"I call on you to confront any Israeli aggressions and violations," Sleiman told conscripts during the ceremony in which the Lebanese flag was hoisted on a hilltop in the border village of Labbouneh for the first time since 1970.

The Lebanese army did not deploy in the area for decades because of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants and subsequently Lebanese fighters, mainly from Hezbollah.

The deployment comes a day after Israel's near-complete withdrawal of several hundred soldiers who had remained in south Lebanon for almost seven weeks after the ceasefire.

A Lebanese army officer told AFP Monday that at least 12 Israeli soldiers were still deployed on the Lebanese side of the Ghajar border zone in the east.

The Jewish state has said it will keep its troops there until security arrangements in the divided village are agreed with UN and Lebanese forces.

United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon commander General Alain Pellegrini said Sunday that he expects the last troops to have pulled out of Ghajar this week, in keeping with the UN ceasefire resolution.

But Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salukh charged that Israel "wants to provoke fresh trouble in south Lebanon" by holding on to Ghajar, inhabited by Syrian Alawites and which is a reputed bastion of drug smugglers and spies.

Prime Minister Fuad Siniora expressed more confidence in a swift Israeli withdrawal.

"The United Nations is dealing seriously with the issue of Ghajar and I believe it will achieve its objective, given our determination" to recover Lebanese lands expropriated on the edges of the village, he said.

In separate comments to his cabinet, Siniora welcomed the departure of "disappointed" Israeli troops.

"The occupier has left disappointed," Siniora said.

"But we still have tasks to complete: recover the Shebaa Farms, free Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails and the enemy still refuses to hand over maps of the landmines they left behind" after leaving in 2000, he said.

Army spokesman Major General Saleh Sleiman told AFP that "by Monday afternoon, the government plan to deploy 15,000 troops in the south up to the border will be complete, except for the area of Ghajar."

Troops had already taken up positions along the border, mainly in Marwaheen, Marun Ar-Ras, Adaysseh and Kfar Kila where about 100 soldiers backed by 10 armored vehicles deployed on the Fatima Gate sealed passageway, he added.

Security Council Resolution 1701, which put an end to the war, called for Israel's complete pullout from Lebanon in tandem with the deployment of Lebanese army troops backed by additional UN peacekeepers, as well as the disarming of all militias.

While Hezbollah has agreed to abide by the mid-August ceasefire, it has resolutely refused to lay down its arms until it is satisfied Israel has ended its occupation of Lebanese territory.

After the end of the war, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said his group's arsenal had increased to more than 20,000 rockets.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who along with regional ally
Iran is a main backer of Hezbollah, has dismissed efforts to stop the flow of contraband arms to the Shiite militant group as "a waste of time."

"If a real will exists to introduce illegal weapons, neither UN resolutions nor military deployment will be able to stop" their entry, he told Spain's El Pais newspaper.

"What's missing (in Lebanon) is a state in which all Lebanese consider themselves represented. If that's accomplished, it will then be possible" to disarm Hezbollah, he said.

Analysts say plenty of room remains for disputes, with Hezbollah maintaining its arsenal and the Israel air force continuing flyovers of Lebanese territory and keeping a small number of soldiers there.

Israeli forces pulled out from south Lebanon on Sunday except from the small village in line with a U.N. truce that ended a war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas.

Lebanon says overflights violate Lebanese sovereignty and breach a U.N. resolution that halted the fighting on August 14.

Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin told Reuters in Jerusalem that the overflights would continue to help ensure that arms supplies do not reach Hizbollah from
Syria.

"Israel's redeployment along the international border does not negate Israel's right to self-defense and to assist in the implementation of the arms embargo, especially when it comes to the Syria-Lebanese border, an issue that has not yet been resolves as part of the Security Council resolution," she said.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem)

"The issue of sitting on power is not a victory and Hamas has no intention to recognize Israel regardless the results," said Hamad.

Hamad was defying international demands to recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by regional peace deals.

The Middle East Quartet urged Hamas to accept these demands in order to get an embargo and Western sanctions on the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) lifted.

"Hamas movement will not comply with interior or exterior pressures to accept the Quartet's conditions," added Hamad.

The Palestinian factions, including Hamas, agreed on a plan of two-state solution in a bid to overcome international pressure, but the issue of recognizing Israel still forming a point of disagreement. The same controversial point also delayed the formation of a national unity government.

