Hezbollah

Abbas Jihah recalls hearing a powerful, loud whistling noise, and in an instant his life was shattered forever. In that split second, the ambulance he was driving, packed with at least 12 people, was picked up with sickening force by an Israeli rocket fired from a helicopter hovering overhead. The vehicle was hurled 20 yards off the road, into the front room of a house.

The residents of Kiryat Shemona and other northern Israeli towns should sleep peacefully tonight. They can expect to walk their streets Sunday without the threat of Katyusha rockets raining down on them from Hezbollah guerrillas across the border in Lebanon. But this calm came dearly to Israel.

The Clinton administration succeeded Friday in arranging a cease-fire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, ending 16 days of fighting. Along with the cease-fire, the United States obtained agreement from Israel and Lebanon on a written understanding that imposes new restrictions on military units in southern Lebanon and for the first time spells out on paper the rules governing these forces.

Riding in jampacked cars and buses piled high with foam mattresses, hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed homeward to southern Lebanon on Saturday on the first day of a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas. For many, it was a bitter homecoming. Lebanon suffered the brunt of the 16-day offensive--dubbed "Operation Grapes of Wrath"--mounted by the Israeli military in retaliation against Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel.

In a grisly attack that cast a darker shadow over Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, Israeli forces pounding the country for a third day Saturday rocketed an ambulance packed with refugees, killing two women and four children. The attack came as Israel stepped up its campaign against Hezbollah fighters by imposing a partial naval blockade on Lebanon--raising anxieties in this capital city that gasoline and food shipments might be impeded.

Shiite Muslim guerrillas fired a barrage of rockets at northern Israel on Tuesday, wounding 36 people. Israeli opposition leaders quickly seized on the attack as political ammunition seven weeks before general elections. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah group said the rocket attack was in retaliation for a land mine explosion that killed a Lebanese teenager Monday and wounded two boys, one of them seriously.

In the battle zone of southern Lebanon, incoming shells explode with dulling regularity, the drone of Israeli aircraft crisscrossing the sky never seems to stop and the distinctive whoosh of an outgoing Katyusha rocket can be heard once or twice an hour. As the conflict in southern Lebanon entered its third week Thursday, and U.S.

The Clinton administration denounced Iran on Thursday for escalating arms shipments to Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and charged that Tehran is trying to thwart the efforts of Secretary of State Warren Christopher as he shuttles around the Mideast in search of a cease-fire. The third planeload of supplies in 10 days arrived in Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Tuesday, according to senior U.S. officials.

As diplomatic efforts intensified to end the conflict in Lebanon, Israeli jet fighters Monday carried out a fiery attack on the second power station in the capital in two days, plunging this city into darkness and reminding the demoralized populace of its suffering during the country's 15-year civil war.

On the fifth day of "Operation Grapes of Wrath," Israeli Brig. Gen. Giora Inbar stood on the rooftop of this border outpost surveying the steep Lebanese mountains that reverberated with the sound of outgoing artillery fire. Israeli troops continued their barrage of more than 5,000 shells on suspected Hezbollah positions beyond those mountains, sending hundreds of thousands of Lebanese refugees north in a message to Beirut that it must rein in the Shiite Muslim guerrillas.