the unprotected civilians for 11 or 12 minutes while U.N. officials frantically tried to get the Israelis to stop. Even after the official request had been made and acknowledged by Israel, one to two minutes into the barrage, the guns kept firing. Says U.N. spokesman Timor Goksel: "We asked Israel several times to stop firing on the Fijian headquarters, telling them that we had civilian victims, but in vain."

The devastation was sickening, a carnage of incinerated corpses, body parts and blood. "I couldn't count the bodies," said Swedish U.N. Captain Mikael Lindvall at the compound right after the attack. "There were babies without heads. There were people without arms and legs." No one is sure precisely how many men, women and children died or even who they were, because so many were literally blown to pieces. Even on Saturday, two days after the attack, the number of dead was still climbing.

Israel, set on a course of escalating pressure, had horribly overplayed its hand. When Prime Minister Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath two weeks ago, the plan was to whip the troublesome guerrillas up north into submission by bludgeoning the landscape until Lebanon--and its overlord Syria--cried uncle. When they did, Peres would obtain ironclad agreements that civilians in the north of Israel would no longer be targets in the low-grade guerrilla war that Israelis felt was taking an increasingly vexatious human, psychological and political toll. But the operation lurched out of control when Israel started destroying Lebanon's painfully restored infrastructure and turned untenable amid the gruesome footage of charred and mangled corpses at Qana. While American, French and Russian diplomats rushed in to halt the bloodshed, Peres and company struggled to see what they could salvage from the fiasco.

As soon as the smoke cleared, Israeli leaders, like Deputy Defense Minister Ori Orr, realized the bombardment had been a "very grave error." But what kind of error? Some thought only a normal military accident: the shells had simply "gone long," said Lieut. General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the chief of staff. Prime Minister Peres appeared on television to say, "I'm sorry that citizens of Lebanon were killed," but he made no apologies for the operation. He blamed Hizballah, saying it would "cause a tragedy to befall Lebanon" unless the Syrians, whose 30,000 troops control much of the country, put a halt to Hizballah attacks. Added an unbowed Peres: "The right to defend ourselves is not dependent on anyone's permission." Hizballah says it is only trying to liberate Lebanese territory.

Even so, the bloody spectacle at the U.N. base evoked a collective gasp of horror around the world and changed political calculations on all sides, especially for the U.S. Deviating from its normal course of deploring any escalation of Middle East violence, Washington had sided with Israel this time. For several weeks preceding the operation, U.S. diplomats quietly pressed Syria to make Hizballah stop rocketing the Galilee. They did not succeed. So from the moment Peres ordered air and artillery reprisals on Hizballah, the Clinton Administration endorsed the premise that the assault was a reasonable response to the provocations and let the world see the U.S. was not going to squelch the operation. After Qana, President Clinton abruptly altered course. From Russia, where he had wanted to quietly bolster Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign, the U.S. President flatly declared, "The parties have got to agree to a cease-fire."

The diplomats got busy, leaning on all parties. After a whirl of phone calls, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher persuaded Lebanon and Syria to say they would go along. Peres, reluctant to stop Grapes of Wrath until he could wring new rules of engagement from Hizballah and Syria, said he would quit shooting if everyone else would. So after all the bloodshed, a return to a low-grade conflict looked possible. Meanwhile, the shells and rockets, attacks and counterattacks flew back and forth unabated.

The informal agreement to keep civilians out of the fight, which was mediated by the U.S. after a similar Israeli attempt to quiet Hizballah in 1993, had been broken all around; but apportioning blame is another matter. There are no isolated events in the Middle East; they are always part of a pattern of violent action and response that takes out its fury on innocents. Egyptian fundamentalists who opened fire on Greek tourists at a Cairo hotel last week, killing 18, thought the tourists were Israelis. The act, they said, was to avenge Grapes of Wrath.