"We agreed on all Prisoners' Document except the issue of Arab Peace initiative because it asked all factions to recognize Israel before joining the government of national unity," Hamad clarified.

Late last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said talks with the governing Hamas to form a coalition government have gone back to zero.

But Hamad denies, saying that "we can't say talks have declined to zero," he added that "great efforts were being made to establish the new government." However, he didn't give a time when the government would come into existence.

"Calling for urgent understandings between Hamas and Fatah movements to tackle internal problems," Hamad warned from increasing levels of poverty, unemployment and disorder in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

Hamad, meanwhile, criticized the one-month long public strike by unpaid governmental employees and chaotic actions by striking security members which sparked deadly clashes that left nine Palestinians killed.

The employees have not been paid regularly since Hamas-led government took office in last March. Instead, the government paid loans and partial advanced payments.

Furthermore, Hamad dismissed threats by Israel to unleash a large-scale military operation in Gaza Strip if the Palestinians didn't free the Israeli soldier they captured last June. "The military solution will not be useful for the state of occupation, and Israel has to meet the conditions of the factions that seized Corporal Gilad Shalit in order to restore him back," said Hamad.

Captors of Shalit, led by Hamas, demand a prisoner swap to exchange him with a number of the 10,000 Palestinian prisoner sheld in Israel.

After the capture of Shalit, Hamad said Israel has turned Gazain to a large prison, devastated vital facilities and bridges, and killed hundreds of Palestinians without getting their objectives done.

People in Gaza dread receiving a telephone call from the Israeli Defence Force.

It usually means they are being warned to leave their house, before it is destroyed by an Israeli warplane.

The Israeli Defence Force says all houses targeted in this way are "carefully identified as terrorist infrastructures" and that it is committed to preventing harm coming to people not involved in terrorism.

The International Committee of the Red Cross says it has distributed emergency household kits to more than 400 families in Gaza since the end of June.

These are families whose houses have been destroyed or damaged; either in air strikes or for other reasons.

The kits are made up of tarpaulins, mattresses, blankets and other essential household items.

One man who lost his house to an Israeli air strike, retired NGO worker Abdel Rahman Salem Thabet, describes what happened:

On 24 August, at 23.30, someone from the Israeli army called me on the phone and ordered me to leave my home quickly.

There are 12 people in our family. The officer also told me to tell all my neighbours to leave their homes at once.

Then, at midnight, the Israeli army bombed my home. Half an hour after the phone call.

An F16 destroyed my home with two rockets. They demolished the four-storey house completely.

The reason they gave was that one of my sons is planning attacks against Israel.

But this son hasn't lived with me since 2004. He lives in the middle of Gaza, between Gaza City and Khan Younis, in Nasiriya Camp.

My home is near Jabaliya camp, much further north.

The Israeli army punished my entire family because of one person - my son - who is not even living in our area.

Until now, no-one has agreed to rent me a home for the 12 people in my family.

They say I am working against Israel and they think the Israeli army will destroy the buildings they rent to me.

We have all been living in one tent since our house was destroyed. The Red Cross gave us the tent.

"In the past months, the government of Israel has continued to evade its responsibility to evacuate the unauthorized outposts in the West Bank," a report said.

"It appears that the summer of 2006, marked by the fighting in south Lebanon, provided a golden opportunity for the settlers to deepen their hold on the land without the media being available to cover it," it said.

In 12 illegal outposts, the construction of permanent homes has likewise continued without hindrance from the authorities, it said.

"The extremist settlers took advantage that attention was concentrated on the Lebanon war to entrench themselves," Dror Etkes, the author of the report, told AFP.

"The situation in Lebanon has likewise furnished the government with an alibi that it didn't need to proceed with the evacuation of wildcat outposts and to proceed with the development of other settlements," he said.

The report was slammed as "lies" by the main settler organization, the Settlers Council in Judea and Samaria, the biblical name by which the West Bank is called in Israel.

"This report is full of lies," Emily Amrussi, a spokeswoman for the group, told AFP. The report, which was published a day before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due in Israel, was aimed "at creating a diplomatic crisis out of nothing."

Washington, Israel's main ally, has repeatedly called on the Jewish state to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank.

Amrussi also vehemently denied that settlers took advantage of the war in Lebanon, saying "it is mostly the settlement cemeteries that increased (during the offensive) with the death of 11 (settler) soldiers" out of a total 121 troops killed.

