From the link above;;
Lebanon's expendable people

"""... Have the soldiers been tortured or abused as they would have been in American or Israeli care?

I hope not. I hope they are being treated well. I hope they are set free and allowed to walk southward through the scattered-rubble and body parts so they can appreciate what their leaders have done in their names. I hope they are released so that Hezbollah can claim a moral victory over the forces of inhumanity and cynicism that have infected the seats of government in Tel Aviv and Washington.
....."""

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Gus:
Unfortunately, I would not be surprised if even with the best of care from their captors, those two soldiers are dead... Dead from the Israeli indiscriminate bombings from above. Thus when their corpses are found below tons of rubbles, they will have hero status for having be martyred by their own kind. Someone else (Hizbollah) will get the blame for having killed them. Surgery with a sledge hammer... Ugly.

From the New York Times

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Iraqi Prime Minister Denounces Israel’s Actions

By EDWARD WONG and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: July 20, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 19 — Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq on Wednesday forcefully denounced the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, marking a sharp break with President Bush’s position and highlighting the growing power of a Shiite Muslim identity across the Middle East.

“The Israeli attacks and airstrikes are completely destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure,” Mr. Maliki said at an afternoon news conference inside the fortified Green Zone, which houses the American Embassy and the seat of the Iraqi government. “I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression.”

Read more at the New York Times

From the New York Times

Preoccupied With Fighting, Israelis Put Aside Plans to Withdraw Settlers From West Bank

By GREG MYRE
Published: July 20, 2006
HAIFA, Israel, July 19 — With daily rocket fire coming from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, two places from which Israel has withdrawn in recent years, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can expect greater resistance in pursuing any plan to withdraw from parts of the West Bank, some Israeli analysts and citizens said.

In March, a solid majority of Israelis voted for Mr. Olmert’s Kadima movement and other parties that supported some sort of Israeli pullback in the West Bank. It appeared that the issue would define Israeli politics over the next couple of years.

But with Palestinian attacks out of Gaza and the Hezbollah assault from Lebanon, the West Bank question has been pushed aside for now, and it could be a much harder sell for Mr. Olmert when he revisits it.

“The West Bank disengagement plan may not be clinically dead, but it is in a prolonged state of suspended animation,” said Mark Heller, a political analyst at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Read more at the NYT

From the Guardian

Srifa was a bustling hillside village. Then yesterday the Israeli jets came

Clancy Chassay outside Srifa
Thursday July 20, 2006
The Guardian

Aliyah, 30, lay on a life support machine in the Jabal Amal hospital in a coma. She was one of a handful of survivors who made it out of Srifa, a village in south-east Lebanon. The man treating her put her chances of survival at less than 20%. "She has severe injuries and has lost a lot of blood," he said.
Fatima Ali Ashma was more fortunate, but not much more. She lay on a hospital bed struggling to breathe.
The force of the blast which overturned the mini van she was fleeing in crushed her chest, damaging her lungs. She sustained severe injuries to her neck and arm.
Speaking slowly and with difficulty, she described what had happened to her. "In the morning we woke up to find that 10 people in the village had been killed. The authorities told us that if we could leave we should get out. So we got in the car and left. As we were leaving, they bombed the road in front of us." There were 10 people in the van with Fatima: all were wounded. "No ambulance could get through. Everyone who could has left Srifa, but the dead bodies are still in the houses."
The attack destroyed 15 houses, killed at least 17, and wounded at least 30. It happened on a day in which 63 people were killed in the bloodiest day of the Middle East conflict so far.
Srifa sits on a hillside overlooking a coastal plain that leads down to a sandy bay which ends with the white cliffs of Naqora and the border with Israel. It was a local beauty spot, where tourists came to see turtles lay their eggs. But it is also in the Hizbullah heartland from which rockets been fired into Israel.
Yesterday, plumes of smoke could be seen rising from its red-tiled rooftops, outlined on the horizon, as the Israelis flattened it. "There was a massacre in Srifa," its mayor, Afif Najdi, told Reuters.

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God gave up long ago on "his creation"...

Yep... since that day when Cain's and Abel's hearts each became a dark shade of grey, despite the blame being heaped upon one by a doddering history... They became Caiel and Abin... The true low fathers of this humanity that has not learnt a single thing about life except make bigger and deadlier weapons to destroy each other...

From Al Jazeera

Brazilians caught in the chaos

By Gibby Zobel in Sao Paulo

Thursday 20 July 2006, 9:54 Makka Time, 6:54 GMT

Seven Brazilians have died in the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, and thousands more are stranded, according to the Brazilian embassy in Beirut.

