"Does anyone imagine that we will stop halfway through so that in two months
it will come back again? No way," he said.
In Washington, U.S. Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that any cease-fire
should be based on fundamental changes that would have a lasting impact on the
region.
"We all want a cessation of violence. We all want the protection of
civilians. We have to make certain that anything that we do is going to be of
lasting value," Rice said.
The week-old offensive was sparked by the soldiers' capture, and Olmert said
Iran, a patron of Hezbollah, was behind the raid to distract the world and the
G-8 summit from the country's nuclear program. "To my regret, Iran's trick
succeeded, everybody remembers the G-8 decision on the subject of Lebanon and
are not dealing with the Iranian issue," he said, according to the statement.
The commander of Israeli forces on the border said the operation would take a
few more weeks, and the army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinski,
said Israel has not ruled out deploying "massive ground forces into Lebanon."
Israel, which has mainly limited itself to attacks from the air and sea, has
been reluctant to send in ground troops because of still-fresh memories of
Israel's ill-fated 18-year-occupation of south Lebanon that ended in 2000.
Meanwhile, a proposal to send a new international force to bolster the
current 2,000-member U.N. force in south Lebanon gained steam.
Western nations have proposed the beefed-up force as part of a possible
cease-fire agreement, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday in
Brussels, Belgium, that a new force must be "considerably" larger and better
armed than the current force, which is viewed as weak and ineffectual. Rice also
called for the introduction of a strong peacekeeping operation.
In the statement, Olmert belittled the current force in Lebanon, but said he
would be cautious about discussing the new force. "It seems to be its too early
to debate it," he said.
As the diplomatic efforts continued, the Israeli air force kept up its
strikes across southern Lebanon, hitting a military base at Kfar Chima before
dawn Tuesday as soldiers rushed to their bomb shelters, killing at least 11
soldiers in an engineering unit and wounding 35 others, the Lebanese military
said. The base is in a hilly area next to Hezbollah strongholds in southern
Beirut that were frequently targeted by recent Israeli strikes.
Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr denounced the strike as a "massacre,"
saying the regiment's main job was to help rebuilt damaged infrastructure. The
Lebanese army has largely stayed out of the fighting, confining itself to firing
anti-aircraft guns at the Israeli planes. But Israeli jets have struck Lebanese
army positions.
At least five people also were killed when a bomb hit a house in the village
of Aitaroun, near the border, witnesses said. Israeli warplanes hit four trucks
that Israel said were bringing weapons into Lebanon.
Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli army spokesman, denounced the shipments. "That
is intolerable terrorist activity," he said. "They are using civilian
infrastructure to bring in weapons, which they are using against us and killing
Israelis, and we will exercise our right of self defense to stop the flow of
weapons into Lebanon."
Syrian Vice Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad denied the charge. "We don't
supply Hezbollah with weapons, and Hezbollah does not want or need our weapons,"
he told CBS Evening News with Bob Schieffer.
Hezbollah guerrillas fired a new barrage of rockets into northern Israel on
Tuesday afternoon, killing a man as he walked down the street toward a bomb
shelter in the town of Nahariya and setting fire to the top of a two-story
apartment building.
At least 100 rockets fell into Israel, hitting a string of towns, including
the city of Haifa.
More than 750 rockets have hit Israel since the violence began, forcing
hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take cover in underground shelters.
