Lebanon

In a rare internal critique of Israel's use of cluster bombs, a government-appointed commission has found a lack of "operational discipline, control and oversight" in the army's deployment of the weapons in civilian areas. The panel's statement, buried in an exhaustive report on Israel's conduct of the 2006 Lebanon war, did not directly challenge the army's assertion that its use of cluster bombs in that conflict fell within the bounds of international humanitarian law.

The ayatollah has a simple piece of advice for any Muslim woman being abused by her husband: Hit him back. "A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter- violence as a self-defense measure," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior-most Shiite cleric, wrote in a fatwa late last year that shocked conservative Muslims around the world. Fadlallah long has been considered a leader of the most radical faction of Shiite Muslims in Lebanon.

The leader of Hezbollah told thousands of mourners Thursday that his Shiite Muslim militant organization would strike Israel to avenge the assassination of one of its most elusive top commanders. Israel has denied orchestrating the car bomb attack that killed Imad Mughniyah on Tuesday in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

A U.S. decision to dispatch a warship toward the Lebanese coast was denounced Friday by the Iranian- and Syrian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Bush administration officials said that positioning the destroyer Cole from the island of Malta farther east toward Lebanon was an attempt to bolster security in the Levant, which was the site of a 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. "The purpose of the U.S.

The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was carried out by a network that is linked to other attacks in Lebanon, the chief U.N. investigator in the matter said Friday. In his first report to the Security Council, Daniel Bellemare said that a group conducted surveillance of Hariri, and that some members continued to operate after he was killed in a 2005 bombing. Bellemare said the commission would not disclose any names to preserve confidentiality.

George Atiyeh, 84, a librarian and scholar who acquired and developed much of the Library of Congress' renowned collection of publications concerning the Middle East, died April 21 of pneumonia at a nursing facility in Fairfax County, Va. Atiyeh went to the Library of Congress in 1967 after an academic career that had taken him from his native Lebanon to the University of Chicago to Puerto Rico. He served as head of the Near East Section for more than 25 years, managing the library's publications from and about the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Lebanon's long-simmering political crisis lurched deeper into violent civil conflict Thursday as bands of Shiite and Sunni gunmen battled in the streets for a second day and politicians took to the airwaves to denounce each other for pushing the country toward war.

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.