JPN: Israeli Refusal in Lebanon, Putting Civilians in Harm's Way and the Views of Israel's Palestinian Citizens

August 10, 2006

Their power of endurance (Ha'aretz) Amira Hass on steadfastness in Palestine and Lebanon

Israeli pilots 'deliberately miss' targets (Guardian, UK) Some Israeli pilots find a way to avoid killing civilians

More Important Articles Links to other important news articles for today

[JPN Commentary: Many commentators are saying that the reason for the high number of civilian casualties in Lebanon is the fact that Hezbollah is hiding its soldiers in civilian areas. The first response to this claim must be that the reason for the high number of civilian casualties is the high number of Israeli missile attacks in civilian areas; regardless of where Hezbollah fighters happen to be, Israel alone is responsible for the civilians it is killing.

However, a recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has shown that Hezbollah forces are often nowhere near the areas Israel is attacking. According to HRW, Israel sometimes does target civilians, which would classify the attacks as war crimes. In short: many Israeli attacks on civilian areas cannot be explained (let alone justified) by the presence of Hezbollah fighters.

Hezbollah fighters are often accused of blending in with the local population. This sounds bad, but in the article below, commentator Jonathon Cook points out that the same thing can be said of Israeli troops when they are seen riding the bus, visiting their families and openly eating at restaurants. This is not to exonerate Hezbollah; whether or not Hezbollah has behaved recklessly towards Lebanese civilians, it has committed grave crimes against the Israeli civilian population. What Cook's article indicates is that we must be careful when listening to Israeli military reports (or mainstream media accounts) of the behaviour of Hezbollah fighters.

The same lesson may be applied when looking at Israeli reports that Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians. Another HRW report documents Hezbollah is indeed targeting civilians (something Cook could have mentioned). But again, Cook makes the important point that it is difficult to believe Israeli reports about the nature of these attacks; Israeli military censorship rules prevent investigations of its claims (although mainstream media rarely informs readers or viewers of these censorship restrictions). So for instance, when the Israeli military reports that Hezbollah rockets land 'near' a hospital, it sounds like they were targeting civilians; what we do not hear is that there may have been military installations near that hospital. As Cook writes: "Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to represent, unchallenged, any attack by Hizbullah as an indiscriminate strike against civilian targets."

Cook's point is significant because the failure to apply the same standards to Hezbollah as to Israel in evaluating their respective conduct encourages both sides to ignore those standards. -- JN and AWJW]

HRW's report on Israel's attacks on Lebanese civilians

HRW's report on Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli civilians

By Jonathan Cook
The Electronic Intifada
3 August 2006
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5390.shtml

Here are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israel's 'cowardly blending ... among women and children'. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side represents a kind of victory."

You probably did not read far before realising that I have switched "Israel" for "Hizbullah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah". The paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published in Britain's Guardian newspaper on 2 August. My attempt at deception was probably futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the kind expressed above can be levelled against Israel.

Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hizbullah is using the Lebanese population as "human shields", hiding its fighters, arsenals and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. "Cowardly" behaviour rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the spiralling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of Hizbullah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in the face of the available evidence and the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human Rights Watch.

Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians indiscriminately in Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians. Our research shows that Israel's claim that Hezbollah [sic] fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."

HRW has analysed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air strikes and found that more than 40 per cent of the dead are children: 63 out of 153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the civilian death toll so far at over 500. Lebanese hospital records suggest the figure is now well over 750, with potentially many more bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble of buildings obliterated by Israeli attacks.

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. Roth states: "The image that Israel has promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of so high a civilian death toll is wrong. In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."

The impression that Hizbullah is using civilians as human shields has been reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli statements that have "blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, arguing that only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all are legitimate targets of attack."

Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan Egeland, he says Hizbullah fighters are "cowardly blending" with Lebanon's civilian population. It is difficult to know what to make of this observation. If Freedland means that Hizbullah fighters come from Lebanese towns and villages and have families living there whom they visit and live among, he is right. But exactly the same can be said of Israel and its soldiers, who return from the battlefront (in this case inside Lebanon, as they are now an invading army) to live with parents or spouses in Israeli communities. Armed and uniformed soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in trains, queuing in banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that mean they are "cowardly blending' with Israel's civilian population?

Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more than blaming Hizbullah fighters for not standing in open fields waiting to be picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That, presumably, would be brave. But in reality no army fights in this way, and Hizbullah can hardly be criticised for using the only strategic defences it has: its underground bunkers and the crumbling fortifications of Lebanese villages ruined by Israeli pounding. An army defending itself from invasion has to make the most of whatever protection it can find -- as long as it does not intentionally put civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly that Hizbullah is not doing this.

So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about Hizbullah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value government and army statements that Hizbullah's strikes into Israel are targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more serious investigation?

Although we should not romanticise Hizbullah, equally we should not be quick to demonise it either -- unless there is convincing evidence suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules governing both its domestic media and the reporting of visiting foreign journalists to prevent meaningful discussion of what Hizbullah has been trying to hit inside Israel.

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.

Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any reports touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted to the country's military censor, but few media are pointing this out. Most justify this deception to themselves on the grounds that in practice they never run their reports by the censor as it would delay publication.

Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by self-censoring their reporting of security issues or by relying on what has already been published in the Israeli media on the assumption that in these ways they are unlikely to contravene the rules.

An email memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a week ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the organisation's reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems noted above, observing that "the more general we are, the free-er hand we have; more specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The editor says the channel will notify viewers of these restrictions in "the narrative of the story". "The teams on the ground will make clear what they can and cannot say -- and if necessary make clear that we're operating under reporting restrictions." In practice, however, BBC correspondents, like most of their media colleagues, rarely alert us to the fact they are operating under censorship, and self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the full picture of what is happening.

Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions that cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his article that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one". He is right, but does not seem to know who is really winning the propaganda offensive.

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, published by Pluto Press and available in the US from University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/745288.html


Thousands of people surged through the streets of Umm al-Fahm this week to protest Israel's bombing of Lebanon. Although the demonstration was announced only an hour before it began, it attracted residents throughout the Israeli Arab city. "Israel is a terror state!" they shouted. "Our people in Gaza and Lebanon will not surrender!"

MK Jamal Zahalka (Balad), one of the rally's organizers, said he could not see the end of the human wave that made its way through the alleyways of Umm al-Fahm Sunday.

The protest is just one example of events and statements that appear to be putting the strength of Israeli democracy to the test. As Israel continues to fight Hezbollah, its tolerance for views condemning the war - often expressed by Arab MKs - is on the wane.

MK Abas Zkoor (United Arab List-Ta'al) spoke from the Knesset in Arabic Monday. In comments addressed to the Lebanese after dozens of civilians were killed in an Israel Air Force strike in Qana, he said: "We ask Allah to forgive your martyrs, increase your reward in the world to come, and avenge the exploiters."

Several Arab MKs called Defense Minister Amir Peretz a "murderer" during the special Knesset recess session that discussed the war. The interruptions led to the expulsion of three Arab MKs - Zahalka, Ibrahim Sarsur and Talab al-Sana - from the plenum. In comments to the media, some Arab MKs referred to Peretz as the minister of war, a derogatory term borrowed from the Arab-language press.

Israeli Arab leaders argue that a true democracy must tolerate opinions and comments that deviate from the consensus, even when the country is going through a crisis. They say that the job of the opposition is to express opinions that differ from those of the coalition, and in this case, it is almost only Arabs who are criticizing the war from the Knesset floor.

MK Azmi Bishara, chairman of the Balad party, told Haaretz yesterday that he believes the war could have been prevented. Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers is not a legitimate casus belli, he said, adding that the fighting has not made neither Israeli nor Lebanese cities immune from the threat of attack.

Whether or not one agrees with Bishara's views, it is his democratic right to express them, he said.