In Lebanon, starting last month, Hizballah claims, Israel violated the unwritten 1993 agreement that neither side would attack civilian targets: several Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli missiles and mines in the areas north of the buffer zone that Israel has occupied inside southern Lebanon for 18 years in defiance of U.N. resolutions. Israel replies that those events were accidents seized on by the guerrillas as an excuse to abandon the agreement and begin pelting rockets at towns in the northern Galilee.

Peres held back for two days after a second volley of rockets exploded and wounded 36 civilians, driving a quarter of a million Israelis into bomb shelters or flight. Then he struck with Israeli might: artillery, missile boats, helicopter gunships and F-16s. With elections only six weeks away, under heavy pressure from his own military and faced with national frustration at recent terror killings by Palestinian suicide bombers, Peres concluded he had little choice. While there is no evidence that he based his decision merely on a desire to look tough in the run-up to the May 29 election, he no doubt hoped he might diminish his image as a softie by taking a step Israelis clamored for.

The targets were supposed to be Hizballah guerrillas, bases, rocket launchers and trucks. But the guerrillas have always operated from good cover among their Shi'ite supporters, and it soon became clear that Israeli shells and missiles were also aimed at Lebanese cities and villages, roads and power stations. Civilian casualties mounted. The issue rapidly turned to proportionality: Lebanese civilians were paying a very high price in Israeli retribution for Hizballah's Katyushas. Though the rockets fell every night, none had killed an Israeli, and most caused little damage. It began to look as if Israel was using a sledgehammer.

But Israel would not ease off, and last Thursday the war turned very sour. First an Israeli fighter-bomber swooped over the town of Nabatiyeh and fired a missile at a house, killing Fawzieh El-Aabed, 40; seven of her children, including a four-day-old daughter; and the fiance of her oldest daughter. The Israelis said they targeted the house to flush out Hizballah fighters. A few hours later came the devastating barrage on Qana.

No one, except Hizballah, denies that they fired two Katyushas and six mortars only 300 yards from the U.N. compound at Qana. Two days before, a Fijian Blue Helmet tried to persuade Hizballah fighters not to strike from a site close to another U.N. post up the road. They shot him in the chest. "We are breaking our backs to stop Hizballah from using the U.N. as a shield," says U.N. spokeswoman Sylvana Foa. "Now it's gone to hell in a handbasket."

Blue Helmets in Lebanon reserved their strongest criticism for the shelling of Qana. Polish General Stanislaw Wozniak, commander of the U.N. force, rejected Peres' claim that army units "weren't aware that there were civilians" at the Fijian camp. "They knew we were sheltering civilians in this U.N. post," Wozniak said. "Simply, you don't attack civilians. You don't attack U.N. positions." U.N. officials insist Israel realized that some 5,000 Lebanese civilians had taken refuge from Israeli attacks at several peacekeeping posts. "I don't want to believe it was deliberate," Captain Lindvall said of the slaughter. "But if it was a mistake, it was an inexcusable mistake. There has been a U.N. position there since 1978." Even some Israelis scoff at official disclaimers. "How the hell could they not have known?" asks an official. "If they know the location of one radio transmitter in a single apartment in the middle of Beirut, you think they don't know there are 500 civilians at that base?"

For Operation Grapes of Wrath, Israeli generals suspended a standing order not to hit any targets within 500 yards of a U.N. facility. Lipkin-Shahak said his troops were also under orders to respond to Katyusha attacks. "We told the U.N. we planned to fire," he said. But when the shelling of Qana began, Time Beirut bureau chief Lara Marlowe heard a U.N commander radio a panicked Fijian soldier that headquarters had asked Israel to stop the bombardment. The firing continued. Only after several minutes of shelling did Israel officially warn the U.N. it was was targeting Qana. Yet in an interview with TIME on Friday, Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, former chief of staff, insisted the troops had been very careful. "It's hard to say right now, with the dead bodies of these innocent victims in front of you," he said, "but our forces made an extreme effort to avoid civilian loss of life."