Separately, the nation's second-largest daily Maariv reported that, contrary to declared government policy, the army plans to guard all illegal outposts in 2007.

National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer told public radio that he was not aware of the outposts. "If that's the case, we have to react in the quickest possible manner and dismantle them, since their existence cannot but complicate things," he said.

During the first nine months of 2006, the government has invited bids for construction of 952 new units in illegal settlements, compared with 235 such bids solicited in the year-earlier period.

According to official data, there are 105 wildcat outposts in the occupied West Bank.

Under the terms of the roadmap, Israel was meant to freeze all settlement construction in the West Bank. The plan, however, has made no progress since its launch three years ago, and Israel says it will not be bound by its commitments until the Palestinians put a halt to attacks.

The number of Israelis living in the occupied West Bank, excluding annexed east Jerusalem, has increased by 2.7 percent to 260,042 during the past six months, according to statistics published by the interior ministry last month.

Israel dismantled all 21 settlements built in the Gaza Strip and withdrew all its troops and settlers from the territory in 2005.

In late June, however, troops were initially returned to the territory at the start of a prolonged offensive to stop militants firing rockets and recover a captured soldier. Israel also continues to hinder traffic in and out of Gaza.

Noam Chomsky observes somewhere that "debates are one of the most irrational institutions that humans have devised," because they "demand irrationality" on the part of the combatants. He neglected to add that they also often bring out the worst in the spectators. And when the subject is Israel, and the debate takes place in New York, where this topic usually evokes irrationality on a titanic scale -- well, the ensuing spectacle is likely to delight a misanthrope's heart.

My high misanthropic hopes were greatly reinforced, while we waited for the program to start, by my immediate neighbors, who were solemnly, and approvingly, discussing the ideas of that mighty thinker, Thomas Friedman. Aha, I thought, mentally rubbing my hands, this is going to be good.

The prosecution team consisted of professors Mearsheimer, Rashid Khalidi from Columbia, and Tony Judt, from NYU. Appearing for the defense were Israel lobbyists Indyk and Ross, both of whom also served Israel's cause as prominent members of the Clinton administration. They were joined by redundant Israeli labor party politician Shlomo Ben-Ami. (Why, you ask, was a former Israeli cabinet minister invited to discuss a question of American politics? That's a very good question, and I wish you had been there to ask it at the time.)

The debate was "moderated" by Ann-Marie Slaughter, who is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton. (The name of this institution always makes me laugh -- as who should say, the Henry VIII School of Women's Studies, or the Lester Maddox Institute for Racial Amity.)

The beleaguered Mearsheimer, of course, is one of the authors, with Stephen Walt, of the succès-de-scandale paper "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," which created quite a stir when it appeared last spring. The sound of carpet-chewing from Alan Dershowitz's Cambridge house reportedly gave many Harvard faculty a week's worth of sleepless nights.

What became known as the "Mearsheimer-Walt thesis" is, to paraphrase bluntly the authors' careful formulations, that the Israel lobby has been successful in "distorting" American foreign policy in Israel's interest. In particular, Mearsheimer and Walt argue, we would not have had an Iraq war without the Lobby's contribution. These are, to say the least, fighting words.

Indyk and Ross showed up in fighting trim, and Slaughter threw them a slow soft one in her first question: Was the Mearsheimer-Walt paper anti-Semitic?

Well, more or less, yes, was the predictable answer from Israel's defense bench. Mearsheimer, said the imposing, silver-maned Indyk, postulates a sinister "cabal" (he must have used this word a hundred times over the next two hours) that includes "anyone who has a good word to say about Israel." With regard to the Iraq war, Indyk's trump card was that the Israel lobby couldn't have made that happen, since the Israel lobby really wanted to go after -- Iran! Mearsheimer, who has presumably heard this sort of thing quite a lot lately, watched Indyk with an unblinking, curious, naturalist's gaze, as though he had discovered a new subspecies of E. Coli.

But there was a slightly tired, perfunctory, pro-forma quality about Indyk's obligatory insults and falsehoods. None of the defenders seemed to have his heart in it, really -- and the audience, to their credit and my surprise, wasn't buying it, either. The defense team had to say these things -- that's how the game is played -- but their threadbare invective evoked groans and hisses from the groundlings, and in any case, the trio had other, more important, fish to fry.

The other fish in question, it appears, is that all these guys would very much like to be back in office. And on this point, sadly, they seemed to have much of the audience with them.

