Israel Starts Phase 2 of Withdrawal : Second of Three Lebanon Pullbacks May Take 12 Weeks

JERUSALEM —  The Israeli government on Sunday ordered the army to immediately begin the second stage of its planned three-phase withdrawal from southern Lebanon. It set no deadline for completion of the redeployment, but a senior defense source said it should be finished within 12 weeks.

The decision was announced by Cabinet Secretary Yossi Beilin after what Israel radio termed a surprisingly brief and harmonious 90-minute Cabinet discussion.

Six Cabinet ministers of the conservative Likud bloc voted against the staged withdrawal plan when the governing national unity coalition adopted it Jan. 14, and criticism of the plan has persisted during a recent period of increased guerrilla attacks on Israeli occupation troops in Lebanon.

First Stage Complete

On Sunday, however, all Cabinet ministers supported Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s motion to begin the second stage of the withdrawal immediately. The first stage, in which the Israel Defense Forces evacuated the area around the port of Sidon, was completed just 16 days ago.

“I want to be out of there yesterday, not tomorrow,” commented one Likud minister who had voted against the pullout in January.

United Press International quoted the state-run Israel radio as saying some troops began pulling back toward their new positions even before the Cabinet vote was made public.

The main areas to be evacuated in the second phase are the Christian stronghold of Jezzine, the strategic Jabal (Mt.) el Barouk, and Israeli positions opposite Syrian forces in the Bekaa Valley. Israeli positions in the westernmost part of the occupation zone, where resistance from mostly Shia Muslim guerrilla fighters has been the strongest, will not be affected by the Stage 2 redeployment.

Israelis Under Attack

The resistance continued Sunday when two Israeli positions in the area east of Tyre came under attack with rocket-propelled grenades. A military spokesman said there were no casualties.

Meanwhile, a leader of Amal, the main Shia Muslim militia, in the southern Lebanese village of Maarake warned Sunday that his forces are ready to attack settlements in northern Israel.

It was the second such threat by a Lebanese Shia leader in as many days, and it followed an Israeli crackdown against Shia villages suspected of harboring guerrilla fighters. Israel’s new “iron fist” policy has left 16 southern Lebanese dead, 22 wounded and more than 200 under arrest in the last two weeks. One was killed Saturday in a massive Israeli raid on Maarake.

There has been little guerrilla activity in the central and eastern sectors of the occupation zone--the ones to be evacuated in the next stage of the withdrawal. Nonetheless, this phase promises to be much more complicated and in some ways more dangerous than the first.

The bulk of the Israeli troops still in Lebanon, estimated to be as many as 20,000, are deployed in the central and eastern sectors. In the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, a narrow no man’s land is all that separates them from two divisions of Syrian troops--about 10,000 of what are widely considered the best trained and equipped soldiers in the Arab world.

The Israelis tried to negotiate arrangements for United Nations troops to move into the void that will be created by their departure from the Bekaa Valley. Those hopes were dashed by Syrian opposition, and one of the biggest concerns about Stage 2 of the withdrawal is that Syrian forces or Palestinian guerrillas allied with the Damascus regime will move southward as the Israelis leave.

Biggest Strategic Prize

Phase 2 also means giving up perhaps Israel’s biggest strategic prize of the war--Jabal el Barouk. The highest point in southern Lebanon, the 6,500-foot mountain ridge has served for nearly three years as a principal intelligence post from which the Israelis spied on Damascus, only 35 miles to the southeast. An Israeli general once boasted to foreign journalists that from Jabal el Barouk his men could “peek into every window” in the Syrian capital.

Unlike the first phase of the Israeli withdrawal, in which only a few troops were actually pulled back across the international border, the bulk of those evacuating the central and eastern sectors are expected to return home. Army bases in northern Israel, which have been almost empty since the invasion force marched into Lebanon in June, 1982, are already being renovated to handle the returnees.

Military sources said that some nonessential equipment has already been removed from the areas to be evacuated in Phase 2 and that the pace of work will accelerate as weather permits. At the moment, Jabal el Barouk is under a thick layer of snow.

The military sources said that all buildings and equipment in the area currently being evacuated will either be removed or destroyed before the last troops pull out.

At the end of Phase 2, the Israeli army will be deployed along a relatively straight line running west from the Syrian border north of Hasbayya to a point northwest of Nabatiyeh, from which the line will turn southwest to the Litani River, then follow the river to the Mediterranean Sea north of Tyre.

The Cabinet must still approve the timing of the final stage of the withdrawal, which the army wants to complete by late summer. The last phase will bring most Israeli troops back across the international border, with only a token force remaining in a narrow “buffer zone” where they are to aid an Israeli-backed local militia in protecting Israel’s northern settlements from guerrilla attacks.

However, Israel television reported Sunday night that former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the Lebanon invasion, has proposed continued deployment of the army in a much larger, 20-mile-deep security zone.

Rabin and Prime Minister Shimon Peres agreed to discuss the proposal in the so-called “inner Cabinet,” which thrashes out the most sensitive issues facing the fragile national unity coalition, according to the television report.