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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve harris who wrote (295825)	7/20/2006 1:01:38 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1571928

I have lost complete sympathy with Israel. You never had any ted. Not you......your love for the Israelis is bottomless. You like that they do so much senseless destruction and killing. It reminds you of your war days. What war did you fight in? Oh wait, you never fought in a war. Another armchair private........ Civilian toll raises questions Israel, criticized for killing hundreds of Lebanese, says Hezbollah stores missiles in residences Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, July 20, 2006 As Israel has steadily escalated its military assault on Hezbollah, so has the criticism about the rising number of civilian deaths resulting from its campaign. Lebanon's Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, accusing Israel of indiscriminately targeting civilians, said Wednesday that his country "has been torn to shreds" by Israel's aerial bombardment, which he said has killed 300 Lebanese, mostly civilians, wounded 1,000 and displaced half a million more. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?" Saniora asked. Israeli officials have said the intense military campaign is necessary to root out the infrastructure of an organization that started the conflict by its unprovoked killing of eight Israeli soldiers and the kidnapping of two more last week. Israel denies its air strikes deliberately target Lebanese civilians. Twenty-nine Israelis are reported to have died in eight days of fighting, including 14 soldiers and 15 civilians. The civilians were killed by Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks on Israeli cities and towns. Capt. Jacob Dallal, the Israeli Defense Forces spokesman, said Israeli forces were doing "everything to minimize" civilian casualties in Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters "don't care" about the deaths of Lebanese civilians, he said. "They just want to wreak havoc in classic terrorist style." But could Israel's campaign, however justified, be waged without inflicting such a high number of Lebanese civilian casualties? Some military analysts say it probably cannot. "Hezbollah is so intertwined with the society and community, it's very difficult to try to destroy the Hezbollah infrastructure without such collateral damage," said Babak Yektafar, an expert on the Middle East at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "If (Israeli forces) were more concerned with collateral damage, they wouldn't be as effective in destroying Hezbollah infrastructure." Analysts agree that some Hezbollah offices and command posts bombed by Israel are so close to civilian targets that casualties among noncombatants are inevitable. Some Hezbollah offices, for example, share buildings with apartments where civilians live, Yektafar said; others cluster in houses in crowded residential neighborhoods. Many of the mosques Hezbollah supports are community centers where elders meet and where families take their children to study the Quran. In the densely packed Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut's southern suburbs -- Hezbollah's bedrock of support -- Israeli air strikes in the past week have reduced entire blocks to rubble, collapsing facades of multistory apartment houses into the streets. "Certain neighborhoods are Hezbollah neighborhoods; you can't hit Hezbollah without hitting civilians," said Mark Burgess, a terrorism expert at the Brussels office of the Washington-based World Security Institute. A more debated assertion, put forward by some analysts and Israeli officials, say Hezbollah stores arms and ammunition in residential houses and often fires rockets at Israel using civilians who live in the houses as human shields. "The reality is, we're fighting an organization that stores the missiles it launches against us in people's homes," Dallal said. "They do it on purpose." Christopher Hamilton, a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Hezbollah had set up special structures inside civilian compounds and fired missiles from inside. sfgate.com