Word: hizballah
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...conflict between Israel and Hizballah guerillas in South Lebanon has raged on for the last week, the calls have increased to put some kind of international peacekeeping force on the ground. But in fact, just such a force is already in place - and has been for nearly three decades - to help protect and provide for residents of this war-racked corner of the Middle East. However, the performance of UNIFIL (for United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), has not inspired much confidence that a mediating force can do much to help...
...transport casualties safely, UNIFIL would normally step in. But on Wednesday, the one planned UNIFIL convoy from Tyre, intended to rotate some observers in a border outpost, was cancelled due to heavy fighting. Israeli troops crossed the border in three places south of Tyre, where they clashed with Hizballah guerrillas...
...South Lebanon is no stranger to bloodshed and violence. The last time Israel launched a punishing offensive against its Hizballah enemies was in April 1996 with Operation Grapes of Wrath. In that two-week campaign of air strikes, some 170 Lebanese civilians were killed. But that grim figure was reached after only five days of Operation Just Desserts, and the evidence of the destruction wrought on this hilly region of citrus orchards, tobacco fields and olive groves can be found in the teeming corridors of the Jabel Amel hospital...
...This is much worse than 1996," says Doctor Ahmad Mrowe, the director of the hospital. "Back then we were receiving old people and resistance fighters. This time it's almost all women and children. We haven't seen one resistance man," he adds, referring to Hizballah guerrillas. He said that the hospital has received 196 casualties, including 25 dead. "We don't need democracy," he says. "We just want to live." The basement of the hospital is packed with casualties and their anxious relatives who have fled their homes from neighboring villages to sleep on thin mattresses in the corridors...
...insists that his engagement with Hamas, and his relationship with Iran and Syria, creates channels of communication that can help solve problems. At the G-8 summit, he made a great show of using these channels, pledging serious efforts to set free the Israeli soldiers captured by Hamas and Hizballah and help end missile attacks on Israel - conveniently avoiding the fact that Russia is the major supplier of missiles and related technology to Iran and Syria, who in turn supply Hizballah...