The firing from both sides went on into the weekend, as the diplomats labored to work out a halt. Christopher headed for Damascus on Saturday to talk with Hafez Assad, considered the linchpin to any solution: if he wants to, U.S. and Israeli officials believe, Assad can persuade Hizballah to stop shooting. But why should Assad play ball? His main objective is to regain possession of the Golan Heights, the portion of southwestern Syria that Israel captured in 1967. But exactly how he intends to get it back is unclear. "The Katyushas are a means of putting pressure on Israel," says a senior U.S. official, "with Damascus as the address."

Washington and Jerusalem both wonder whether Assad is really ready to make a serious deal. He agreed to a proposal for direct negotiations with Israel last year, but Peres suspended them in February after a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings made peace talks a political liability. Israelis and Syrians alike assumed the talks would begin again after the May 29 election, but the mess in Lebanon has raised doubts on all sides. Is Assad really interested in a peace agreement? If so, shouldn't he being keeping Lebanon quiet to avoid causing problems for Peres, who is more interested in peace treaties than opposition candidate Benjamin Netanyahu and his rightist Likud? Does this outbreak mean, as Israeli Cabinet minister Yossi Beilin suggested in Washington last week, that Assad is not really committed to a negotiated agreement?

Not necessarily. Western and Arab observers agree that it is not certain how well Assad controls Hizballah, even though it operates on his turf in Lebanon. The Shi'ite guerrilla force was founded in the early 1980s by radical Iranians. Assad, a secular politician who crushed his homegrown fundamentalists, did not publicly embrace Hizballah; he entrusted relations to his intelligence chiefs. The group has grown less extreme in recent years, sending delegates to the Lebanese parliament, but Hizballah is still closely tied to Tehran and remains as determined as ever to fight Israel. Yet it also seems to pay attention to suggestions from Syria on when to show restraint and when to step up attacks on Israel.

As the Middle East peace process goes on--and not even the bloodshed in Lebanon stopped Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from agreeing last week to start negotiating next month on a final settlement--Iran or Syria may have been growing uneasy. Some Syrians suspect Iran had concluded that Assad was about to sign a treaty with Israel and cranked up Hizballah to delay the process. Other analysts think Assad is worried about what disruption peace with Israel might bring to Syria's tightly controlled society and has decided to stall.

It may be even more complicated than that. Assad wants all of the Golan back, and Israel wants a full peace with Syria, including diplomatic and trade relations. But Israel is willing to return the Golan territory only slice by slice, testing at each stage to see if the peace is real. Given those unsatisfactory terms, Assad may have decided that it makes no difference whether Peres the peacemaker or Netanyahu the hard-liner is in office in Jerusalem. "Syrians were very hopeful that Peres would take a big step," says Ibrahim Hamidi, a Damascus-based journalist. "Either Peres couldn't do it or he didn't want to. He hasn't advanced the peace process." Assad appears ready to wait and see.

The Israeli government is in a greater hurry. Despite the Qana debacle, Peres was determined to keep fighting as long as Hizballah continued its rocket salvos. The Israelis still hoped for an agreement shutting down those attacks and giving the Israeli army a freer hand against Hizballah. In return, as part of a peace treaty with Lebanon, Israel would be willing to discuss a pullout back inside Israel's borders if Hizballah were disarmed and no violence had occurred for some specified period.

As diplomats scramble to stop the shooting, each side is demanding that the other back down. The standoff resembles a game played by children in villages throughout Lebanon. Two youngsters stand face to face, and each sticks a finger in the other one's mouth; both start biting down. The one who screams and pulls his finger out first is the loser.

--Reported by Lisa Beyer/Tel Aviv, Dean Fischer/Washington, Aharon Klein/Qiryat Shemona and Lara Marlowe/Qana

With reporting by LISA BEYER/TEL AVIV, DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON, AHARON KLEIN/QIRYAT SHEMONA AND LARA MARLOWE/QANA