Israel has announced it will end its war in Lebanon early Monday morning.
Israel will halt its war in Lebanon at 7 a.m. Monday (midnight EDT Sunday night), a senior Israeli government official said Saturday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matter. Israel’s Cabinet was to endorse the U.N. cease-fire resolution later Sunday.
Israeli helicopters, meanwhile, flew hundreds of commandos into the Hezbollah heartland, and some army units reached the Litani River on Saturday as both sides indicated they would accept the U.N. cease-fire plan to stop heavy fighting still raging in southern Lebanon.
It’s a very eerie thing to both announce a specific endpoint for a war and continue the killing in the nonce. This isn’t a criticism of Israel, just an observation on the nature of things.
As regular readers know, I was an MLRS (rocket artillery) platoon leader during Desert Storm. We got word late the evening of February 27 that the war would end at noon local time the next day. Obviously, we were ecstatic. Around nine the next morning, though, we were ordered to prepare for one last fire mission, which would have lobbed hundreds of additional rounds–each containing 744 644 dual purpose improved conventional munition mini-grenades–onto unspecified targets. Given that we’d already won the war, it struck me as macabre, indeed. Thankfully, for reasons I do not know until this day, the mission was called off.
