Security zone falls apart in 3 days
Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Military Correspondent

THE WAY OUT: Several hundred South Lebanese

Waiting to cross into Israel at the border near

Metulla yesterday. South Lebanese fled to Israel

for fear of reprisals by Lebanese guerillas.

Five minutes and five hundred meters were all that separated the convoy escorting President Ezer Weizman yesterday from a group of triumphant Hezbollah fighters.

When Weizman reached Zarit for a visit, smoke was still rising from the opposite hill where Israeli artillery had hit some jeeps only a little while before.

Later, when the president climbed up to the rooftop of the Ozana family home, he could see a number of Hezbollah soldiers trying to get their wounded away from the Karkum outpost's southern flanks.

It began, apparently, as a mistake.

The Hezbollah, surprised by the speed of the collapse of the South Lebanon Army's 81st Regiment (that same regiment that only a week ago was called by senior IDF officers as "a strong force that will never surrender"), went out to celebrate their victory.

The jeeps, covered in Hezbollah flags, left the abandoned outpost in Nakoura, east of the village of Atie a Sha'ab, copying in the western sector what happened the day before in the central sector.

But this time the guerrillas had a problem with intelligence (or maybe the years of absence from the area took their toll).

The jeeps began to climb the southern flanks to Karkum, without knowing that it was the only remaining Israeli outpost between Kiryat Shmona and the Mediterranean.

Only halfway up the hill did the Hezbollah guerrillas discover that the Nahal and armored corps still held the outpost.

The guerrillas opened fire, and the IDF immediately fired back with a massive barrage - from the outpost, from headquarters at Zarit, and from combat choppers sent into the battle.

Zarit's local council chief, David Ozana, lives in the northernmost house in the moshav, with the best view of Karkum.

The journalists who climbed onto his roof watched the battle from up close - so close that Channel One reporter Moti Eden, who was the first one there, narrowly missed being wounded by some stray shots.

As far as the IDF was concerned, the incident ended well:Some Hezbollah guerrillas were killed while no IDF soldiers were hurt.

But the brief battle at Karkum well reflects what is left of the security zone. It is a territory with no borders and no rules, where nobody knows who controls the next hill, let alone who is climbing the hill right next to your hill.
The missing general
Three days. That's all it took for the SLA to collapse.

The destructive domino effect that began with the abandonment of the Taibe outpost without a shot being fired on Sunday spilled across the entire front yesterday, all the way from Hasbaya in the east to the sea.

Early in the morning, as the IDF was leaving its western command headquarters in Bint Jbail, the officers there informed the SLA officers in the region, "From now on, your fate is in your hands."

The battalion commander and his two remaining regimental commanders (the third regiment had collapsed the day before) understood the message.

A few Hezbollah attacks on the advance outposts were enough for the western zone commanders of the SLA to announce that they were putting down their arms.

The Druze regiment in the east joined them by the afternoon, a few hours after the SLA officers told Brigadier General Benny Gantz, the chief liaison officer in the territory, that they intended to fight on.

By evening the entire extent of General Antoine Lahad's soldiers consisted of two small enclaves, one on the Ali Taher ridge and the other near Marjayoun.

The military correspondents have been cruel to Major General Gaby Ashkenazy, the commander of the front in the north. Every day at his briefing, they ask "Where's the general?" and every day Ashkenazy has to try the unfamiliar path of diplomacy, saying that as far as he knows, "The general is on his way."

At least until last night, the hero from Masada was still in Paris.

Who knows, said some in the IDF. Maybe there is some problem with his travel agency.
Embarrassment at Fatma
Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of the general's soldiers, along with their families, showed up at the gates to Israel.

At the Fatma crossing near Metulla, it was hot, crowded and tense.

The long line of cars waiting for permission to enter Israel reached almost all the way to Marjayoun and the tension became nearly unbearable when a lone Hezbollah fighter opened fire on the line of cars from an abandoned building, keeping everyone pinned down until an IDF force finally killed him (all of this was broadcast live on television).

Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, who showed up yesterday on the border, could see how the very scenario he had been predicting for months was coming true, in all its grisly detail. When Sneh predicted that thousands of panic-stricken Christians would crowd up against the Good Fence, he was mocked in the Prime Minister's Office as a professional pessimist.

The best of the security experts predicted that only a handful of top SLA officers would seek asylum in Israel. Yesterday, IDF officers upped that estimate to several thousand.

Sa'id Gatz, deputy commander of the SLA training base in Majdaya, has lost some of the optimism he clung to almost religiously during the past few months. "You abandoned us. We have no other words for it," he said.

"I'm aware of the pressure at Fatma," said Major General Ashkenazy in his daily briefing. "It's by people who have lost everything. We're leaving an outpost. They're leaving a home. We're going home to our country. They're being forced to leave their country.