Collateral damage ( Gideon Levy)

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Let the chips fall where they may, the saying goes, but this time the chip was a terrifying concrete beam that was sent flying into the air hundreds of meters from a house the IDF bombed in the middle of the night. It landed in the bedroom of a 14-year-old girl, Dahm al-Az Hamad. Sometimes children are killed, but this time the girl was her parents' only child. Her mother is paralyzed. Sometimes tragedies happen, but the tragedy of the Hamad family is almost too much to describe.

As Dahm al-Az lay in her mother's embrace, the beam smashed into her frail body and tore it to pieces. Now this long-impoverished and newly bereaved family sits dumbstruck in its tin house in the Brazil refugee camp, at the edge of Rafah. The tin ceiling of the bedroom is still in tatters, the remains of the beam still lie on the floor, while sitting in the plastic chair in the shabby living room, Basama the mother sits and weeps silently. Her wheelchair was also destroyed in the bombing. There is no longer anyone to nurse her, no longer an iota of hope in the home that was suddenly rendered childless. The pilot pressed a button and two powerful bombs, amazingly smart and precise, landed one after the other, sending the beam flying into the air and inflicting a horrific tragedy on the Hamad family, which was already a victim of fate. Regards to the pilot.

They have only one photograph of their daughter, a tiny eternal remembrance in the form of a blurred passport photo of a small, beautiful little girl, her hair neatly done and a hint of a weak smile on her lips. There is nothing more than that."

more

[tocqueville]

1. US complicit in the bombings

On July 24, as yet another sign of its looming failure in Lebanon, Israel deployed the first of thousands of cluster munitions against what it called "Hezbollah emplacements" in southern Lebanon. Cluster munitions are an effective, if vicious, combat tool and those nations that use them, including every single member of NATO (as well as Russia and China), have consistently refused to enter an international agreement banning their use.

The most responsible nation-states that use them, however, "double fuse" their munitions to cut down on the failure rate of the "bomblets" after they have been deployed. During the administration of US president Bill Clinton, defense secretary William Cohen agreed to the double-fusing of US cluster munitions and a phase-out of the "high dud rate" munitions in the US stockpile, which was intended to cut the failure rate of these munitions from 14% (some estimates are higher) to less than 3% (though some estimates are lower).

While investigations into Israel's use of these munitions is not yet complete, it now appears that the IDF deployed single-fused munitions. Recent reports in the Israeli press indicate that artillery officers carpeted dozens of Lebanese villages with the bomblets - as close to the definition of the "indiscriminate" use of firepower as one can get.

The Israeli munitions may well have been purchased from aging US stockpiles that were not double-fused, making the United States complicit in this indiscriminate targeting. Such a conclusion seems to fit with the time-line of the resupply of munitions to Israel on July 22. The IDF may well have been able to offload these munitions and deploy them quickly enough to have created the cluster-munitions crisis in Lebanon that plagues that nation still - and that started on July 24.

read the whole background here
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html

there are 3 very complete articles by :

Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry ... the co-directors of Conflicts Forum, a London-based group dedicated to providing an opening to political Islam. Crooke is the former Middle East adviser to European Union High Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff member of the Mitchell Commission investigating the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a Washington, DC-based political consultant, author of six books on US history, and a former personal adviser to Yasser Arafat.

[Tom Joad]

3. speaking of that, here is a powerful video of some of the carnage

the US government sponsored in Lebanon.
What will Israel do when Blair and Bush are gone?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ogiSMfjOrk0

The higher you build your barriers
The taller I become
The further you take my rights away
The faster I will run
You can deny me
You can decide to turn your face away
No matter 'cause there's

Something inside so strong
I know that I can make it
Though you're doing me wrong, so wrong
You thought that my pride was gone... oh no
There's something inside so strong
Something inside so strong

The more you refuse to hear my voice
The louder I will sing
You hide behind walls of Jericho
Your lies will come tumbling
Deny my place in time
You squander wealth that's mine
My light will shine so brightly it will blind you
Because there's

Something inside so strong....

