Israel plans to withdraw its 30,000 troops from southern Lebanon by the end of next week, its army announced, as its ceasefire with Hezbollah continued to hold despite a few skirmishes and rocket fire.
Withdrawals proper will start tomorrow, said foreign diplomats briefed by the Israeli army. "They want a fast exit in one-to-two weeks," said one diplomat.
Negotiators are hoping that a symbolic handover of territory - however small - to Indian UN troops in the region tomorrow will be seen as symbolically significant, and provide reassurance to nervous Lebanese citizens.
Nicholas Blanford, Times Correspondent in Lebanon, said that today there was a confused and volatile picture in the former warzone during the truce, with units of Israeli soldiers very close to Hezbollah fighters, and the chaos heightened by unexpectedly large number of civilians flooding back to the area.
Hezbollah guerrillas fired at least 10 rockets today, but none crossed the border into Israel. Israel said two skirmishes broke out in which Israeli troops shot five guerrillas, although it was not clear if they were wounded or killed. A day earlier, six guerrillas were killed.
Israeli soldiers have already pulled back from strategically unimportant territory around the mainly Christian town of Marjayoun, seized during their final push late last week, and this morning were leaving Bourj al-Mulouk, which lies between Marjayoun and the Israeli border.
"Co-ordination meetings (about withdrawal) have already started. As a first step, areas that are not crucial from our perspective could be handed over (to Unifil troops and the Lebanese army)," said an Israeli government official.
The Israeli army said that it intended to consolidate its forces on positions that were more easy to defend, while it waited to hand over to peacekeeping forces.
The likely sequence of events in the handover finally started to become clearer this afternoon, when Lebanese government sources said that the Lebanese army would start to deploy south of the Litani river on Thursday.
A total of 15,000 Lebanese troops are expected to deploy in a 20-mile wide swath of land north of the Israeli border within days, but agreement on how and when they would arrive had been delayed by Cabinet wrangling.
It is understood that Hezbollah's change of heart, refusing to disarm its fighters, had proved a stumbling block.
Elias al-Murr, Lebanese Defence Minister, has said that Lebanon's largely Shia army will not be asked to disarm Hezbollah guerrillas in the south. But this afternoon the problem appeared to have been bypassed as a firm date was set.
"As we speak, the army is readying the force. They will start deploying on Thursday," a senior Lebanese political source said, adding that army units would deploy in pockets held by Israeli forces in south Lebanon only after Israeli soldiers hand over their posts to UN peacekeepers.
Under the ceasefire agreement arranged at the UN, the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers will control a buffer zone to keep Hezbollah fighters away from the border.
Senior French soldiers were due to meet at the UN later today to discuss beefing up the current UN observer force (Unfil), which numbers 2,000, with thousands more foreign peacekeepers.
More than 20 countries have offered to contribute troops. They hope to have drawn up a framework for operations by Thursday, with the extra peacekeepers probably starting to arrive next week.
Five weeks of ground clashes, Israeli air strikes and Hezbollah rocket fire ceased at 6am BST yesterday as the truce took effect, encouraging thousands of Lebanese refugees to return to southern villages devastated by the war.
This morning thousands more vehicles piled high with belongings jammed the bombed-out coastal highway linking Beirut to the south of the country, as a sea of mainly Shia Muslim refugees streamed home.
The rush by the hundreds of thousands of refugees to return to villages with no electricity, water and basic services, let alone many destroyed homes, has surprised the authorities. Warnings were issued after two returning refugees died after setting off unexploded bomblets from Israeli cluster devices.
The truce also allowed thousands of Israelis to leave bomb shelters for the first time in a month.
The Israeli army said that Hezbollah had fired four mortar bombs overnight that landed near Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, causing no casualties or damage. The Israeli forces did not respond, although yesterday they killed six Hezbollah fighters whom they claimed had fired at them after the truce.
If the Israeli and Hezbollah withdrawals go according to plan, it will be the first time for many years that there has been any Lebanese army presence in the south, an area that has until now been controlled by fighters from Hezbollah, the Shia militant group which has two elected ministers in the Lebanese government.
Both Israel and Hezbollah have claimed victory in the five week conflict. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, said last night that his fighters had won a "strategic and historic victory" over Israel and that it was the wrong time publicly to discuss disarming them.
He promised that Hezbollah volunteers would immediately begin repairing homes damaged by Israeli strikes and that the organisation would pay a year’s rent and other costs to help the owners of about 15,000 destroyed houses.
In a rare public speech Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President, today concurred that Hezbollah had won an important victory. He claimed that the Israeli army had been humbled, and that Israel's leaders should now sue for peace.
By contrast, America and Israel said that Hezbollah had suffered a crushing military and political blow, and its arsenal of rockets had been severely depleted.
