Lebanon asks UN for international probe of Qana

United Nations, Aug 1: A top Lebanese official asked the UN Security Council today for an international inquiry into the Israeli raid on the southern Lebanese village of Qana that killed at least 54 civilians, mostly children.

Tareq Mitri, Lebanon's acting foreign minister, also renewed a government plea for an immediate end to the fighting between Israel and Hizbollah, which has raged since July 12.

''The onslaught continues unabated. It has to stop,'' Mitri, who is also Lebanon's culture minister, told the council.

While US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a cease-fire could be forged this week, Israel said today it would not stop fighting despite an international outcry over its deadly air strike on a building in Qana a day earlier.

Israel said it was unaware civilians had been in the building and accused Hizbollah of launching rockets from Qana.

It asserted its right to self-defence after Hizbollah crossed over into Israel 19 days ago to seize two Israeli soldiers and later rained rockets on northern Israel.

''Some of us are tired of listening to a kind of self-righteous discourse about self-defence,'' Mitri said. ''We have heard ad nauseum that in wars mistakes are committed.'' But he said there was ''a pattern of behavior'' in repeated Israeli actions against Lebanon. ''You are all aware that none of those aggressions achieved its stated aim,'' he added.

Lebanon's council of ministers, he said, had approved a plan to end the conflict, which included an immediate cease-fire, a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon, a release of Lebanese and Israeli prisoners, and deployment of an international peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.

The plan also would put the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, an area the United Nations says is part of Syria, under UN control until claims of Lebanese sovereignty are resolved.

Israeli UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman, in a drawn-out tit-for-tat exchange with Mitri, said he agreed with much of what the Lebanese official said.

He stressed, however, that Israel had no territorial designs on Lebanon but was forced to act against a ''monstrosity'' -- an apparent reference to Hizbollah.

Lebanon had first been taken over by ''tyrants in the north, namely Syria,'' then ''taken hostage by terrorists of the worst kind -- the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in the 1980s and Hizbollah in the 1990s,'' he said. ''Isn't it time that Lebanon took its fate into its own hands (and) not crying out to the Security Council?''

Reuters

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