[geek tragedy]

5. Could you have found a more biased source? Citing those

two is like citing Bibi Netanyahu or Daniel Pipes on the other side.

[tocqueville]

6. if those two guys were writing about Iraq they would be praised...

what Asia Times reports fits very well with reports in independent European media or even the Haaretz. Fact is that an army of 30000 - considered as one of the best in the world both by professionalism and weaponry - has been screwed by 3000 diehards (which obviously didn't lose much more than the attackers) but to the price of a terrible amount of civilian casualties, many of them not even belonging to the part of the Lebanese population that supports the Hezbollah. That's the interesting part of the story and quoting it doesn't transform you into a Hezbollah supporter more than criticizing the US war in Iraq makes you a member of Al Quaeda.

If I was Israeli I'd be more concerned by that because denying reality isn't helping. But it's still amazing to see that some Jewish Americans can't consider for a minute that Israel might be wrong at least sometimes.

[shergald]

7. It never happened, you mean?

Or was it that the prose made the incident look human, when everyone knows that Palestinians are terrorists bastards at heart and deserve their misery. A benign military occupation and it is not at all appreciated.

[geek tragedy]

8. I wasn't responding to the OP. eom

[breakaleg]

2. As I read this I couldn't wait to hear how Israel would respond to her

death, how they would excuse it or rationalize it away. And here it is. They were intent on targetting tunnel and gave no care to the people who lived in that house. And they outright deny her death was related to their attack. I guess they have to do something so they can sleep at night. Disgusting.


" "The IDF attacked from the air a house in Rafah under which a tunnel was dug to transfer arms. After the attack a large explosion occurred at the site, apparently attesting to the presence of large quantities of arms there. According to the IDF's information, the girl Dahm al-Az was not in the building that was attacked or even in the neighborhood where the attack was carried out, but was in her home and was killed as the result of an accident. The accident apparently has nothing to do with the IDF attack, which, as noted, took place hundreds of meters from the site. Additionally, it is not possible to determine whether the girl's death occurred at the same time as the IDF attack."

---snip----

[tocqueville]

4. the worse is the intelligence failure, even the US generals were dismayed

The "target stretching" escalated throughout the conflict; frustrated by their inability to identify and destroy major Hezbollah military assets, the IAF began targeting schools, community centers and mosques - under the belief that their inability to identify and interdict Hezbollah bunkers signaled Hezbollah's willingness to hide their major assets inside civilian centers.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ12Ak01.html

On July 28, the severity of Israel's intelligence failures finally reached the Israeli public. On that day, Mossad officials leaked information that, by their estimate, Hezbollah had not suffered a significant degradation in its military capabilities, and that the organization might be able to carry on the conflict for several more months. The IDF disagreed, stating that Hezbollah had been severely damaged. The first cracks in the Israeli intelligence community were beginning to show.
......

"It seemed to them that Israel threw away the book in Lebanon. This wasn't surgical, it wasn't precise, and it certainly wasn't smart. You can't just coat a country in iron and hope to win."

The cold, harsh numbers of the war point up the fallacy of the Israeli air and ground campaign. Hezbollah had secreted upwards of 18,000 rockets in its arsenals prior to the conflict. These sites were hardened against Israeli air strikes and easily survived the air campaign. Hezbollah officials calculated that from the time of firing until the IAF was able to identify and deploy fighters to take out the mobile rockets was 90 seconds. Through years of diligent training, Hezbollah rocket teams had learned to deploy, fire and safely cover their mobile launchers in less than 60 seconds, with the result that IAF planes and helicopters (which Israel has in much fewer numbers than it boasts) could not stop Hezbollah's continued rocket fire at Israel ("Israel is about three helicopters away from a total disaster," one US military officer commented).

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html