Hezbollah bombards Israel, Qana inquiry completed
From The Washington Post:
Also, "the Israeli military announced it had completed an inquiry into the airstrike Sunday on the Lebanese town of Qana that killed civilians huddled in a three-story building":
I'll withhold comment for now. Suffice it to say that I, too, blame Hezbollah for hiding behind civilian shields. But that hardly makes this any more palatable. And I'm not sure whether or how much to blame Israel. Perhaps the airstrike could have been conducted more carefully. Perhaps these deaths could have been avoided. I don't know.
Just as there have been civilian deaths in Lebanon, an unavoidable consequence of war, so too have there been civilian deaths on the Israeli side throughout this conflict and the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict that goes back decades. And so have there been civilian deaths on all sides.
Life and death. A common, shared humanity. Is there not some hope for peace even as the bombs keep falling?
Tragedy is the only word that comes to mind. It seems to be the appropriate word to use.
Hezbollah shattered two days of relative calm in northern Israel on Wednesday, spraying the region with more than 230 rockets that set buildings and forests ablaze, wounded at least 33 civilians and killed a man as he rode his bicycle in front of his home.
Hezbollah's largest barrage of the war -- 80 more rockets than struck the Jewish state during any other day of the three-week-old conflict -- came as several thousand Israeli ground troops continued their sweep through southern Lebanon, clashing with Hezbollah fighters in at least 11 towns.
Also, "the Israeli military announced it had completed an inquiry into the airstrike Sunday on the Lebanese town of Qana that killed civilians huddled in a three-story building":
In a statement, it blamed the incident on Hezbollah for using civilian areas to facilitate attacks, including in Qana, and found the building was targeted in accordance with military guidelines. The statement also expressed regret for the incident and said the building would not have been attacked had the military known civilians were inside. Most of those who died were children.
I'll withhold comment for now. Suffice it to say that I, too, blame Hezbollah for hiding behind civilian shields. But that hardly makes this any more palatable. And I'm not sure whether or how much to blame Israel. Perhaps the airstrike could have been conducted more carefully. Perhaps these deaths could have been avoided. I don't know.
Just as there have been civilian deaths in Lebanon, an unavoidable consequence of war, so too have there been civilian deaths on the Israeli side throughout this conflict and the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict that goes back decades. And so have there been civilian deaths on all sides.
Life and death. A common, shared humanity. Is there not some hope for peace even as the bombs keep falling?
Tragedy is the only word that comes to mind. It seems to be the appropriate word to use.
posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at
8:29 AM
4 Comments:
Israel is being vilified by opportunistic politicians and the international media over the air strike that killed 28 persons in the Lebanese village of Qana. In the rush to blame Israel, a number of relevant facts are ignored: 1) the sad fact of the matter is that, no matter how much is done to minimize the risk to civilians, civilians inevitably die in wars; 2) Israel has placed its soldiers at risk in order to minimize civilian casualties in Lebanon, while Hezbollah, in flagrant violation of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, deliberately behaves in ways to maximize harm to Israeli and Lebanese civilians; 3) in Qana there were indisputable military targets, including locations from which Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel; 4) pending the outcome of an investigation, there is no way to tell whether all of those killed in the airstrike were "civilians," as Israel's critics confidently tell us, or whether the dead were actually a mix of combatants and noncombatants.
Senior Israeli officials said yesterday that Hezbollah rocket launchers were concealed in civilian buildings in the village, from which 150 rockets were fired over the past 20 days. They showed reporters video footage of rocket launchers being driven into Qana, from whence rockets were fired at northern Israeli towns, including Kiryat Shemona, Afula and Ma'alot. Israel targeted the building hit early yesterday because intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah operatives were inside, along with Katyusha rockets and launchers. Typically Hezbollah fighters fire rockets at Israeli targets and then dart into nearby buildings.
Indeed, as it has repeatedly done in the course of the 19-day-old military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces have relinquished the element of surprise by dropping leaflets on Qana and many other Lebanese towns telling residents that they should leave the area because the IDF is preparing to conduct military operations against Hezbollah. Just as Israel tries to move Lebanese civilians out of the line of fire, Hezbollah does its best to put them in danger and peril. In a dispatch published yesterday in Australia, the Sydney Sunday Herald Sun demonstrates just how Hezbollah wages war.
The photographs, from a Christian area of eastern Beirut called Wadi Chahrour, were smuggled out of Lebanon. One photograph depicts a fighter with an AK-47 rifle guarding "no-go" zones after an Israeli attack, and another with a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun in an apartment block, with sheets hanging out to dry on a balcony. Another shows the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. An Australian was standing just down the street when the block was obliterated. "Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets," he said. "Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then, it was totally devastated...It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more." (The pictures are posted online at www.news.com.au/heraldsun.)