"Genuine democracy means that there is no consensus," Bishara said. "That is true in normal times and in a time of war. History is full of examples of unjust wars that broke out amid a national consensus, and the latest example of that is the American war in Iraq. The war over Lebanon is a war of choice, and I have no doubt about it."

But Bishara has not expressed his views to the Israeli broadcast media, saying that Arabs interviewed on the air are regularly accused of being disloyal to the state.

"This is the season of incitement against Arab MKs," he said. "What is considered an extremist opinion here is considered very moderate in the Arab world."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/748012.html

Over three weeks, since the campaign in Lebanon began, despite the nonstop and lethal fire on populated areas and the rising number of civilian and military casualties, the Jewish public not only justifies the Israeli offensive in Lebanon and believes the government has clear goals that the campaign is meant to achieve, but also overwhelmingly supports continuing the fighting until the goals are attained. Similarly, there is almost full support for the ongoing attacks by the air force, even though they are causing destruction of infrastructure and suffering to the Lebanese civilian population.

Despite criticism in the media, the public gives high marks to the Israel Defense Forces' combat capability and to the credibility of its reports on the fighting. Hezbollah's combat capability is also rated high but the public does not view its reports on events as credible. In addition, the overwhelming majority believes Hezbollah initiated the attack on the northern border to serve its own interests and those of Syria and Iran, and not to help the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel.

Almost the entire public supports stationing an international force in Southern Lebanon to separate the sides and stop the fighting between them.

In the domestic sphere, a small majority defines the national mood as "moderately good or very good" - a reversal of the pattern observed in the previous month when the mood of the majority was "moderately bad or very bad." A large majority also defines their personal mood positively as well as their own and their family's sense of personal security.

There is also a very wide consensus on the high resilience of Israeli society so far, and apart from a few percentage points everyone is prepared to personally assist the residents of the North in various ways. An issue on which there is not a consensus is the right of protest: the Israeli Jewish public is evenly split between those who think opponents of the government's policy in Lebanon have the right to express their protest at present and those who think they should not exercise the right of protest at this point.

Those are the main findings of the July Peace Index survey that was carried out on Monday and Tuesday, July 31 and August 1.

The Jewish citizens of Israel currently believe almost unanimously (93 percent) that the campaign in Lebanon is justified. Only 5 percent view it as unjustified, and the rest have no position. A segmentation by gender reveals that an overwhelming majority of both sexes justify the campaign, but the majority is slightly smaller among women - 90 percent compared to 97 percent among men. Seventy-nine percent of the total Jewish public favors continuing the fighting until the goals that were set are achieved, while only 16.5 percent want an immediate declaration of a cease-fire and the beginning of a process at the international level leading to political negotiations.

A definite majority (57 percent) believes the government has clear goals for the operation, while 34 percent see it as lacking clear goals (9 percent do not know). A segmentation by voting for the Knesset in the recent elections shows that among voters for Yisrael Beiteinu, the Pensioners and United Torah Judaism, a higher rate view the government as lacking clear goals than the proportion of those who think it does have them. Meretz voters are evenly split, while a majority of voters for all other parties think the government has clear goals for the campaign.

In the same spirit of overwhelming justification of the war, 91 percent of the public say the air force attacks in Lebanon are justified even if they destroy infrastructure and cause suffering to the Lebanese. This holds true for a majority of the voters for all parties, though for Meretz voters it is only a small majority of 53 percent with 47 percent saying the air force attacks are not justified.

The survey results indicate that the criticisms voiced in the media of the IDF's achievements in the fighting do not resonate among the Jewish public. Eighty-seven percent assess the IDF's combat capability as good or very good, only 9 percent as bad or very bad (the rest do not have a clear opinion). Moreover, 78 percent view the IDF's reports from the Lebanese battlefield as credible or very credible, only 19 percent seeing them as unreliable (the rest have no opinion). Interestingly, regarding belief or disbelief in these reports a segmentation by party voting revealed no clear pattern.