The first was a seven-year-old boy, Bassel Termos, from the Foz do Iguacu area of Brazil who was on holiday with his parents.

The latest, Dib Barakat, 62, was killed when an Israeli air attack destroyed the furniture factory which he owned and where he was working.

Barakat had been living in Lebanon for 10 years.

Family members had to flee from his funeral when bombs began falling 50 metres from the cemetery.

Dib's nephew, Kalil Laila, told local media in Brazil that his uncle lived in a region of Lebanon that had a large Brazilian population, and that they were having difficulties getting out of the country.
Lebanon is a popular summer destination for Brazilians and home to many.

There were about 200,000 Brazilians in Lebanon when the conflict between Israel and its neighbour erupted into a military campaign.

Brazil, in turn, has the largest Lebanese population outside the Middle East.

No Haven in a City Paralyzed by Dread .....

Washington Post | July 20, 2006 | P. A01

TYRE, Lebanon, July 19 - Soon after dawn Wednesday, Ibrahim Khalil Heidar readied his green Mercedes. His wife, son and daughter-in-law climbed in, carrying no more than would fit in the trunk. Their neighbours, among them eight women and four children, piled into two other cars: a white and a blue Mercedes. On the roof of each vehicle, they carefully tied a white sheet that rippled in the morning breeze. A universal message, it was their plea for protection.

They then left their small border town of Aitaroun, already barraged by Israeli airstrikes, and made for Tyre, and safety. But little around them was safe. A bomb-hewn crater blocked one road. A detour brought them to another crater. "Around and around" they drove, Heidar recalled, before they reached a narrow, buckling road an hour later that ran along a grove of ripening lemons bordered by stately pines.

"We didn't hear anything until the missiles struck us," the 75-year-old Heidar said. "One, two, three - I have no idea." From his hospital bed in Tyre, he shook his head at a memory just a few hours old. "God help us," he said.

In more than a week of Israeli airstrikes, his home of southern Lebanon has shattered like a china plate. Among its shards are the broken lives of tens of thousands of people fleeing villages such as Aitaroun, and tens of thousands more stranded in Tyre, a besieged city spread out along the Mediterranean Sea where aid and hospital officials say a humanitarian disaster is unfolding.

Red Cross officials here said scores of people were killed in attacks across the south on Tuesday. With roads under threat of attack, they said, the office's five ambulances couldn't reach villages, leaving victims buried under the rubble. Braving the shelling that residents describe as random, cars flew white flags from antennas, rolled-up windows, sunroofs or hand-held flagpoles.

Civil defense workers, too scared to venture out in firetrucks, had to leave a rotting corpse in a humid sun along one road. His bloodied head was propped against the window of his car, struck on Tuesday. Clothes spilled out of torn suitcases in the trunk; on the ground lay pink and blue baby shirts.

Tyre, a city of 60,000 before the war, 12 miles north of the Israeli border, is paralyzed by fear and dread. Hundreds of people have fled to the Tyre Rest House, a beachfront hotel, hoping for an evacuation. The city itself is deserted: No shop is open; few cars ply the streets, which are strewn here and there with rubble. In a traffic circle, a horse lazily grazed on grass, as a lonesome car alarm pierced the afternoon sky, drowned out every so often by the trail of Israeli jets and the thud of bombing.

"It's not the end. This is only the beginning," said Katya Taleb, who got married last month. "It's the beginning of the end."

The road into Tyre hugs a coast under blockade by the Israeli navy. A scarred landscape unfurls. Virtually every bridge is destroyed. A white Mercedes, its windows shattered, is perched along one; several cars are abandoned near a cemetery. Bombs have etched craters along the highway, spraying the asphalt like buckshot. Livestock sits untended in a corral; watermelons and tomatoes rot at fruit stands.

A green medallion hung from his rearview mirror. "Mohammed," it read. "God loves me, and I love God," said Mansour, a father of two.

Then he turned more serious: "I have young. They have to eat. I don't like it, but if I don't work, they don't live."

Oncoming cars, speeding at 80, maybe 90 mph, flashed their headlights as a warning. In the distance, smoke rose from the road after it was struck by a shell. Cars screeched into a U-turn, then sped off in the other direction. At times, drivers flagged other drivers. "What's the best way to Beirut?" one shouted. Another, stranded, yelled: "Please help me! Please! I need a mechanic."

Along a dirt road crossing the Hasbaya River, a car had collided with a telephone pole.

"You have to have tough nerves so this doesn't happen," Mansour said. "Scary," he then kept repeating under his breath. "Scary."