Hezbollah's treatment of both Israeli and Lebanese civilians violates international law. Article 51 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention states that: "The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the subject of attack." Moreover, by using Lebanese civilians as human shields, Hezbollah appears to be violating Article 58 of Protocol 1, which requires parties to a conflict to "Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas." Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: "The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan falsely accuses Israel of deliberately attacking members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), even as Hezbollah repeatedly targets U.N. peacekeepers. Last Monday, an Internet site called Little Green Footballs notes that the United Nations issued a press release reporting that an unarmed U.N. observer was critically wounded by small arms fire originating from a position controlled by Hezbollah. He was airlifted to an Israeli hospital for treatment. The following day, Hezbollah opened fire on a U.N. convoy, forcing it to turn back. On Friday, U.N. forces issued a press release reporting that "Hezbollah fired from the vicinity of five U.N. positions" in southern Lebanon, and that the number of troops in a Ghanaian battalion of the U.N. is "somewhat reduced" due to Hezbollah firing from near the U.N. positions, which provokes retaliatory shelling from the Israeli side.
In sum, Hezbollah -- along with its enablers in Tehran and Damascus -- bears full responsibility for the carnage in both Israel and Lebanon.
By
Anonymous, at 2:35 AM
I'm not totally convinced Hezbollah used human shields around this building in Qana. The language of this article, while suggestive, does not actually say that.
"In a statement, it blamed the incident on Hezbollah for using civilian areas to facilitate attacks, including in Qana, and found the building was targeted in accordance with military guidelines."
Notice that nowhere in that sentence does it say that human shields were used at that building. And, of course, there's the more obvious fact that just because Israel says it, that doesn't make it true.
The idea that Hezbollah used human shields was contradicted in a Haaretz article that I talk about here. They quote the IDF as saying that rockets actually weren't fired from the site in Qana, as previously alleged.
By
Anonymous, at 2:49 AM
The practice of placing rocket launchers in and adjacent to mosques, schools, hospitals and apartment blocks is so widespread, of such long standing, so well documented, witnessed and photographed and so hard to dismiss with some article or web site that I'm not sure I know what your position is or what motivates it.
It's quite possible that this particular building did not have rocket launchers in the courtyard when the attack was made and didn't have a basement full of munitions or Hezbollah offices in the building. It's very possible that since the rocket launchers are mounted on trucks, that they fired a salvo and simply drove off, which is just how those Russian rockets are supposed to be used. No one would deny the possiblility that the attack was based on bad data, but I don't think an honest, objective commentator can deny the basic strategy of maximizing civilian casualties as a propaganda weapon against Israel.
Hezbollah and Hamas have staged attacks on their own people for that purpose and blamed them on Israel. When they give tours to the media in Lebanon, they hire fleets of ambulances to drive around the block with sirens blazing - not to rescue the injured, but to make the situation look worse.
And of course it's puzzling why someone would stress only the collateral damage caused by Israel when all of Hezbollahs attacks are against civilians and not against military targets.
I don't recall Israel using double explosive devices so as to provide a second explosion to kill rescuers - or tossing grenades into school bus windows or precisely targeting shopping malls and clubs and markets using suicide bombers so as to make sure that civilians, many civilians and only civilians will die.
You know, a lot of civilians were killed on D-day and in the liberation of Europe, many by accident, imperfect targeting or misplaced explosives - was that our fault or Hitler's fault?
Regardelss of your selected articles, Hezbullah are not the good guys and their entire existence is dedicated to exterminating Israel not making peace with them or negotiating with them.
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Capt. Fogg, at 4:53 PM
Again, if you take Qana out of context and you filter your data carefully, perhaps it was an unnecesary strike. Making it a deliberate criminal act however is harder when putting it in the context of Hezbollah's war against Israel and the US. Blow up a thousand military targets and one turns out tb wrong? Whether or not that's criminal depends on the observer and his prejudices.
We killed a whole lot of Korean civilians in the 50's. Should we have let Korea fall from fear of collateral damage? Did not the Communists share the responsibility for the dead? Which side has the most consistent record of attacking civilians - Israel or Hezbullah or Hamas or Islamic Jihad? It's not useless to point out the nature and deeds of Hezbullah, it's just inconvenient to your opinions.
There is a bit of a difference between recognizing the sensless and tragic and heartbreaking death in a war and claiming that Israel is a renegade nation of criminals who targets civilians for sport. Hezbullah is a renagade group who targets civilians for sport. The knee-jerk response from pro-jihad simpathizers is shown by the immediate certainty that Israel targeted the UN out of malice when the observers themselves told a different story. Objectivity is not breaking out all over.
I am not diminishing the horror; as a cartoonist in the New York Times said today "one man's collateral damage is another man's son" and that's painfully true, but where I depart from your view is that I see it as part of the horrors of an old and unremitting war against Israel and not proof of the evil intent against residents of Lebanon. I also see it as a triumph for Hezbollah who as a matter of policy, have in countless other incidents attempted to maximize Lebanese and Palestinian casualties while attacking exclusively civilian targets in Israel, again and again and again and again. That doesn't matter?
What good does it do to repeat that they are terrorists? It does harm to deny it or call it irrelevant. It does harm because it makes it easier creatively to imply criminal intent by those who act against them.
What nation has raised a finger or wagged a tongue in preventing the buildup of weapons by a stateless militia sworn to kill Jews or die? A band of bastards that no other nation but weak and helpless Lebanon will alow in it's borders? Feel some guilt there? What nation does one single thing when Israeli civilians are slaughtered? Looking for something to feel guilty about?
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Capt. Fogg, at 5:21 PM
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