Posted by
Dawnsblood on Tuesday, January 09, 2007 7:00:15 PM
Michael
makes his way into S. Lebanon with a pair of guides and a friend from a news magazine. The pictures he posts are eerie and dark but the responsibility is all Hezbollah's. If you want to know what happened in southern Lebanon during the war
I suggest you read on. A small taste:
Israel may have over-reacted in July and selected targets (the milk
factory, bridges in the north, etc.) that should not have been hit. But
the stark scene on the hill of Maroun al-Ras demonstrated that the
Israeli military did not bomb indiscriminately as many have claimed.
Unlike Hezbollah, the Israelis are able to hit what they want and they
don’t shoot at everything. That mosque wouldn’t be standing if they
dropped bombs and artillery randomly in the villages.
“My mother is from Deir Mimas,” Said said. “In July Hezbollah
brought their weapons out of the caves and valleys and into the
village. My family has a small house there that was burned during the
war.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Eh,” Said said. “It’s okay. It is fixed now. Anyway, at first
Hezbollah fired their missiles from groves of olive trees. Then they
got hit by the Israelis. So they moved into Deir Mimas because the
other nearby option was Kfar Kila. Hezbollah didn’t want the Shia
villages hit, so they moved into Christian villages instead.”
That sounded right. I recently saw Kfar Kila from the Israeli side. The town is literally right on
the border, only twenty feet or so from the fence next to the Israeli
town of Metulla. I saw no damage whatsoever in Kfar Kila – and this was
one day before the end of the war – but I did hear machine gun fire in
the streets ominously close to where I was standing.
You really should go and look,
if only for the pictures.