Hezbollah

The tentative truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is just part of a larger effort by the Jewish state to reach out to longtime adversaries. In the process, it confronts a number of difficult, domestically unpopular negotiating options. One key issue faced by Israeli diplomats is both straightforward and highly sensitive. Syria wants the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967, returned in exchange for peace.

Army troops moved into the streets of Tripoli on Monday, restoring a precarious calm in northern Lebanon after 10 people died in heavy clashes in recent days, military officials said. "The situation is back to normal since this afternoon, when the army entered all the neighborhoods where the fighting happened," said a high-ranking military officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. "Our intervention came after a political agreement between all parties."

The Israeli Cabinet's approval Sunday of a prisoner swap with the militant group Hezbollah touched off cries of victory in Lebanon and sparked fresh debate within the Jewish state over the price of its determination to retrieve missing soldiers. After weeks of emotional public speculation and a six-hour Cabinet debate, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government voted 22 to 3 in favor of a deal that would return two captured Israeli soldiers. Olmert acknowledged Sunday that they were probably dead.

Closing an uneasy chapter of its 2006 war against Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, Israel prepared to swap the most notorious Lebanese convict in its prisons today for the remains of two Israeli soldiers whose capture sparked the fighting. The deal, approved by Israel's Cabinet on Tuesday, revived raw emotions on both sides of the 34-day conflict: Israel's frustration over its failure to crush an Arab foe and Hezbollah's euphoria in holding off a powerful army until a U.N.-brokered truce.

U.S. and Colombian investigators have dismantled an international cocaine smuggling and money laundering ring that allegedly used part of its profits to finance Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, officials said Tuesday. Culminating a two-year investigation, authorities arrested at least 36 suspects in recent days, including an accused Lebanese kingpin in Bogota, the Colombian capital.

Protesters blocked roads around Beirut and other regions to enforce a general strike aimed at toppling the government. The opposition, led by Hezbollah and its allies, set out early to burn tires on major highways north and south of the capital and on a road around downtown Beirut, sending black smoke billowing into the sky. Army forces and fire engines moved in to remove the obstacles.

Hezbollah and its allies paralyzed Lebanon on Tuesday, sending thousands of demonstrators to seize control of major roads, brawl with government supporters and choke the seaside capital in the acrid smoke of burning tires. The swift seizure of the country's roads took many here by surprise, and marked a major escalation in the militant group Hezbollah's campaign to overthrow Lebanon's U.S.-backed government.

By the time morning commuters headed off to work Wednesday, the fires had been snuffed out. The roadblocks had melted away. The rampaging youths who had been burning cars and choking off the nation's roads seemed to have evaporated.

The United States said Monday that Israel probably violated an agreement on its use of U.S.-made cluster bombs in July's war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. "There were likely violations," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. The State Department said it had delivered a classified preliminary report to Congress on Monday. McCormack declined to say how Israel violated U.S. rules, contending that such information was classified.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert testified for more than six hours Thursday before a commission investigating the performance of Israel's government and military during last summer's conflict in Lebanon. Olmert's office declined to comment on what the prime minister told the panel during the closed-door hearing, but he had been expected to defend the government's decisions during the war with Hezbollah guerrillas and to characterize the outcome as a win for Israel.