To: longnshort who wrote (79178 ) 4/27/2010 9:01:57 AM From: Thomas M. Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 90947 Too bad that Israeli Jew doesn't provide any evidence to back up his claims, eh? Hezbollah in fact targeted the Israeli military, which is why they killed such a low percentage of civilians: <<< ... I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the war we were hit by Hizbullah rockets that killed two young brothers. The attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hizbullah was indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shiite militia was so committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was happy to kill Nazareth’s Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be easily dismissed: it depended both on a “clash of civilisations” philosophy not shared by Hizbullah and on the mistaken assumption that Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hizbullah, Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority. But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake -- something Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a military weapons factory and a large army camp. Hizbullah knows the locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail -- employing the same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon. One of Hizbullah’s first rocket attacks after the outbreak of hostilities -- after Israel went on a bombing offensive by blitzing targets across Lebanon -- was on a kibbutz overlooking the border with Lebanon. Some foreign correspondents noted at the time (though given Israel’s press censorship laws I cannot confirm) that the rocket strike targeted a top-secret military traffic control centre built into the Galilee’s hills. There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or inside Israel’s northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth, for example, Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on top of an Arab town -- so close to it, in fact, that the factory’s perimeter fence is only a few metres from the main building of the local junior school. There have been reports of rockets landing close to that Arab community. How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the Israeli and foreign media was highlighted recently when it was widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket had landed “near a hospital” in a named Israeli city, not the first time that such a claim has been made over the past few weeks. I cannot name the city, again because of Israel’s press censorship laws and because I also want to point out that very “near” that hospital is an army camp. The media suggested that Hizbullah was trying to hit the hospital, but it is also more than possible it was trying to strike -- and may have struck -- the army camp. Israel’s military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to represent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an indiscriminate strike against civilian targets ... >>>electronicintifada.net It's a shame that Israel plants its military into civilian areas, but that isn't Hezbollah's fault. In contrast, Israel targeted civilians, which is why civilians were such a large percentage of the dead Lebanese: <<< ... Giving the lie to the “human shields” theory, HRW says its researchers “found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army] launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians. ” In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could find no evidence that Hizbullah was operating in or near the areas that were attacked by the Israeli air force ... >>> Tom