UPDATE FROM A LEBANON UNDER UNJUSTIFIED ISRAELI WAR RAGE

Thursday August 3rd, 2006- 23rd day of attack

August 12th, 2006- INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST AND
SOLIDARITY

Reporting after 23 days of consistent Israeli attacks
on Lebanon:

More than 900 Lebanese people have been killed in
three weeks of fighting with Israel,
More than 3,200 have been wounded
1 million or a quarter of the total population had
been displaced
Third of the casualties had been children under 12.
Numbers are still not very accurate many bodies still
under rubble and Lebanese are still fleeing their
towns. (Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora reported
by BBC)

Human Rights Watch- Israel committing war crimes
(Aug 3, 2006- Reuters- abcnews.go.com, hrw.org)
“Israel’s military appears to have deliberately bombed
civilians in Lebanon and some of its strikes
constitute war crimes”, the US-based rights group
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday. They added
that Israel’s contention that Hezbollah fighters were
hiding among Lebanese civilians did not justify its
"systematic failure" to distinguish between civilians
and combatants. "In some instances, Israeli forces
appear to have deliberately targeted civilians," HRW
said in a statement accompanying a report released on
Thursday.

"The failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents
and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices.
Israel says its strikes destroy Hezbollah
infrastructure and stop rocket attacks that have
killed 56 and caused large-scale evacuations in
Israel. HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said in
the many cases of civilian Lebanese deaths
investigated by the rights group, the location of
Hezbollah members or their weapons stores appeared to
have no bearing on the areas attacked. "Hezbollah
fighters must not hide behind civilians. That’s an
absolute. But the image that Israel has promoted of
such shielding as the cause of so high a civilian
death toll is wrong," he said in the statement.

On aid, fuel, safe corridors, food, medicines, and
worsening condition in the South
Aid agencies in Lebanon say the severe damage to roads
and bridges by Israeli air strikes is having a drastic
effect on distribution of badly needed aid (BBC). The
agencies say they are also using small vehicles for
fear that larger ones will be hit by Israeli aircraft
searching for Hezbollah fighters. Aid workers are
warning of worsening conditions among refugees in the
southern border region. Shipments of humanitarian aid
are reaching the south Lebanese port city of Tyre, but
aid agencies say they are still having trouble getting
the relief supplies to areas where they are most
needed. The United Nations says access for desperately
needed aid convoys to southern Lebanon had not
improved since Israel agreed to a partial 48-hour
suspension of air strikes on Monday. The UN’s refugee
agency (UNHCR) has warned that fuel shortages continue
to increasingly hamper humanitarian relief operations.

Lebanon is working to secure fuel imports as part of
UN humanitarian aid convoys and from neighboring Syria
to avert shortages that could see the lights go out
and the country grind to a halt within days. "If this
situation continues, we have a week to 10 days with
rationing. If people just consume as normal, fuel will
not last four days," said Sami Brax, head of Petrol
Station Owners Union. "If we don’t get petrol from
Syria we will run out by Sunday. You will see all
movement in the country fall 50 per cent," said one
petrol industry source in Lebanon. Electricity has
been increasingly strictly rationed since the conflict
started. Some areas of Beirut now receive less than 12
hours of electricity a day.

Besides fuel, supermarkets have run out of fresh milk
and some other foodstuff. Drug stores only have a
short supply of essential medicine. "By the end of the
week, we will run out of much of the food we have,"
said George Jabra, a major Lebanese wholesaler of food
products. The foods most likely to run out, he said,
include rice, sugar, canned tuna and corn beef. His
products normally arrive through Beirut port, which
has been a target of Israeli attacks. The ports of
Jounieh and Tripoli to the north have also been
attacked. "We’re sitting and watching. It will be
worse when the electricity is totally cut," said
Jabra. Also, medicines for blood pressure and diabetes
– that are in high demand - are in short supply.
Pharmacist Suleiman Dandan said he had supplies for
another 10 to 15 days. Baby food is also slow in
coming, he said.

Some Lebanese people say despite the good intentions
of the international community, humanitarian aid is
not what the country needs most. Tyre resident Jamal
Halaby shook his head as he watched the shipment
unloaded at the port. "He is telling us that ’All this
relief, all this food aid and blankets - it’s
summertime! We do not need blankets! We do not need
their food," he said. "They can take all this back.
What we want is an immediate cease-fire. This is what
will help".
(Sources: BBC, AP, www.stuff.co.nz,
news.morningstar.com, Lebanon news.Net)

Opinion; The refugees’ fury will be felt for
generations to come.
Israel is seeking to cast itself as the victim even as
it expels the people of Lebanon and Gaza from their
homes. People walk the dusty, broken roads in
scorching summer heat, taking shelter in the basements
of empty buildings. In Gaza and Lebanon, in the
refugee camps of Khan Younis, Rafah and Jabaliya, in
Tyre and Beirut, in Nabatiyeh and Sidon, hundreds of
thousands of men, women and children seek refuge. As
they flee, they risk the indiscriminate wrath of an
enemy driven by an existential mania that can not be
assuaged, only stopped. Ambulances are struck,
humanitarian relief convoys are struck, UN observers
are struck. Warning leaflets are dropped from the sky
urging people to abandon their homes, just as they
were in 1996, 1982, 1978, 1967 and 1948. The
ultimately impossible decision in Gaza and Lebanon
today is: where does a refugee go?

