Pictures Showing The Cowardly Hezbollah

UPDATES BELOW REGARDING THE BOMBING IN LEBANON

Many on the left have been saying that the fact that Hezbollah fires its missiles from populated civilian areas is just untrue. They blame Israel for the deaths of the Lebanese civilians since they just do not believe that terrorists would use innocent women and children for cover.

Australias Herald-Sun has obtained photo's smuggled out of Beirut that prove Israel right. Photo's of Hezbollah fighters dressed in civilian clothes firing from anti-aircraft guns smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood:

THIS is the picture that damns Hezbollah. It is one of several, smuggled from behind Lebanon's battle lines, showing that Hezbollah is waging war amid suburbia.

The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons.

Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.

The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

Even more damning:

The images include one of a group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun metres from an apartment block with sheets hanging out on a balcony to dry.

Others show a militant with AK47 rifle guarding no-go zones after Israeli blitzes.

Another depicts the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket in the middle of a residential block blown up in an Israeli air attack.

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut and did not wish to be named said he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

"Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets," he said.

"Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated.

"It was carnage. Two innocent people died in that incident, but it was so lucky it was not more."

They are doing what they do best, killing innocent people. Their own people this time but it obviously matters not to them since they continue to do it. They must believe Israel will back off…..hopefully they will not get their wish. This fight is for not only the survival of Israel but its another front on the war on terror.

The NYT's has a similiar story:

The refugees from southern Lebanon spilled out of packed cars into the dark street here Thursday evening, gulping bottles of water and squinting in the glare of the headlights to find family members and friends. Many had not eaten in days. Most had not had clean drinking water for some time. There were wounded swathed in makeshift dressings, and a baby just 16 days old.

But for some of the Christians who had made it out in this convoy, it was not just privations they wanted to talk about, but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah – a contrast to the Shiites, who make up a vast majority of the population in southern Lebanon and broadly support the militia.

"Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets," said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. "They are shooting from between our houses."

"Please,'' he added, "write that in your newspaper."

[…]Many Christians from Ramesh and Ain Ebel considered Hezbollah's fighting methods as much of an outrage as the Israeli strikes. Mr. Amar said Hezbollah fighters in groups of two and three had come into Ain Ebel, less than a mile from Bint Jbail, where most of the fighting has occurred. They were using it as a base to shoot rockets, he said, and the Israelis fired back.

One woman, who would not give her name because she had a government job and feared retribution, said Hezbollah fighters had killed a man who was trying to leave Bint Jbail.

"This is what's happening, but no one wants to say it" for fear of Hezbollah, she said.

But still the left persists in their defense of appeasing terrorists such as these, blaming it all on Israel.

UPDATE 07/30/06 1000hrs PST

So we all wake up to the fact that more civilians have died in Lebanon due to Hezbollah’s continuing use of hiding behind them:

Israeli missiles hit several buildings in a southern Lebanon village as people slept Sunday, killing at least 56, most of them children, in the deadliest attack in 19 days of fighting.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed “great sorrow” for the airstrikes but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas for using the area to launch rockets at Israel, and said he would not halt the army’s operation.

[…]Israeli said it targeted Qana because it was a base for hundreds of rockets launched at Israeli, including 40 that injured five Israelis on Sunday. Israel said it had warned civilians several days before to leave the village.

“One must understand the Hezbollah is using their own civilian population as human shields,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry official Gideon Meir. “The Israeli defense forces dropped leaflets and warned the civilian population to leave the place because the Hezbollah turned it into a war zone.”

The interesting thing here is that Hezbollah sends hundreds of rockets into civilian neighborhoods inside Israel everyday. Where is the denunciation of these attacks? Why is it only the Israeli’s get denounced?

It’s sad that children have died but if Hezbollah would start fighting like men instead of cowards hiding behind these children then this loss would never had happened.

It’s also sad that the only ones being blamed for the loss of innocent lives is Israel, instead of terrorists……incredible.

By the way, this is a little off topic but check out this video of a UN ambulance helping to hide terrorists…..you have to see it to believe it:

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UPDATE II 1010hrs PST

Just found this video from Fox News which shows rockets being fired from the same apartment building which was hit today in Lebanon: (Best viewed in Firefox, IE reduces the image)

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Here is the whole video with no sound:

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The left is so quick to pass around the “war crime” sticker but no word from them yet on this, all we get from the left and our MSM is the “outrage” over this attack by Israel.

Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel from civilian apartment buildings is a WAR CRIME…..Hell, Israel dropped leaflets telling all the civilians to leave. What more can they do? They cannot allow this firing base to continue to exist, plain and simple.

UPDATE III 1035hrs PST

Check out this news report quoting Hezbollah as saying they have been preparing for this war for six years:

Qassem admitted Hezbollah had been preparing for conflict since Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000. He claimed it had not been convinced that Israel’s aspirations in Lebanon were over, despite its withdrawal.

“The fact that Israel kept the Shebaa Farms (a strip of disputed land on the border), held on to the prisoners and its continuous reconnaissance flights over Lebanon were all indications of its aggressive intentions towards Lebanon,” he said.

Hezbollah’s stockpiling of arms and preparation of numerous bunkers and tunnels over the past six years have been key to its resistance. “If it was not for these preparations Lebanon would have been defeated within hours,” he said.

I also found this video purportedly of a Hezbollah gun crew hiding inside a civilian house:

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UPDATE IV 1045hrs PST

Vital Perspective has his hands on one of the leaflets dropped at this apartment complex bombed today:

Israel dropped leaflets warning residents that airstrikes were on the way. We have obtained the text of that leaflet which was dropped by the Israelis as well as a scanned image of what one of these leaflets looks like:

“To all citizens south of the Litani River Due to the terror activities being carried out against the State of Israel from within your villages and homes, the IDF is forced to respond immediately against these activities, even within your villages. For your safety! We call upon you to evacuate your villages and move north of the Litani River.”

State of Israel

UPDATE V 1055hrs PST

Tom Shanker writes about the fact that this new front on the War on Terror has taught US military planners much about the coming fight:

“We are now into the first great war between nations and networks,” said John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a leading analyst of net warfare. “This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.”

In a talk that Mr. Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational. This makes them effective, and hard to track and target.

A net war differs from all previous wars, which were about brute confrontation of forces, mass on mass — what Matthew Arnold called bloody contests of “ignorant armies” meeting on the “darkling plain.”

Net war is the battle of the many, organized in small units, against conventional militaries that organize their many into large units. These network forces are not ignorant. They are computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.

“The pooling of information is certainly a characteristic of these kinds of insurgencies,” said Daniel Benjamin, who served on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton before joining the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In Iraq, for example, the lessons on how to build and place I.E.D.’s have spread and been assimilated in record time. There is certain to be the insurgent equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation on Hezbollah’s successes that will make the rounds of the insurgent and terrorist Web sites.”

Hezbollah spent the last six years dispersing about 12,000 rockets across southern Lebanon in a vast web of hidden caches, all divided into local zones with independent command.

“They dug tunnels. They dug bunkers, they established communications systems — cellphones, radios, even runners to carry messages that aren’t susceptible to eavesdropping,” said one military officer with experience in the Middle East. “They divided southern Lebanon into military zones with many small units that operate independently, without the need for central control.”

To attack Israel, Hezbollah dispersed its fighters with no distinguishing markings or uniforms or vehicles. Fighters access the weapons only at the moment of attack, and then disappear. This makes preventing the attack all but impossible. It is a significant modernization of classic guerrilla hit-and-run tactics. Israel has been unable to significantly degrade the numbers of rockets because of this approach. Hezbollah fired more than 100 a day at the start of this conflict; they are still firing more than 100 a day, despite Israeli bombardment.

Hezbollah still possesses the most dangerous aspects of a shadowy terror network. It abides by no laws of war as it attacks civilians indiscriminately. Attacks on its positions carry a high risk of killing innocents. At the same time, it has attained military capabilities and other significant attributes of a nation-state. It holds territory and seats in the Lebanese government. It fields high-tech weapons and possesses the firepower to threaten the entire population of a regional superpower, or at least those in the northern half of Israel.

While Hezbollah has emerged as a new kind of threat, it cannot be forgotten that the network is a creation of Iran, with the support of Syria, and both countries know they cannot attack Israel — or American interests — directly. The Bush administration is debating internally whether the best course of action against Iran and Syria is to negotiate with them, isolate them, or do something stronger.

Hezbollah’s success in surviving Israeli bombardment poses an immediate implication for American military planning as the United States figures out what to do about Iran, either as part of an effort to halt its nuclear ambitions or a broader offensive with political goals, like regime change.

