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Israel's Lebanese allies to vacate military post

JERUSALEM: Israel's Lebanese allies have decided to vacate a military post in southern Lebanon that had come under repeated attack by Iranian-backed Hizbollah guerrillas, the Israeli military said on Friday.

An army communique said militiamen in the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army (SLA) would relocate from Soujoud to two new positions in Israeli-occupied south Lebanon where they would have better protection and could operate better.

The South Lebanon Army (SLA), trained and paid by Israel, last June fled another enclave -- in Jezzine -- which had been caught for years in the struggle between the SLA and Hizbollah guerrillas fighting Israeli occupation.

Military sources said Soujoud, on the northern edge of an Israeli-occupied security zone, had come under repeated attack from Hizbollah of late. They said that with the evacuation of nearby Jezzine, there was far less use for a post at Soujoud.

The two posts, about 18 km north of the border, were among the farthest from Israel.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak has promised by next July to pull his troops out of the south Lebanon occupation zone which Israel carved out in 1985 with the avowed aim of preventing guerrilla attacks on northern Israel.

But Barak's security adviser Danny Yatom denied the evacuation of Soujoud was a signal to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, the main power broker in Lebanon, that Israel was sticking to its timetable for a July pullout.

"There is no diplomatic signal here. The military-security assessment was what led to the decision that the SLA would leave the Soujoud post and redeploy in another way," Yatom told Israel's Army Radio.

The army communique said that "operational considerations" prompted the SLA decision, in coordination with the Israeli army, to relocate to two new posts in the eastern sector in the security zone of southern Lebanon.

"The new posts provide better protection and improve the operational ability of the SLA," the statement said.

The spokesman for the United Nations peacekeepers in south Lebanon, Timur Goksel, said on Thursday that fierce fighting might drive them too out of parts of the last active Arab-Israeli front.

Goksel told Reuters that attacks launched by Lebanese guerrilla groups from areas near U.N. bases had put troops of the U.N. Interim Force in South Lebanon (UNIFIL) in grave danger and confined them to their shelters in recent days.

He further accused Israeli and SLA troops of firing very close to U.N. bases on suspicion the area harboured guerrillas.

Israeli planes kept up their attacks on south Lebanon for the fifth consecutive day on Thursday, raising tension in an area that has witnessed an escalation in fighting this week.

An Israeli army communique said planes hit "terrorist targets" in the Soujoud area overnight.

On Sunday, Hizbollah assassinated Akl Hashem, the SLA's second-in-command. A day later, the guerrillas killed three Israeli soldiers and wounded four in the bloodiest attack against the occupation army in months.

On Wednesday, the guerrillas killed another SLA militiaman.

Israeli officials have blamed the surge in violence on Lebanon's political master Syria and demanded Damascus rein in the guerrillas. Syria denies having influence over Hizbollah.-Reuters