Judt, and Mearsheimer, and Khalidi, don't have this problem. They all have tenure at good universities -- or, in Khalidi's case, at a university that suburban parents still think is a good one. They get published, and people cite them. They're at the pinnacle of their profession, and only death or Alzheimer's can knock them off it. But Indyk, and Ross, and the Woody-Allenish Ben-Ami, wielded state power once, and now they don't. They're on the outside looking in, and would love to have their helicopter rides, and their bodyguards, and their sense of importance back again.

So the burden of their song, last night, was that the Lobby is not the problem. Rather -- they sang, in close three-part harmony -- rather, the problem is that we have these awful Republicans in power here in the US, and the awful Likudniks -- now wearing a centrist smiley-face -- in power back in the Promised Land. Want to make things better? Throw the rascals out, and put us back in.

The rodentine Ross put it most crassly: "If Al Gore had been president, we would not have had an Iraq war." The crowd, I'm sorry to say, loved it. Ben-Ami took up the same tune and modulated into a slightly different key: "One thing that doesn't exist in your analysis," he thundered, "is Israel!" -- a line which, depressingly, may have nudged the applause-meter up to its maximum for the evening. "Israel's behavior is the responsibility of its elected leaders!" More applause, and sage murmurs of "he's very intelligent!" from my neighbors in the peanut gallery.

The defense team indignantly rejected the idea that a US administration should ever "force" Israel to do anything -- while strenously claiming, in the next breath, that Bill Clinton, to his everlasting credit, had put the screws to Israel in a way that made Torquemada look like a bleeding-heart. So... if you have a problem with the Israel lobby, then your best bet is to elect a Democrat. Now there is an original idea.

If you've read Clayton Swisher's remarkable book, The Truth About Camp David, then the picture that Indyk and Ross and Ben-Ami were painting of an assertive Clinton holding Israel's feet to the fire will look a little strange. In fact, last night was something of a reunion for Indyk and Ross and Ben-Ami, who were all participants in the Clinton "peace process" -- and all working for the same side, though Indyk and Ross held US passports and Ben-Ami an Israeli one. As Aaron Miller, Ross' former deputy from that period, famously observed later, "far too often, we functioned in this process, for want of a better word, as Israel's lawyer."

But the rewriting of history, and the retrospective rose-tinting of Democratic and Labor administrations, is a favorite liberal game, and the Manhattan congregation largely approved. Indyk, Ross and Ben-Ami were able to put over the virtuoso turn of denying, in one breath, that the Israel lobby has any power, and promising, in the next breath, to neutralize that power if they could only get back into their helicopters.

They have a point, of course. Neither Israel nor its Lobby are monoliths. The Likudniks are now in the ascendant in both, and our tuneful trio are, relatively speaking, sidelined. There are different ideas about tactics and strategy, priorities and alliances, among different elements at both ends of the Washington-Jerusalem axis.

But of course -- as Mearsheimer came close to saying, at one point -- the best proof of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis was sitting in front of us all night, in the form of Ross and Indyk themselves. These two have spent their careers alternating between organizations like AIPAC and WINEP on the one hand, and guarding the Middle East henhouse in government on the other. The twists and turns of tactics and diplomacy, as one faction replaces another, don't conceal an underlying, essential continuity.

If I weren't such a misanthrope, I might be tempted to say that nevertheless, the glass is half full. Twenty years ago, such a discussion, in this venue, would have been unthinkable; any attempt to raise the topic at all would have been shouted down by a coalition of JDL thugs from Brooklyn, and tough little old ex-Communist ladies from the Upper West Side. Twenty years ago, you would not have seen Establishment figures like Mearsheimer and Walt saying such things. Twenty years ago, a New York audience would have received Indyk's cheap demagogy with thunderous applause rather than groans and boos.

So the times they are a-changin'. But we still have a ways to go. If I correctly assessed the temper of last night's crowd, they mostly still want to find a way to divide the baby -- to support and vindicate Israel, but without all these awful wars and walls. They would like to cajole the Palestinians into playing nice -- without giving them anything that Israel might want. They would like to bring Iran to heel, without putting any boots on the ground, if I may borrow the buzzword-du-jour.

In other words, I fear most of them want Bill Clinton back. And when I contemplate that idea, the glass looks a lot more than half empty.

Michael J. Smith lives in New York City. When his busy social schedule permits, he works at undermining the Democratic Party on his blog, stopmebeforeivoteagain.org.