What's going on in Lebanon right now? Three points stand out from today's coverage. First, civilians are being massacred. Second, Hezbollah is doing great: light casualites, plenty of weapons, and they are winning the hearts and minds of the non-Shiite Lebanese. Third, Israel is preparing a ground invasion.
1.
The NY Times on the devastation of Tyre:
The morbid reality of Israel's bombing campaign of the south is reaching almost every corner of this city. Just a few miles from the Rest House hotel, where the United Nations was evacuating civilians on Thursday, wild dogs gnawed at the charred remains of a family bombed as they were trying to escape the village of Hosh, officials said.
Officials at the Tyre Government Hospital inside a local Palestinian refugee camp said they counted the bodies of 50 children among the 115 in the refrigerated truck in the morgue, though their count could not be independently confirmed.
Abdelmuhsin al-Husseini, Tyre's mayor, announced on Thursday that any bodies not claimed in the next two days by next of kin would be buried temporarily in a mass grave near the morgue until they could receive a proper burial once the fighting ends.
Juan Cole writes that
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.
2. The leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, is sounding upbeat:
I can confirm without exaggeration ... that the leadership structure of Hizbollah has not been hurt. All this Israeli talk that they hit 50 percent of our rocket capabilities and warehouses, this talk is all wrong and nonsense.
And this from a Hezbollah fighter:
"It's true that until now, we have lost six fighters and many civilian martyrs. But Israel has done nothing up to now. Militarily, we are stronger than when the fighting began. And most of the Lebanese are with us -- that's very important," said Akbar, speaking in French.
The Lebanese who didn't support Hezbollah prior to the conflict, including many Christians and Sunni Muslims, blame the Shiite militia group for triggering it by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. But Israel's campaign -- which has killed more than 300 civilians, displaced 500,000 people and targeted the country's infrastructure while hunting Hezbollah positions -- has united them during war.
"The way Israel is fighting has people believing that the goal is not the destruction of Hezbollah, but the destruction of Lebanon," said Nizar Hamzeh, a professor of international relations and expert on Hezbollah.
So all this carnage adds up to nothing for the Israelis. They are losing the battle for hearts and minds, and they can't even do much harm to Hezbollah.
3. Israel is preparing to invade southern Lebanon. They are warning hundreds of thousands of Lebanese to evacuate, even as they drop bombs on their homes, villages, schools, and hospitals.
Don't you know that Israel has a right to exist?