A crater sits at the entrance to Tyre, mounds of asphalt and dirt gathered beneath apartment buildings with shattered windows. Awnings hang in the geometry of destruction. Every so often, a group of mainly young men sits inside the entrance of an apartment building. Otherwise, the streets are given over to stray dogs. On one stood Mohammed Rahhal, a 25-year-old laborer. "We're catching the worst of it - day and night, night and day," he said.

Crusted blood was still on Rahhal's ear, a wound he'd suffered a day before when an Israeli air raid targeted a building next to his masonry workshop. "The Israelis want to empty the south so that they can destroy it," he said.

"We want to leave, but there's no way out," said Sabina Hijazi, with her four children between the ages of 2 and 13. She started crying, and her words poured out. The bombing terrified her children; occasionally, it shook her house. No banks are open, so she can get no money. Nor are the shops, so no food. Her son is sick, but she's too scared to venture out to the hospital. "What can I do?" Hijazi asked. "How can I get my children out of here? If we can't leave, we're left facing death."

Hospital officials estimated that perhaps 12,000 people have already left the city, maybe more. About 15,000 poured in before the roads became too dangerous. Ali Mroue, 15, said his family had spent most of the time since then in the basement, with 75 others. During the fiercest barrages, the children cried, and parents recited verses of the Koran or read to themselves quietly.

Across the city, families are relying on what they had stocked before the fighting began - bread, beans, milk, sugar, cheese and lunchmeat. Electricity was cut on the second day, spoiling some of the food, and water followed. The sick are running short of medicine. In attacks that have left residents bewildered, a private school was bombed, as was the civil defense headquarters and fire station. "It's hell," said Taleb, the newlywed.

"The attacks are absolutely random," said her husband, Ali. "They don't discriminate...

Next to Taleb was Martha Dubois, the French principal of the private school that was bombed. One of her students, 14-year-old Saraya Baydoun, walked by, her face cut when a bomb hurled debris near her house. Dubois had not seen her in days.

"Sweetheart, you're okay!" she said, hugging her. 

At the small Red Cross office, its five ambulances parked outside, frustration reigned as many of its 50 volunteers sat idly. On this day, they were especially upset about the events in the nearby village of Srifa, where the office's director, Sami Yazbak, said bombing had collapsed 20 houses and buildings. One ambulance had made the perilous trek, and its crew estimated that between 60 and 80 people were still buried there.

"We're not sure if they're dead or alive," Yazbak said. "No one can get there and take them out from under the rubble. It's not just Srifa. It's all the villages. Sometimes people are still alive, but there's no way to get to them. You just can't help them."

He looked over a map, roads to the largest villages highlighted in black. "Every day is getting worse than the day before," he said.

One volunteer, Qassem Shallan, said he had taken a call from an elderly couple in the village of Byut al-Sayyid. They pleaded for the Red Cross to pick them up, to bring them water, to deliver medication for the woman's high blood pressure.

"I started crying," he said. "There's no way to get there. I don't know if she's still alive."

At Najm Hospital, doctors who had been working eight days straight said they were running low on antibiotics, gasoline for the generator, oxygen, suture, cotton and gauze...

Ali Najm, a 35-year-old radiologist, beckoned a visitor into a small room. "Here, I want to show you something," he said. Najm knocked, then gingerly opened the door. Inside was his wife, 8-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, along with his sister-in-law and her three children, all of whom have been sharing a cramped room for a week now, deeming the hospital safer...

A few rooms down was Heidar, the patriarch of the family whose cars were attacked coming from Aitaroun on Wednesday. On the road into Tyre, he had followed 100 yards behind the two other cars. The missiles struck those cars, and the survivors crawled out, clambering into the lemon grove. Seeing the blast, Heidar and his family followed them, abandoning their Mercedes. "The bombing came right on top of us," he said.

A blast severed his left pinkie finger, cut his back and broke his foot. He crawled over to his daughter-in-law, Insaf, who was also wounded. His 71-year-old wife, Leila, was stranded farther away. Less than a minute later, there was another explosion.

His wife was so dismembered that the hospital had no corpse to bring to the morgue. Three others in the group died, including 31-year-old Ghassan Faqih, whose 3-year-old daughter, Narjis, lay in another bed, staring at the ceiling. Her face was peppered with blood.

"You see, my family." Heidar couldn't go on. His pale blue eyes watered, and he swiped away dirt still in his gray hair from the Israelis' attack. 

meanwhile, through his criminal looking glass ….

The Israeli military's chief of staff Dan Halutz said that Israeli "operations are centering on south Lebanon. Among other things, the army is trying to cleanse the border zone of Hezbollah outposts and attack the villages from which Hezbollah is firing.