Hezbollah's combat capability is also rated high (which might explain why the public is ready to accept continued warfare against the organization despite the many victims this campaign is claiming in Israel). Seventy-four percent assess Hezbollah's fighting capability as good or very good, only 17 percent as poor or very poor (the rest have no opinion). As for reports from the battlefield, however, the public does not give Hezbollah much credit - only 12 percent view its accounts as reliable or very reliable, 82 percent as moderately or totally unreliable.

An especially interesting finding is that an overwhelming majority of the Jewish public sees no connection between the Palestinian issue and Hezbollah's initial attack. Only 9.5 percent think Hezbollah opened the front in the North to help the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel; 81.5 percent say the organization did so to serve its own interests and those of Syria and Iran.

What will happen after the war? Seventy-one percent favor the stationing of an international force in South Lebanon to separate the sides and stop the fighting between them, as done, for example, in the battle zones in former Yugoslavia. Twenty percent oppose stationing such a force.

The high level of consensus on the different aspects of the war appears closely connected to the high level of national fortitude that the survey results reveal. Eighty-eight percent see Israeli society as standing up well or very well so far under the burden of the campaign, with only 9 percent seeing its resilience as poor or very poor. This strength is evident in the declared readiness of almost all the interviewees to help the residents of the North in one way or another, including hosting, contributions of money or goods and so on. A majority of 55 percent assesses the current national morale as good or very good, 41 percent as bad or very bad. Note that in the previous month the corresponding findings were 35.5 percent and 58 percent. In other words, since the war began there has been a substantial improvement in the national morale.

Indexes: General negotiation index: 45.8

Negotiation index, Jewish sample: 41.0

The Peace Index Project is conducted at the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and the Evens Program in Mediation and Conflict Resolution of Tel Aviv University, headed by Prof. Ephraim Yaar and Prof. Tamar Hermann. The telephone interviews were carried out by the B. I. Cohen Institute of Tel Aviv University on July 31-August 1, 2006, and included 617 interviewees who represent the adult Jewish and Arab population of Israel (including the territories and the kibbutzim). The sampling error for a sample of this size is 4.5 percent.

For the findings of the survey, see: http://www.tau.ac.il/peace

[JPN Commentary: In her newest column, Amira Hass reminds us of the heart wrenching suffering of civilians in Israel’s wars against Lebanon and the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, and makes two critical points. First, she reminds us that Israel counts on its brute force to create a new political reality. In so doing, she says, Israel is ignoring the human factor - that the Palestinians and Lebanese' fortitude grows in lockstep with our strengthening powers of destruction.” Second, she addresses the suffering of Israeli civilians in northern Israel - civilians whom this war has placed in danger and failed to protect - and brings home the context of their suffering with a comparison to the Gaza Strip. She says: “We are justly concerned about the welfare of northern residents, proud of their fortitude, understand those who leave, are shocked by the death of each person and by every rocket hit, and identify with those suffering from anxiety. Take what the northern residents have been going through for a month, multiply it by 1,000, add an economic blockade, power and water cuts, and no wages. This is how the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been "living" for the past six years. With her humane sensitivity and sharp analysis, Hass helps us gain critical political insight as our hearts break for the needless and continued suffering. -- SAM]

08/09/2006

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/747999.html

Hezbollah's Al-Manar television station would dismiss as feminine and sentimental the view that peoples don't win wars. Like other Arab analysts, they regard attacking Israeli civilians and engaging the IDF in fierce battles as an Arab victory. But where's the victory for the 1,000 Lebanese the Israeli army has killed? Where's the victory in a million people fleeing homes that were bombed and destroyed? Are such losses worthwhile just to demonstrate that a guerrilla group can entangle a regular army and expose such an Israeli weakness?

On the other hand, the non-victory of the other side is not an Israeli victory, even if Israel triples the number of Hezbollah fighters and doubles the number of Lebanese mothers that it has killed so far. Even if the Israeli Air Force wipes out a thousand villages, it would still not bring back to life the Israelis who were killed.

