Some Serious Stuff

Well...


I can continue my crappiness and talk about maths or I can continue to post pictures of female celebrities...

However, today I decided to do something Entirely different.

I going to talk about lebanon. Or more specifically

Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon


A little background information here here.

This blogs copies heavily from the Human Rights Watch Group(HRW) based in America.

HRW has interviewed victims and witnesses of attacks in oneon-
one settings, conducted on-site inspections (when security allowed), and collected information from hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies. HRW has also inspected the IDF(Isaeli Defense Force)’s use of weapons and discussing the conduct of forces with IDF officials.

Basically, Isareli fails to carry out "the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets" And interviews with IDF officers reviews a notion of indiscriminating between civilian and military targets. As quoted by a Isaeli officer “in the center of Beirut there is an area which only terrorists enter into."

One damning incidents which i felt the IDF really over did it is this :
Israeli warplanes and Apache helicopters launched a sustained bombardment of the southern Lebanese village of Srifa on July 19. “After the first bombing, villagers started fleeing to neighboring villages for safety,” one resident reported. “Israel saw this from their drones, and they sent Apache helicopters to circle the village to prevent us from leaving. They started shelling the area around the village from airplanes.”

Well Done, first you bomb the village. Then when the villagers are trying to leave, you round them up like lambs and start firing at them...

One of Israel main defense is that Hezbollah has been setting up sites near civilian homes and hence the high cost of civilians casualties. But it that really so?

From the HRW report, the IDF bombing of Qana is unwarrented. Survivors had angrily denied Israeli allegations that Hezbollah rockets had been fired from the area and that local residents had been used as “civilian shields” by militants. “If they [the Israelis] really saw the rocket launcher, where did it go?” Muhammed Mahmoud Shalhoub, a 61-year-old farmer who escaped the bombed building, told HRW. “We show Israel our dead, why don’t they show us the rocket launchers?” Another resident, Ghazi Aydaji, added: “If Hezbollah was firing near the house, would a family of over 50 people just sit there?”

On-site inspection by HRW also saw no evidence that there had been Hezbollah military activity around the areas targeted by the IDF during or just prior to the attack: no spent ammunition, abandoned weapons or military equipment, trenches, or dead or wounded fighters.

The use of "cluster ammunition" by the IDF are also very objectional as this weapons have a very poor history of discriminating between civilians and military targets.

Also, the IDF has also targeted medical personnel and aid convoys. “A weapon directly hit one ambulance, and a second attack struck the second ambulance a few minutes later,” the report stated. “All six of the Red Cross workers were injured during the attack, and the three patients they were treating suffered additional injuries. One of the patients, a middle-aged man, lost his leg in the ambulance strike, while his elderly mother was partially paralyzed. The third patient, a young boy, received multiple shrapnel wounds to the head.”

The Full report is availiable here.

A summarized version is availiable here.

Understanding, the IDF actions leaves much to be desired. However, at such a stage, I would most probably like to reserved my comments until a second report from the HRW is out. The report of Hezbollah rockets in Israel is out. However, I think that it is only appropriate that we pray of the sufferings in the Middle East.