Israeli air attack kills 54 civilians, including 19 children

I still can't believe how sad and pathetic this statment is ! How on Earth they encourage killing civilians ? The other thing is how many people in Israel believe and share the same opionion of this council ? and how much it affects the current bloodbath ? how many israeli soldiers and pilots and leaders are influnced by this ??

 

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Oh, they've killed all the Little Ones
While their faces still smiled
With their guns and their fury
They erased their young lives
No longer to laugh
No longer to be a child
Oh, they've killed all the Little Ones
While their faces still smiled

Now they're burying the Little Ones
And making their graves deep
So the world cannot see
That tonight we may sleep
While they wash away the blood
The mothers all weep
Oh, they're burying the Little Ones
And making their graves deep

Yet where will the devils go
When that day comes?
When the angels drag them out
To face The Little Ones

Oh they killed all the Little Ones
With their eyes open wide
There was nothing to help them
On the day that they died

No bed to run under
No cupboard to hide
Oh they've killed all the Little Ones
With their eyes open wide

They'll be raising The Little Ones
With no sin to atone
In the light of high Heaven
They will sit on tall thrones
Where playtime lasts forever
And God's Mercy never ends
They'll be raising the Little Ones
And they'll all be best friends
They'll be raising the Little Ones
And they'll all be best friends

 

Of course IDF didn't target civilians deliberately. They targeted those Hezbollah, and killed 30 somethings of them. All the other 500+ including children are just collateral demages. Of course Hezbollah targeted Israeli civilians, and killed 9 of those precious lives, and another 30 something soliders as collateral demages. I thought IDF are the ones having precision weapons.

Of course US administation regret that civilians are dead. Of course they want the violence to stop, and they want Middle East to become a peaceful region. They just don't want them to stop killing now.

I learned to judge action by action itself, not the claimed motives, when I grew up. Because one can never fully prove others' motives, even though everyone claims something just or nobel. Action speaks for itself. It doesn't matter what I believe or others believe, or what some claim. The result is there for any adult to judge for themselves.

In fact, I value words from those "kill them all" advocators much more. At least, they are honest to themselves.

 

My point is that Hezbollah contributed greatly to the death of those children too. This is not one sided. You should put just as much blame on them. It's not like they were staging a non-violent protest when Israel attacked. When you sow the seeds of violence and hatred, you will reap what you sow, and blood will be on your hands.

 

'They found them huddled together'

More than 60 people, including 34 children, killed by Israeli attack on home where families were sheltering

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Jonathan Steele and Clancy Chassay in Qana; Rory McCarthy on the Israel-Lebanon border; Wendell Steavenson in Beirut; and Julian Borger in Washington
Sunday July 30, 2006
The Guardian

It was an unremarkable three-storey building on the edge of town. But for two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, it was a last refuge. They could not afford the extortionate taxi fares to Tyre and hoped that if they all crouched together on the ground floor they would be safe.

They were wrong. At about one in the morning, when some of the men were making late night tea, an Israeli bomb pulverised the house. Some witnesses describe two explosions a few minutes apart, with survivors desperately moving from one side of the building to the other before being hit by the second blast. By tonight, more than 60 bodies had been pulled from the rubble, said the Lebanese authorities, 34 of them children; there were only eight known survivors.

The bombing, the bloodiest single incident in Israel's 18-day campaign against Hizbullah, drew instant condemnation from around the world and sparked furious protests outside the UN headquarters in Beirut. The Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, accused Israel of committing "war crimes" and called off a planned meeting with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. Israel apologised for the loss of life but said it had been responding to rockets fired from the village.

Mohamad Qassim Shalhoub, a slim 38-year-old construction worker, emerged with a broken hand and minor injuries, but he lost his wife, five children and 45 members of his extended family. "Around one o'clock we heard a big explosion," he said. "I don't remember anything after that, but when I opened my eyes I was lying on the floor and my head had hit the wall. There was silence. I didn't hear anything for a while, but then heard some screams."

"I said: 'Allahu Akbar [God is great]. Don't be scared. I will come.' There was blood on my face. I wiped it and looked for my son but couldn't find him. I took three children out - my four-year-old nephew, a girl and her sister. I went outside and screamed for help and three men came and went back inside. There was shelling everywhere. We heard the planes. I was so exhausted I could not go back inside again. "

Ibrahim Shalhoub described how he and his cousin had set out to get help after the bombs hit. "It was dark and there was so much smoke. Nobody could do anything till dawn," he said, his eyes still darting around nervously. "I couldn't stop crying, we couldn't help them."

Said Rabab Yousif had her son on her knee when the first bomb fell.