The trauma and economic damages will continue to affect many people's lives. Even if the cease-fire agreement is closer to Israel's positions than to Lebanon's, it would still not be a victory. Israel's insistence to unilaterally lay down the rules in the region perpetuates and deepens its character as an alien element within it. Israel's future generations will continue to pay for this obstinacy.

It comes as no surprise that this war has not yet been finished in one fell swoop. For six years, the Israeli army has accustomed its soldiers to regard their assaults in the occupied territories as "fighting" and "battles." They fostered the myth that there was symmetry between the advanced regular Israeli army and groups of Palestinians armed with light weapons and homespun bombs, scurrying among the tanks and helicopters that are demolishing their houses and fields. Indeed, on a few occasions, the Palestinians succeeded in guerrilla operations that killed or wounded the troops. But these were the exception. The suicide attacks inside Israel attest to the "military" weakness of the Palestinian organizations.

Now the IDF has sent to Lebanon soldiers who have been taught to believe that warfare is running down refugees' homes with tanks and bulldozers; that a battle is firing from helicopters at fighters with Kalashnikov rifles who cannot even scratch the Israeli tank surfaces. These soldiers think that defending the homeland is preventing hundreds of thousands of people from living like human beings, by operating roadblocks in the territories.

By another twisted standard set by the Israeli army in recent years, homes in northern Israel whose occupants have left to escape the Katyushas are to be designated as "abandoned." This, after all, is how Israeli military spokesmen justified, initially, the fact that bulldozers systematically demolished the homes of civilians in Khan Yunis and Rafah - civilians who had fled massive Israeli fire.

Bulldozers will not raze the homes of Israelis in the North, but why should thieves, for example, not take from them whatever they can get their hands on? These are, after all, abandoned homes, the thieves will say in their defense, citing the precedents.

Why bring this up today? First, because the war - state cruelty - against the Palestinians is ongoing. Second, because Israel's double standard and basic contempt for anyone who isn't "us" explains better than the army's outdated equipment and faulty training why it has been receiving blows so far and will continue to receive them. Israel is convinced that in Lebanon, as in Gaza and the West Bank, its unlimited power to destroy is both a deterrent and spur to political change. It is ignoring the human factor - that the Palestinians and Lebanese' fortitude grows in lockstep with our strengthening powers of destruction.

We are justly concerned about the welfare of northern residents, proud of their fortitude, understand those who leave, are shocked by the death of each person and by every rocket hit, and identify with those suffering from anxiety. Take what the northern residents have been going through for a month, multiply it by 1,000, add an economic blockade, power and water cuts, and no wages. This is how the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been "living" for the past six years.

The Israelis allow their army to continue destroying, trampling and killing in the Palestinian territories. Here, like in Lebanon, the real intelligence and security failure is Israel's ignoring the extent of our uninhibited, unrestrained devastation and their amazing power of human endurance. This is why Israel has delusions of "victories." If the homemade rockets are still being fired at Sderot despite the Palestinians' extensive suffering, it is because they have concluded, correctly, that Israel's destruction power is not intended to stop Qassam rockets - or to free Gilad Shalit. It is intended to force them to accept a surrender arrangement, which they reject not with military victories but with their power of endurance.

[JPN Commentary: In the last month, Israel’s air-war on Lebanon has killed nearly a thousand Lebanese - the vast majority of whom were civilians - and displaced 25% of the population. While Israel continues to claim that they don’t target civilians, this article from The Observer reports that some Israeli military officials are becoming uncomfortable with the results of the air-war and questioning the validity of the targets chosen by military intelligence. Some airforce pilots have chosen to “deliberately miss” their assigned targets, fearing that the intelligence has given them civilian, and not military, targets. The overwhelming numbers of civilian casualties attest to their being in the direct line of fire, and these rumblings from within the ranks for the military - and the personal responsibility taken by a few pilots - are an urgent and critical new development. -- SAM]

Fliers admit aborting raids on civilian targets as concern grows over the reliability of intelligence

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838437,00.html

Sunday August 6, 2006

At least two Israeli fighter pilots have deliberately missed civilian targets in Lebanon as disquiet grows in the military about flawed intelligence, The Observer has learnt. Sources say the pilots were worried that targets had been wrongly identified as Hizbollah facilities.