...The US and Britain are claiming that no ceasefire is
possible until there is an international force that
will implement United Nations resolution 1559. Yet the
Lebanese prime minister issued a seven-point plan in
Rome last week, consistent with international law and
agreed by all elected parties in Lebanon (including
Hezbollah), that had as its first requirement an
immediate and unconditional ceasefire. It is
implementation of the dozens of UN resolutions that
Israel has flouted for more than 50 years with
protection from the US - and now from Britain - that
will stop this conflict.

...Previous wars did not give Israel the security it
claims to seek, and nor will this one...It is producing
generations of refugees who will also resist... Israel
has failed to understand that it cannot expel a people
and call itself the victim; that it cannot conquer its
neighbors and treat any and all resistance to that
conquest as terrorism; that it cannot arm itself as a
regional superpower and annihilate the institutional
fabric of two peoples without incurring the fury of
their children in the years that follow.

(Karma Nabulsi, Arab Media Watch advisor, teacher of
politics and international relations at Oxford
University, and author of Traditions of War:
Occupation, Resistance and the Law, 2 August 2006, The
Guardian)

War crimes and Lebanon
Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Howard Zinn,
Ken Loach, John Berger, Arundhati Roy
(The Guardian Thursday August 3, 2006)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1835915,00.html

The US-backed Israeli assault on Lebanon has left the
country numb, smoldering and angry. The massacre in
Qana and the loss of life is not simply
"disproportionate". It is, according to existing
international laws, a war crime.

The deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon’s
social infrastructure by the Israeli air force was
also a war crime, designed to reduce that country to
the status of an Israeli-US protectorate. The attempt
has backfired. In Lebanon itself, 87% of the
population now supports Hezbollah’s resistance,
including 80% of Christian and Druze and 89% of Sunni
Muslims, while 8% believe the US supports Lebanon. But
these actions will not be tried by any court set up by
the "international community" since the US and its
allies that commit or are complicit in these appalling
crimes will not permit it.

It has now become clear that the assault on Lebanon to
wipe out Hezbollah had been prepared long before.
Israel’s crimes had been given a green light by the US
and its loyal British ally, despite the opposition to
Blair in his own country. In short, the peace that
Lebanon enjoyed has come to an end, and a paralyzed
country is forced to remember a past it had hoped to
forget. The state terror inflicted on Lebanon is being
repeated in the Gaza ghetto, while the "international
community" stands by and watches in silence.
Meanwhile, the rest of Palestine is annexed and
dismantled with the direct participation of the US and
the tacit approval of its allies.

We offer our solidarity and support to the victims of
this brutality and to those who mount a resistance
against it. For our part, we will use all the means at
our disposal to expose the complicity of our
governments in these crimes. There will be no peace in
the Middle East while the occupations of Palestine and
Iraq and the temporarily "paused" bombings of Lebanon
continue.

International Action against the Israeli Attack on
Lebanon
Edinburgh International Film Festival cancelled an
official Israeli Embassy sponsorship of their
programmed and returned the Israeli cheque following a
huge public outcry over Israeli Embassy involvement.
Writers, actors and members of the public inundated
the organizers with mail and phone calls demanding the
financial support from the Israeli Embassy be ended
and warning that they would boycott Edinburgh’s
flagship event if this were not done. (Press release
by Edinburgh Stop the War Coalition)
Global Exchange ( http://www.globalexchange.org/ ),
member of United for Peace and Justice and US Campaign
to End the Israeli Occupation calls for a Week of
National Action in the United States. They called upon
their members to Congress and the White House every
day and participate in the Emergency Week of Action
between August 7th and 11th. Three main issues they
will raise to members of Congress: 1. Support
Kucinich & Jackson-Lee Resolutions for Immediate
Cease-Fire & Just Peace. 2. Stop U.S. Support for
Israel’s Attacks on Gaza and Lebanon 3. End Weapons
Deliveries to Israel Now

Amnesty International ( http://www.amnesty.org/ ) is
organizing a global vigil on Monday, August 7, calling
for an immediate and effective ceasefire to the
conflict in Israel and Lebanon and to stand in
solidarity with the victims and survivors on both
sides. The message of the vigil is: 1) to call for a
ceasefire, 2) to demand that all governments stop the
supply of arms to the conflict and 3) to stand in
solidarity with the victims and survivors from both
sides of this conflict.