Israeli Jets Retaliate for Deaths of 2 Soldiers in Ambush

JERUSALEM —  Israeli military jets and artillery bombarded suspected guerrilla targets in southern Lebanon on Thursday, hours after two Israeli soldiers were killed and eight others wounded in an ambush.

The incident, the most serious attack against Israeli troops in Lebanon since five soldiers were killed June 10, occurred against a backdrop of heightened tensions between Israel and Syria and a flurry of U.S. diplomatic activity aimed at restarting the stalled Middle East peace talks.

At least three guerrillas from the Shiite Muslim organization Hezbollah also died in an exchange of fire with Israeli soldiers that followed the ambush near the village of Sojoud, an Israeli military spokesman said.

The Israeli army unit was patrolling the area on foot when it was ambushed, Israel television reported.

Thursday’s casualties raise to 20 the number of Israeli soldiers killed this year by Hezbollah, which is seeking to oust Israel from the self-declared security zone it occupies along the uneasy border with Lebanon.

After the morning attack, Israeli jets launched two airstrikes against “firing positions for terrorists” near the village of Jabal Safi, the Israeli spokesman said.

The army reported accurate hits on the planes’ targets but gave no word on casualties in the air raids or the shelling that accompanied them.

The latest flare-up occurred as Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordecai was meeting in Tel Aviv with U.S. peace envoy Dennis Ross, who arrived in the region this week to try to restart deadlocked negotiations between Israel and Syria and to push for more progress in talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Any time you have this kind of fighting . . . it creates a situation that obviously has its own dangers,” Ross told reporters after he spoke with Mordecai about southern Lebanon. “That is why I say, always, our interest is in defusing tensions. If you defuse tensions, you create a better basis for stabilization. . . . We want the negotiations to resume.”

Peace talks between Israel and Syria have been at a standstill since before the election in May of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line government.

The Syrian government has made it clear that it rejects Netanyahu’s desire to resume negotiations without making a commitment in advance to give up the Golan Heights in exchange for peace. Israel seized the strategic plateau from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Netanyahu said Hezbollah has its own objectives in carrying out what he described as “a war” against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.

But, he said, “the scope of its activities and its ability to expand this activity into massive attacks against us is always dependent on Syrian agreement.”

The Damascus government is the key power broker in Lebanon, where it maintains more than 35,000 troops.

In recent weeks, Syria has jangled nerves in Israel by shifting thousands of its soldiers from near Beirut, the Lebanese capital, to the Bekaa Valley, much closer to the Israeli border.

The deployments have raised concerns of a possible confrontation with Syria at a time when there is no progress at the bargaining table. The memory of Egypt and Syria’s surprise 1973 attack on the Jewish state on Yom Kippur--a holy day that begins at sundown Sunday--has not helped to ease the tensions.

Although diplomatic sources say Syria’s Hafez Assad has used the U.S. as an intermediary to tell Israel that the shift of Syrian forces toward Israel’s borders did not target the Jewish state, the Israeli press has ascribed various motives to Syria’s military moves. One that has gained some currency here is that Syria may be preparing to respond to an expected Israeli offensive against Hezbollah.

Netanyahu has warned that his government will respond harshly to guerrilla attacks against Israeli soldiers.

In other news Thursday, Israeli and Palestinian officials appeared to be making at least limited progress toward a compromise on the sensitive issue of Israel’s redeployment from the West Bank city of Hebron.

The overdue withdrawal was the focus of a four-hour meeting the day before between Mordecai, the Israeli defense minister, and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Saeb Erekat, a top Palestinian negotiator, said Thursday that Arafat will not renegotiate terms of the Israeli withdrawal but is now prepared to consider some changes in security arrangements in the volatile city.

The Netanyahu government has sought to reopen the Hebron negotiations, citing a need to increase security for the 400 or so Jewish settlers who live there among 94,000 Palestinians.