Voices expressing concern over the armed forces' failures are getting louder. One Israeli cabinet minister said last week: 'We gave the army so much money. Why are we getting these results?' Last week saw Hizbollah's guerrilla force, dismissed by senior Israeli military officials as 'ragtag', inflict further casualties on one of the world's most powerful armies in southern Lebanon. At least 12 elite troops, the equivalent of Britain's SAS, have already been killed, and by yesterday afternoon Israel's military death toll had climbed to 45.

As the bodies pile up, so the Israeli media has begun to turn, accusing the military of lacking the proper equipment, training and intelligence to fight a guerrilla war in Lebanon. Israel's Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, on a tour of the front lines, was confronted by troubled reserve soldiers who told him they lacked proper equipment and training.

Israel's chief of staff, Major-General Dan Halutz, had vowed to wipe out Hizbollah's missile threat within 10 days. These claims are now being mocked as rockets rain down on Israel's north with ever greater intensity, despite an intense and highly destructive air bombardment.

As one well-connected Israeli expert put it: 'If we have such good information in Lebanon, how come we still don't know the hideout of missiles and launchers?... If we don't know the location of their weapons, why should we know which house is a Hizbollah house?'

As international outrage over civilian deaths grows, the spotlight is increasingly turning on Israeli air operations. The Observer has learnt that one senior commander who has been involved in the air attacks in Lebanon has already raised concerns that some of the air force's actions might be considered 'war crimes'.

Yonatan Shapiro, a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a 'refusenik' letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information. According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of 'common sense' and in the context of the Israeli Defence Force's moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.

Shapiro said: 'Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they're afraid people will be there, and they don't trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets.'

He added: 'One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hizbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house ...

'Pilots are always being told they will be judged on results, but if the results are hundreds of dead civilians while Hizbollah is still able to fire all these rockets, then something is very wrong.'

So far none of the pilots has publicly refused to fly missions but some are wobbling, according to Shapiro. He said: 'Their target could be a house firing a cannon at Israel and it could be a house full of children, so it's a real dilemma; it's not black and white. But ... I'm calling on them to refuse, in order save our country from self-destruction.'

Meron Rappoport, a former editor at the Israeli daily Haaretz and military analyst, criticised the air force's methods for selecting targets: 'The impression is that information is sometimes lacking. One squadron leader admitted the evidence used to determine attacks on cars is sometimes circumstantial - meaning that if people are in an area after Israeli forces warned them to leave, the assumption is that those left behind must be linked to Hizbollah ... This is problematic, as aid agencies have said many people did not leave ... because they could not, or it was unsafe to travel on the roads thanks to Israel's aerial bombardment.'

These revelations raise further serious questions about the airstrike in Qana last Sunday that left dozens dead, which continues to arouse international outrage. From the outset, the Israeli military's version of events has been shrouded in ambiguity, with the army releasing a video it claims shows Katyusha rockets being fired from Qana, even though the video was dated two days earlier, and claiming that more than 150 rockets had been fired from the location.

Some IDF officials have continued to refer vaguely to Katyushas being launched 'near houses' in the village and to non-specific 'terrorist activity' inside the targeted building. In a statement on Thursday, the IDF said it the air force did not know there were civilians in what they believed was an empty building, yet paradoxically blamed Hizbollah for using those killed as 'human shields'.

Human rights groups have attacked the findings as illogical. Amnesty International described the investigation as a 'whitewash', saying Israeli intelligence must have been aware of the civilians'.

One Israeli commander from a different squadron called the Qana bombing a 'mistake' and was unable to explain the apparent contradiction in the IDF's position, although he insisted there would have been no deliberate targeting of civilians. He said he had seen the video of the attack, and admitted: 'Generally they [Hizbollah] are using human shields ... That specific building - I don't know the reason it was chosen as a target.'

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