"I couldn't see anything for 10 minutes and then I saw my son sitting in my lap and covered with rubble," she recalled. "I removed the dirt and the stones I freed him and handed him to the people who were inside rescuing us.

"I then started freeing myself, my hands were free, and then went with two men to rescue my husband. We pulled him from the rubble. I tried to find Zainab, my little daughter, but it was too dark and she was covered deep in rubble I was too scared that they might bomb us again so I just left her and ran outside." She was in hospital with her son and husband, who was paralysed and in a coma. There was no news of her daughter.

Rescue workers were pulling bodies from the rubble all morning, and came across the smallest corpses last, many intact but with lungs crushed by the blast wave of the bombing.

"God is great," a policeman muttered as the body of a young boy no older than 10 was carried away on a stretcher. The boy lay on his side, as if asleep, but for the fine dust that coated his body and the blood around his nose and ears.

The house stood at the top of a hillside on the very edge of Qana and its disembowelled remains had spilled down the slope. Bodies were lined up on the ground - a baby, two young girls and two women. The rigid corpse of a young man lay nearby, his arm rising vertically from beneath a blanket, his index finger pointing up to the sky.

"Where are the stretchers, where are the stretchers?" a rescue worker cried as Israeli warplanes roared overhead. Sami Yazbuk, the head of the Red Cross in Tyre said they got the call at 7am, but had to take a detour to Qana because of shelling on the road.

Another body was brought out. Sweaty and tired, Naim Raqa, the head of the civil defence team, hung his head in grief: "When they found them, they were all huddled together at the back of the room ... Poor things, they thought the walls would protect them."

In a nearby ambulance the smallest victims were stacked one on top of the other to make space for the many to come. A boy and girl, both no more than four years old had been placed head to toe. They were still wearing pyjamas.

Family photos - one showing two young children - were scattered in the debris. Mohsen Hachem stared down at the images adorned with smiles. "They had to have known there were children in that house," he said. "The drones are always overhead, and those children - there were more than thirty of them - would play outside all day."

Anger at the attack also surfaced in Beirut, where windows in the UN building were smashed and its lobby invaded by demonstrators furious at the rising Lebanese civilian toll. Amid extensive coverage on Lebanese television of corpses being unearthed from the remains of the building, thousands had turned out in the city's main open square to vent their fury.

Over the border, Israeli leaders expressed sorrow for the civilian deaths, but the military said that Qana had been targeted because Hizbullah had been using it as a base from which to launch rockets.

"There was firing coming from there before the air strike. We didn't know there were civilians in the basement of that building," one Israeli defence force spokesman said. He added that rockets had been fired from Qana "in the last few hours" before the air strike, and that the Israeli military had warned civilians to leave southern Lebanon several times in the days before.

The strike that destroyed the building was a precision-guided bomb dropped from the air, the same kind of bomb that destroyed a UN position in Khiyam last week, killing four UN observers. Writing on fragments of the US-made bomb at the site read: GUIDED BOMB BSU 37/B.

"We don't know what the people were doing in the basement. It is possible they were being used as shields or being used cynically to further Hizbullah's propaganda purposes," the spokesman said. "We apologise. We couldn't be more sorry about the loss of civilian life."

The Israeli government said it would investigate.

For Qana, history has repeated itself. Ten years ago, more than a hundred civilians taking refuge in a UN compound there were killed by Israeli shelling. The Israeli military described that attack as a mistake, but a UN report was highly sceptical of its explanation.

At the site of the latest tragedy, a man erupted as another small body was brought out, followed quickly by another. The civil defence workers cradled the corpses before placing them delicately on the bright orange stretchers.

"He was the son of Abu Hachem," said a young man in the crowd outside the house. "They're Ali and Mohammed - they're brothers," a neighbour shouted.

At Tyre general hospital, Dr Salman Zaynadeen said the casualties were the worst thing he and his colleagues had ever had to face. Twenty-two bodies were already in the refrigerated lorry serving as the hospital's morgue, 12 of them children. "At least 20 more are expected. They range in age up to 75. They were crushed under the building", he said.

There was a knock on the door which opened slightly. "They've brought in five more," said an orderly.

Outside in the yard five dead boys lay on the ground. Army staff were photographing them at close range for identification purposes. The youngest, Abbas Mahmoud Hashem, lay on his back with his head turned to the left and his right leg drawn up. A dummy hung on a blue plastic chain round his neck; powdered concrete covered his face and hair. No one seemed to know his age but he looked about 18 months.

On a hospital bed, a 13-year-old survivor, Nour Hashem, lay fiddling with her bed sheet, her eyes welling with tears. She had been in the house where so many of her family had been killed but had miraculously escaped with only slight injuries.

