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There are now a half-million refugees in Lebanon. With Israel having cut off southern Lebanon, there are also reports of food shortages.

The attack against Israel was unprovoked. Bob wonders "what the sequence of events was," and whether Hezbollah only started shooting its rockets after Israel began its fierce response. The answer: Hezbollah actually started firing rockets last week before it kidnapped the soldiers. It was part of a diversion tactic.

But what Israel is now doing in Lebanon seems to me untenable. I didn't believe it when I first saw reports of it, but the Post says Israel is indeed bombing gas stations. How long can you keep people without the ability to travel and get food?

So I'm sympathetic to the unilateral breather proposed by Ari Shavit in the Haaretz: 

[T]he war should be started over: Hold fire. Declare a unilateral cease-fire for 72 hours. Make the international community responsible for resolving the problem of the northern border by nonviolent means within that period. Make it clear that Israel is not an unthinking bully that lashes out in every direction, but rather a responsible, orderly country, which is demanding that a zealous terrorist organization be removed from its border, that it stop threatening the lives of Israel's citizens and that it release the soldiers it kidnapped entirely unprovoked from Israel's sovereign territory.

Another few days of these airstrikes and that proposal will be a non-starter. 

P.S. For those looking to keep on news of the war, here's an automatic feed of the latest stories from mostly Israeli and Palestinian outlets.

Comments

[Tim Dickinson]

Hey Eric,

Thanks for this post. It answered several head scratchers for me about how this got all got started.
Hope all's well with you.

Your fellow MJ-alum-cum-blogger, Tim

[chris charla]

I can't understand the gas station bombing at all. It strikes me as ridiculous. I did read that HA was keeping civilians from leaving some villages in the south, which also strikes me as ridiculous.