Where the killing is easy

via Kel at The Osterley Times comes a detailed report at The Observer about an incident I briefly mentioned yesterday:

Israel steeply escalated its military campaign against Hizbollah in Lebanon yesterday with a series of air strikes that left more than 35 civilians dead, including a single strike on a convoy of families fleeing the fighting in a village near Tyre in the south of the country that killed more than 20 people, most of them children.

As more details have emerged, it became clear that this refugee convoy was actually heeding IDF advice to evacuate before soon-to-be-launched attacks ensued.

According to witnesses and photographs from the scene of the worst incident, an Israeli missile incinerated a car and a small truck full of families leaving their Lebanese border village of Marwaheen near Tyre after the Israeli army used loudhailers to tell residents they had just hours to go. Pictures showed charred bodies of children strewn across the road.

How's that for efficiency. No need mucking about blowing up people one at a time; tell them to leave, have them gather themselves into a tight group and then attack them with one fell missile. Further details inform us that this attack was not the result of some far-off missile launch but, in fact, the direct action by an IDF gunship:

Eighteen civilians, including nine children, were burnt alive when missiles from an Israeli helicopter gunship slammed into a convoy of residents fleeing border villages in south Lebanon....

This is just some of the action the liberal New York Times called "morally justified."

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Predictably, Hezbollah ratched up their rocket launches and Haifa has now suffered civilian casualties when a rocket hit a government rail yard. Meanwhile, Israeli attacks on Beirut, Tripoli and elsewhere, continue to intensify and George Bush demanded that Syria tell Hezbollah to stop their retaliatory attacks, since Israel is simply a reactive, thoughtless entity, which only reacts -- violently -- to external stimuli. George Bush doesn't seem to realise that the Israeli offensive began as the result of a kidnapping, the Hezbollah rocket attacks only coming after the Israeli shelling, bombing and air strikes. Since the Hezbollah attacks did not incite the Israelis initially, ceasing them won't stop Israeli actions at all. I think it might actually be better if Bush just kept stuffing his face with butterball biscuits.

This just in: Israeli airstrikes have just killed eight Canadians in southern Lebanon, which is either collateral damage or part of Israel's larger operation to simply defend itself.