Salon: The "Hiding Among Civilians" Myth

[regnaD kciN]

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.

(...)

So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well -- with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion.

And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight.

More here.

[madrchsod]

1. this could also be one of the reasons

"In October 2005 the Israeli Defense Force deployed a sophisticated new radar system near the Gaza Strip, designed to give early warning to Israeli residents of incoming Katyusha missiles, Kassam rockets and possibly mortar rounds. Because Israeli forces are able to locate the source of fire and return fire, the terrorist organizations have developed special methods of action to avoid injury. They fire towards a target from a number of positions, changing positions frequently and constantly using new positions."


http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/katyusha.htm
Katyusha Rocket

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. There was a speaker at our rally here on Sunday

A guy who just got back from Lebanon. He said the Israelis target a certain area and tell the Lebanese to evacuate civilians. Then they drop their bombs on the civilians as they are on the road fleeing the targeted area.

[izzie]

4. Does look like the old news reels I grew up with

People on the roads fleeing and the planes coming over to blow them up. I either saw a lot of that as a kid or I saw it once and it really stuck in my mind. It was from both sides of the world I do recall that. It does go back to what you think is going on that become very important to how you think and from my safe home it looks like the people in Lebanon are really getting killed, and that is what the world and Middle East are seeing. I would think Israel is going down the tubes also. Madness on both sides and such a waste. I would not think Bloody Bush or Rice would try to stop it. Both seem to think military power will fix about anything. Many on that side of thinking are still fighting the Vietnam war and think we should have won that one so how can you reason with that?

[teryang]

3. This is just a war of reprisals or "collective punishment"

...of the civilian population. It doesn't work, period. Bombing civilian populations is not effective. To the contrary, it stiffens resolve. This is well known among bombing analysts.

[Igel]

5. They're pushing 3000 sorties.

The death toll of civilians, in the estimation of a Hezbollah advocate--with the figure including what the same advocate estimates are 150-200 or so (as of yesterday) people buried in a building, and uncounted--is 600.

A dozen strikes probably account, at this point, for over 300 of those deaths. And we've been told what the military target was for some of those strikes: i.e., we know that a Hezbollah target was among civilians. Sometimes a person, sometimes a rocket launcher, sometimes a weapons cache.

This leaves 300 dead for over 2500 sorties. Hezbollah doesn't have to "hide" among civilians very often for this number to be reached, even assuming that Israel never struck a target by accident or due to bad intelligence.

We also know that some of those strikes were simply wrong. Even using the 600 civilian dead figure, Israel wouldn't have to be wrong very often with that number of sorties.