The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has said that he wants to increase the numbers of UN peacekeepers in Lebanon from their present level of 4,500 to more than 5,500. The request was made in a report to the Security Council, and follows enormous advances made by Hizbollah fighters in Israel's self declared security zone in southern Lebanon. Israel's client militia, the South Lebanese Army, appears to have collapsed.
The Israeli cabinet is still meeting in emergency session to decide whether to withdraw its forces more than a month earlier than planned. The South Lebanese Army, which had been supported by Israel and acted as a buffer against Islamic guerrillas, has effectively collapsed. Hizbollah fighters have now taken over key areas of the enclave and are within a few miles of the Israeli border. It is thought that the government of Ehud Barak is considering whether to withdraw its remaining troops in June, five weeks earlier than had been planned.
Five civilians have been killed in the region. Members of the Israeli-backed militia have been fleeing, as Israeli soldiers continue their planned withdrawal from the security zone it has occupied for more than twenty years. Some of those killed today by Israeli fire were in the Irish sector of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force. Fighters belonging to the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army are reported to have been cut off from their supply lines. Some reports speak of the SLA evaporating from their positions.
A UN spokesman said that the SLA had now ceased to function as a unified fighting force. He said that Israeli gun-ships are reported to have fired on hundreds of civilians marching between villages in the occupation zone, killing two people. Hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been returning to hilltop villages in the south of the country abandoned by the Israeli-backed militia that has occupied them for the past 22 years.
