Frustrated U.N. troops caught in crossfire

NAQOURA, Lebanon — Trapped between a sea full of Israeli gunships and hills crawling with Hezbollah guerrillas, U.N. troops hunkered down in bomb shelters Thursday while somebody else's war raged outside.

Refugees working their way north cursed them for failing to provide enough medicine, shelter or food. Supplies were running low; they hadn't had bread in five days. Israeli gunboats lobbed shells into the hills that rise behind the base. And Hezbollah's fighters were at it again, shooting off rockets into Israel from a patch of turf a few football fields from the front gate.

"Southern Lebanon," one of the peacekeepers, Ryszard Morczynski, began. He paused. "If you flatten the country and make it a parking lot, then you will disarm Hezbollah."

Sent here without weapons to monitor a peace that never came to pass, today the U.N. troops are embittered and embattled, imprisoned in their base as rockets and missiles cross paths overhead. Their collective insecurity only deepened after the death of four of their colleagues in an Israeli airstrike on another U.N. post Tuesday.

Their toothless, and ultimately futile, mission to oversee the pacification of southern Lebanon offers a telling glimpse into the fate that could await Israel in its efforts to crush Hezbollah — and a cautionary tale for a U.S.-backed notion that international troops might fare any better than the Israelis against the Shiite guerrillas.

Hezbollah stronghold

The U.N. headquarters here, a barbed-wire-encircled sprawl that rambles downhill toward the sea, is wedged in a Hezbollah stronghold. The face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini frowns down on the road; a looming model of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock is impaled on a pole just outside the base walls. The mosque, a much-invoked symbol of the Muslim-Jewish struggle for Jerusalem, is rendered here in yellow, the color of Hezbollah.

Being trapped literally and figuratively between the two sides has put the U.N. troops on edge. Nobody here ventures through the gates to the outside world without phoning the Israeli army with a painstaking description of the vehicles and their routes — and a plea to be spared attack. Israel often takes hours to approve even routine trips, officials here said ruefully.

Rocket launches nearby

Hezbollah guerrillas also endanger U.N. lives by systematically setting up rocket launches alongside U.N. bases, either in the hope that Israel will think twice before firing back, or with the cynical aim of generating bad publicity for Israel by enticing it to bomb peacekeeping troops. Guerrillas sidled up to the U.N. bases to strike Israel at least four times in 24 hours this week, officials here said.

The telltale sounds rolled through the Naqoura headquarters Thursday: A thud followed by the fluttering, arching whine of outgoing rocket fire. Hezbollah fighters were just outside the base, shooting rockets toward Israel.

Officials started and craned their necks in the direction of the front gate. Turning on their heels, they began to herd everybody in sight toward the bomb shelters. Heavy shelling had been going on for hours, but the Hezbollah rocket launch on the base's perimeter posed a more serious threat. Israeli airpower might be called in to smite the fighters.

"If there's a retaliation, it might be accurate," Morczynski said, "or it might not."

"They hit one yesterday," another U.N. official muttered gloomily. "So why not today?"

The sound of jets swelled in the skies over the base. The officials walked faster. A voice scratched with unnerving, automatic calm from mounted speakers: "All personnel proceed to shelter immediately."

Air-raid sirens screeched to life in the Israeli town of Nahiriya and carried over the border to the base.

"They're taking the cover of villages or U.N. positions to act, hoping this proximity to people will be a problem to the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] when they have to respond," said Gen. Alain Pellegrini, force commander of the U.N. troops, who met with reporters inside a bomb shelter. "But the IDF doesn't take this into account."

Fear of attack from Israel shadows life on the base, which has been struck by two Israeli shells since the outbreak of fighting. Top officials here, who spent hours entreating Israel to cease the attacks on their observation post before Tuesday's fatal strike, say they believe it was deliberately destroyed.

"This objective was very carefully aimed at and very professionally hit," Pellegrini said.

Col. Jacques Colleville, a Frenchman, was on the telephone with the Israeli military that night. He explained that the post had already been hit and damaged, and begged Israel to stop shelling, he said.

We'll call you back, he says he was told. But nobody called. Within 2 ½ hours, U.N. officials heard that the post had been demolished.