Cease-Fire Accepted In Lebanon as Fighting Continues

From the Washington Post:

BEIRUT, Aug. 12 -- Hezbollah and the Lebanese government accepted a U.N.-declared cease-fire with reservations Saturday night, but the war wore on with Israeli airstrikes, Hezbollah rocket attacks and expanded fighting on the ground.
The continued warfare, in which at least seven Israeli soldiers and 19 Lebanese were killed, indicated that the month-old conflict was unlikely to stop immediately despite Friday's U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an end to Hezbollah attacks on Israel and Israel's military operations in Lebanon. The Israeli cabinet was scheduled to make its decision Sunday, with Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres predicting that the U.N. cease-fire would be accepted in Jerusalem as well. But at the same time, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, said he had dispatched more troops and armor to Lebanon to pursue Israel's goal of driving Hezbollah fighters from a strip of border territory and holding it until an international peacekeeping force can be organized and deployed along the frontier.
Peres, in a telephone interview, said Israeli military forces were expanding operations in southern Lebanon because "the timetable permits it and there's an impression that Hezbollah controls the situation, which is not true." He added that while Hezbollah is continuing to fire rockets, "the best way to stop it is to clear out the area of the rockets."
Peres said that after the expected cabinet approval of the resolution Sunday, he believed that there was "a fair chance" that a cease-fire would be imposed by the end of the week and that the international forces could be in place in "another week or two" afterward.

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--Tom Hayes