(AP) - The United States and France remained divided over a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon the main dispute holding up a Security Council vote on a U.N. resolution aimed at ending the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
France is backing Lebanon's call for Israeli troops to start pulling out once hostilities end and when Lebanon deploys 15,000 troops of its own in the south. The United States is supporting Israel's insistence on staying in southern Lebanon until a robust international force is deployed, which could take weeks or months, reports Trend.
Pressure on the Security Council to adopt a resolution to try to end more than four weeks of fighting has intensified as casualties mount and the prospect of a broader Israeli ground campaign grows.
Since fighting began on July 12, the council has been unable to take any significant action because of divisions over the cessation of hostilities and withdrawal of Israeli troops.
"I think we're all still operating in very good faith and trying to resolve some different issues that we've known for some time and that we're trying to piece together," U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said Wednesday after a meeting with ambassadors from the four other permanent council nations, Russia, China, France and Britain.
"My sense is that we're getting closer in a way to resolving some of them, but I don't want to underestimate the conceptual and operational differences that we're
trying to overcome," he said.
At Wednesday evening's meeting of the five permanent members, France presented the latest language in the draft resolution, a Security Council diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.
One key amendment "calls upon the government of Lebanon, upon cessation of hostilities, to start deploying its armed forces throughout the south as the Israeli army starts withdrawing," the diplomat said.
The U.S. response to that idea was not immediately clear.
Bolton has said the main issues were matters of sequencing which steps should happen first.
China's deputy U.N. ambassador Liu Zhenmin said the five permanent members would meet again Thursday morning, and progress would depend on "how the U.S. and French are going to make compromises."
The U.S.-French draft circulated Saturday calls for "a full cessation of hostilities," with Hezbollah immediately stopping all attacks and Israel ending offensive military operations. But Israel would still be allowed to take defensive action and there is no call for the withdrawal of its troops from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah's stronghold.
Lebanon opposed the draft, saying it favored Israel too strongly, a view that Hezbollah backed on Wednesday.
The Lebanese government demanded that the cessation of hostilities must be complete including all Israeli military activity and said all Israeli troops must leave when the fighting stops. It warned that their presence would be viewed as a new occupation and cited Hezbollah's threat to shoot at any Israeli soldiers in the country.
French President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday said the draft should be revised to take into account Lebanese and Arab demands for changes. He appealed to the U.S. to speed up its response to these demands and warned that giving up the push for an immediate end to the fighting would be the "most immoral" response.
Chirac said that if France and the United States don't reach agreement France might introduce its own resolution.
Bolton said the United States believes Lebanon's decision to deploy the army in the south "is significant and we are going to take account of that in the resolution."
"The strategic issue, however, remains the same as it has been from near the outset of this, which is that everybody wants to see this used to transform the situation in the region which means fundamentally that we don't want Hezbollah to re-infiltrate the southern part of Lebanon," he said.
U.S. officials said a cease-fire deal could accommodate both Arab demands for an immediate Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon and U.S. and Israeli demands that no security vacuum be left for Hezbollah to fill.
The composition and mandate of the replacement force is a sticking point, but U.S. officials said it could be a combination of Lebanese and foreign forces, perhaps under the banner of the U.N. force.