Juan Cole collects detailed reports from many sources.
Friday July 21
http://www.juancole.com/2006/07/israelis-bomb-beirut-baalbak-again.htmlsnip>
The Orwellian world into which Olmert and his band of manic bombers have plunged ordinary Lebanese is illustrated by Liz Sly's report for the Trib:
' Thousands of Lebanese were trying to flee the south after Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets warning people to leave, stirring fears that an Israeli ground invasion was imminent. But hundreds of thousands more remain stranded in villages and towns across the south, unable to leave their homes because of the intensity of the sustained Israeli bombing campaign. United Nations and Lebanese officials warned of an impending humanitarian disaster unless food and medical supplies are allowed to reach the stricken area and called on Israel to establish a "humanitarian corridor" to allow aid to get through. '
So let's get this straight. The Israelis warn the small town Shiites of the south to flee their own homes and go hundreds of miles away (and live on what? in what?). But then they intensely bombing them, making it impossible for them to flee. The Lebanese have awoken to find themselves cockroaches.
I repeat, this is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing of the Shiites of southern Lebanon, an assault on an entire civilian population's way of life. Aside from ecology, it is no different from what Saddam Hussein did to the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, and the Israelis are doing it for exactly the same sorts of reasons that Saddam did.
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Saturday July 22:
http://www.juancole.com/2006/07/haifa-rocket-attack-wounds-5-israeli.htmlsnip>
Israel has killed so many civilians in South Lebanon that health authorities are forced to stick them in mass graves. Megan Stack writes:
' "I've been a doctor for years, and I've never seen anything like this," said Nabil Harkus, who stood over a trio of unidentified corpses. "They can't fight Hezbollah because Hezbollah is not an army," he said, referring to the Israeli warplanes overhead. "They kill the people because they think it's the only way to stop Hezbollah." The Lebanese government has confirmed the deaths of 350 people in the fighting so far, but rescue workers here warn that the true tally is probably much higher. Relentless bombing has wrecked roads and rendered communication so spotty that no one knows how many people have died. '
The Nabatiyah Hospital serves a city of over 100,000. Reuters reports, "Water is cut off, the electricity is down, and medicine can only reach Nabatiyeh hospital across broken roads and through Israeli air strikes. But the injured still come, and doctors fear worse is ahead. The hospital, in the rolling hills of southern Lebanon, has treated 75 people wounded in Israeli bombardment since the start of a 10-day-old conflict triggered by the capture of two Israeli soldiers by the Shi'ite Muslim guerrilla group Hizbollah. Director Marwan Ghandour says the hospital could be flooded with patients if Israel launches a ground offensive across the border, just 20 km (12 miles) to the south."
Some 70 percent of the 500,000 persons that the Israelis have rendered homeless by their intensive bombing of Lebanon are from the Shiite south.
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