When the IDF discovers that Hezbollah is firing rockets at Israel from a particular village, Halutz said, the army warns the residents to leave the village and then bombs it..."

IAF Targets Top Hezbollah Figures In Beirut Bunker

whilst ….

Lebanon's Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, called for an immediate cease-fire with Israel on Wednesday...In the first casualty figure officially announced by the government Siniora said that 300 people have been killed, 1,000 wounded and half a million displaced in Israel's operation.

In a swipe at the international community, particularly the United States, which said Israel was acting in self-defense, Fouad Siniora said, "Is this what the international community calls the right of self-defense? Is this the price to pay?" 

Siniora added he would seek compensation from Israel for the "unimaginable losses" to the nation's infrastructure. Speaking to a gathering of foreign ambassadors, Siniora made an urgent appeal for end to hostilities on a humanitarian basis. "We will spare no avenue to make Israel compensate" for the destruction inflicted on the country, he told the gathering, which included the U.S. ambassador.

Lebanese PM Calls For Cease-Fire, Says Half Million Displaced

and whilst bushit the butcher says that Israel needs more time to terrorise its neighbours, a few Americans would seem to disagree …..

‘After getting out of Lebanon, writer June Rugh told Reuters on Tuesday: "As an American, I'm embarrassed and ashamed. My administration is letting it happen [by giving] tacit permission for Israel to destroy a country." The news service quoted another American evacuee, Andrew Muha, who had been in southern Lebanon. He said: "It's a travesty. There's a million homeless in Lebanon and the intense amount of bombing has brought an entire country to its knees."

Embarrassing. Shameful. A travesty. Those kinds of words begin to describe the alliance between the United States and Israel. Here are a few more: Government criminality. High-tech terror. Mass murder from the skies. The kind of premeditated action that the US representative in Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials - Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson - was talking about on August 12, 1945, when he declared that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

The United States and Israel. Right now, it's the most dangerous alliance in the world.

Of course, Israeli officials talk about murderous crimes against civilians by Hezbollah and Hamas. And Hezbollah and Hamas officials talk about murderous crimes against civilians by Israel. Plenty of real crimes to go around. At the same time, by any measure, Israelis have done a lot more killing than dying. (If you doubt that, take a look at the web site of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and its documentation of deadly events.)’

The Most Dangerous Alliance In The World

given its toadying to the Zionists over the last century, it seems somehow fitting that Israel has still found time to offend its British government sponsors, by commemorating an earlier Israeli terrorist attack …..

‘As Israel wages war against Hezbollah “terrorists” in Lebanon, Britain has protested about the celebration by right-wing Israelis of a Jewish “act of terrorism” against British rule 60 years ago this week.

The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.

They have erected a plaque outside the restored building, and are holding a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack.

Simon McDonald, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, and John Jenkins, the Consul-General in Jerusalem, have written to the municipality, stating: “We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated.”

In particular they demanded the removal of the plaque that pays tribute to the Irgun, the Jewish resistance branch headed by Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister, which carried out the attack on July 22, 1946.’

British Anger At Terror Celebration

but given the duplicity of British government in betraying the Arab peoples over the past century, their sensitivity to the behaviour the criminal Zionists serves only to underscore their sickening hypocrisy in the face of Israel’s terrorist attacks on defenceless civilians ….

The Murder Of A Nation

and whilst Israel claims that Syria & Iran are arming & financing the terrorist attacks being made against her, nothing is said about Israel’s role of catspaw for the global ambitions of the bushit administration, as evidenced by the enormous financial support that the US continues to provide her ….

‘Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. aid since World War II.

The $3-plus billion per year that Israel receives from the U.S. taxpayer is about one-fifth of the total U.S. aid budget, and amounts to more than $600 per Israeli. Most of this money is transparent, earmarked in Congress’ foreign operations (foreign aid) appropriations bills, with the three major items being military grants (Foreign Military Financing, or FMF), economic grants (Economic Support Funds, or ESF), and “refugee assistance.”

Not earmarked, but also included in the foreign operations bills, is Israel’s portion of the grants for American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA).

In addition, and less transparent, is the interest from early disbursement of aid and monies buried in the appropriations for other departments or agencies, primarily the Defense Department (DOD). These are mostly for so-called “U.S.-Israeli cooperative programs” in defense, agriculture, science and hi-tech industries.’

A Conservative Estimate Of Total Direct US Aid To Israel: $108 Billion

ABC News at noon, an old woman sitting on the ground in a refugee camp in Syria with her 8 grandchildren stated that her son had refused to flee with them. Why? "he has gone to join Hezbullah".

When will Bushit and his Zionist buddies learn that terror breeds terror?

You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation. ~~ Marian Wright Edelman