Torn to Shreds

Early in the evening, Capt. Roger Harrfouche talked to his brother on the phone from his unit's home base at Jamhour, south of Beirut. "I hope they don't target the Lebanese Army," the burly 40-year-old officer said. "Do you think they'll target the Lebanese Army?" No, his brother said, that wouldn't make sense. The captain's public-works regiment was helping repair bridges and other bits of the country's blasted infrastructure, not fighting anyone.

The first Israeli bomb hit after most troops at the base had gone to sleep. The captain rushed out of his barracks to help the wounded. An ambulance raced toward the burning buildings. Another bomb hit, and the ambulance exploded. When the attack ended, Harrfouche and 10 other soldiers had been killed.

Last week's attack on Jamhour added bafflement to horror in Beirut. What sense could be made of this conflagration in which Israel, under merciless attack from Hizbullah rockets, demanded that the Lebanese Army take responsibility for disarming Hizbullah militias--then bombed the Army, too? The Lebanese government--supported by Washington as a promising democracy--is crumbling beneath an Israeli military assault--also supported by Washington. "What is the United States doing? What is Israel doing?" asks Saad Hariri, a Lebanese member of Parliament whose father was assassinated last year while trying to free the country from Syrian domination. "You promote democracy and then you allow it to be destroyed."

Israel says it wants only to get rid of Hizbullah in the hope that democracy will grow in its place. "Our hope is that the Lebanese government will impose its sovereignty over the entire country of Lebanon," Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told NEWSWEEK's Lally Weymouth (interview). And the strike on Jamhour? "We certainly do not attack Lebanese Army bases," said Israeli military spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal. He suggested, without further elaboration, that Hiz-bullah might have had some presence there. Any building where Hizbullah hides is "a legitimate target," said Dallal. In effect, that definition also includes any building where Hizbullah is thought to hide. Lebanese Brig. Gen. Salih Suleiman told news-week that Israel's planes had followed military firetrucks returning to the base from town.

By the weekend Hizbullah fighters and rocket attacks had killed 19 Israeli soldiers and 15 civilians, including several children. The Israeli bombardment had killed roughly 350 people, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Many were civilians, including dozens of children. Still, Dallal could not confirm claims in the Israeli press that 50 percent of Hizbullah's fighting ability had been eliminated. There was no reliable baseline for such an estimate, he said. "We don't even know what 100 percent is," he said. "It's a very, very nebulous thing."

Whatever victories Israel has achieved, Washington has backed it all the way. On the diplomatic front, the administration blocked calls at the United Nations and elsewhere for an immediate end to the fighting. The White House was in no rush to see the Israeli offensive pulled back. "What a lot of people want to do is just say, 'OK, cease fire'," President George W. Bush told NEWSWEEK's Richard Wolffe onboard Air Force One early last week. "But you haven't really addressed the underlying cause of the problem"--meaning the power of Hizbullah and its backers in Iran and Syria. On the military front, the administration started rushing new shipments of precision-guided munitions to Israel from an inventory that includes 5,000-pound "bunker buster" bombs.