"We were all sleeping in the same room, my friend, my sister and my cousin," she said, her voice still shuddering.

"I pulled the rubble off my mother and she took me to another house, then she went looking for the rest of my brothers and sisters. But my brothers and sisters didn't come and my mother didn't return."

guardian

 

1. Yes.
2. The Yesha Rabbinical Council are ultra-right wingers who live in the West Bank.
3. The Yesha Rabbinical Council are not the Israeli government. They advocate using armed force against the Israeli Governenment.
4. None of them serve in the military; none of their kids serve in the military.
5. These are the kooks that are supporting chopping down Palestenian olive groves and killing Rabin, and think that that Israeli should have a king and be a theocracy, and think Meir Kahane was the greatest thing ever (Kahane's political party was outlawed in Israel for being racist and facist).
6. They also have a very strict idea of who a "real jew" is. It pretty much excludes anyone who isn't a religiously zealous right wing nutball.
7. They are on the same kook scale as David Duke or Farakhan, but they have a small but loyal following.
8. If terrorists exclusively targeted these guys there would be few complaints in Tel Aviv.
9. They have a following in my university. Many of them are Americans from Brooklyn.

 

1. They have this strange fetishistic thing about bringing the Messiah. Kind of like crazy apocolyptic Christians wanting to bring about the last days and the return of Jesus, and like them their vision of this great rapture includes only them, and excludes most Israelis, because they are all secular heathens.

2.Not many people take them remotely seriously, but one was enough to kill a Prime Minister.

3.They have little effect on political decisions, don't worry. If anything, there are complaints that Shin Bet (Israeli FBI) spends more time ollowing them than they do Arab terrorists. The government sees them as just as much of a threat to democracy.

4.Threre might be an ultra-nationalistic politician or two who might say something in public to throw them a bone to get elected, but I wouldn't say they have any more influence on Israeli brass, than David Duke has on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

5. One of them told my ex-girlfriend (who's mother is Danish and Christian) that even though he really liked her, he'd have no qualms about killing her because she wasn't "really" a Jew.

6. If there wasn't constant conflict with muslim terrorists, there would probably be a civil war here, with the Jewish ones.

7. People march in huge protests against them.

 

Then again Israel didn't have to go on an all-out bombing campagin against Lebanon over a small raid to capture 2 soldiers. People keep deflecting the fact that it was Israel who decided to escalate this into a full scale war when it didn't have to and didn't do so in previous such occasions. And IMO, I don't feel it was justified whatsoever but was obviously an excuse.

Hezbollah launched rockets in retaliation with the only weapons they have to conduct any kind of "bombing" in return. I don't condone it necessarily but it is understandable why they would feel the need to do it.

 

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3283816,00.html

 

Fired from the basement of a shelter filled with women and children ~ those are some amazing rockets.

 

Not fired from a basement, but perhaps stored in a basement.

 

Not stored in that basement ~ terrified men, women, and children with no where to run were 'stored' in that basement.
______

Israel made a terrible mistake -- their 48-hour ceasefire is a start at evaluating how exactly they are going to accomplish their goal of eradicating Hezbollah with 21st smart bombing when all other methods have failed in the past.

 

You and gwayneco are probably both right. From what I've read and seen from the local media and heard from friends, the IDF drops leaflets warning that a bombing is coming to take out Hizbollah, and Hizbollah won't let the civillians leave.

 

Its always the stronger power that's at fault, it seems.

Hezbollah has less damaging weapons and fewer soldiers. They are like the little brother punching the older brother. As soon as the older brother retaliates, he gets in trouble because he is stronger.

So the choice is to let Hezbollah raid across the border, launch Rockets into your country from civilian areas and do nothing, or punch back and get in trouble.

 

they bombed the whole town (CNN reported this)...nearly every building has been leveled...i guess you are right...they could have been stored in any one of those buildings...kill em all.

 

Israel does realize they made a huge mistake with this bombing - the 48 hour ceasefire is proof of this ~ the ‘ball’ is now in Hezbollah's court to withhold missile attacks during this timeframe.

Let's hope the 'diplomats' can work some magic in the next couple days.

 

We have a winner. The Euros, the UN, and the Arab media don't bat an eye when Jews die.

 

Yeah, Hezbollah was dumb enough to put all their explosives in one building.

 

Why are you saying this is BS - Hisbollah does exist to wipe Israel off the map.

And Israel has every right to defend itself.

That they made a huge mistake by bombing this particular building and hit civilians is regrettable.

However, Hisbollah are terrorists and apparently, they were operating from that village.

 

gee,... I dunno what are brutal, bonafide terrorist organizations to do?