[…]Also of great interest in the military threat of these networks is that some of the most significant technologies once held in near-monopoly control by the American military are now available at L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer and Sharper Image, among them high-quality night-vision goggles and global positioning devices.

“We are in a world today where we have a non-state actor using all the tools of weaponry,” from drone aircraft to rockets to computer hacking, said P.W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in the impact of new technologies on national security. “That’s what this new 21st-century warfare is going to look like. We have now entered an era where non-states or quasi-states do a lot better militarily than states do.” He added, “I don’t think we have answers yet for what to do.”

UPDATE VI 1110hrs PST

Now this is interesting:

Senior IDF officers told reporters a short time ago that there is a contradiction in the timing of the bombing of the village of Kana and reports of the explosion that killed more than 50 civilians and set off world-wide condemnation of Israel. Air Force Commander Amir Eshel left open the possibility that Hizbullah terrorists blew up the building or that an unknown cause set off explosives which were stored in the structure.

He explained that recorded information shows that Israeli Air Force planes bombed the building between midnight and 1 a.m. and that the next attack at 7:30 a.m. was up to 500 yards away. He said reports of the killing of civilians came around 8 a.m. “It is not clear what happened” between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m., he said.

Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan pointed out that Hizbullah terrorists have fired more than 150 rockets from the village of Kana since the beginning of the war.

So we are to believe it took the Lebanese 6 hours to get help to this building? Or did they wait for it to collapse for a better media event?

My bet is on option 2.

UPDATE VII 1145hrs PST

Fox is reporting that some Hezbollah cheerleaders have stormed the UN building in Gaza:

Protesters angry over an Israeli airstrike that killed more than 50 people broke into the main U.N. building in the Lebanese capital Sunday, burning U.N. and American flags and damaging some offices.

Around 5,000 protesters massed outside the empty building and chanted anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans.

Dozens of angry demonstrators, carrying yellow flags of the militant Hezbollah group and chanting “We are all resistance!” climbed over a two-meter high fence outside the United Nations office in downtown Beirut. They broke windows on the ground floor and burned a U.N. flag.

Based on the time discrepancies about the bombing I would not put it past Hezbollah staged this whole thing, including the wholesale slaughter of it’s own….all to create a whirlwind of anger against Israel.

UPDATE VIII 1235hrs PST

Good news:

The United States is expected to block a United Nations Security Council resolution denouncing Israel for the killing of about 60 civilians in the Lebanese village of Kana Sunday morning. Israel has said that the explosion in the building that caused the deaths may have been caused by stockpiles of Hizbullah weapons and not by the Israeli attack.

The Council is taking a recess at this hour and will resume its meeting in two hours.

UPDATE IX 1245hrs PST

Here is a video from Ynet that shows more proof of the cowardly Hezbollah tactic of hiding amongst civilians: (Best viewed in Firefox, IE reduces the image)

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An IDF investigation has found that the building in Qana struck by the Air Force fell around eight hours after being hit by the IDF.

“The attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear,” Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the incidents at Qana.

Eshel and the head of the IDF’s Operational Branch, Major General Gadi Eisnkot said the structure was not being attacked when it collapsed, at around 8:00 in the morning.

The IDF believes that Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse.

Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed. “It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.

“I’m saying this very carefully, because at this time I don’t have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap,” he added.

Eshel said that an additional attack took place at 7:30 in the morning, but added that other buildings were targeted. “This was an attack on three buildings 460 meters away from the structure we are talking about. Four bombs were dropped and all of them are documented by the planes’ cameras. They all struck their targets. In addition, we carried out a filming sortie that photographed the village during the afternoon showing that the three targeted buildings we struck. We have verification of strikes on the building and that the bombs reached their targets,” Eshel said.

“An attack that took place at two in the morning struck two targets, both of them 400 meters away from the building (that collapsed). They were also destroyed. The attack between 12 and 1 a.m. struck the area of the affected house, and there were accurate strikes on the target. We are asking the question â€“ what happened between 1 in the morning and 8 in the morningâ€¦ we understand this building was attacked between 12 and 1 in the morning, seven hours before it was seriously damaged,” he said.

Brigadier General Eshel explained that “since the start of fighting in Lebanon 150 rockets from a very high number of rocket launchers have been fired from the village and its surrounding areas, at a number of sites in the State of Israel. Within the village itself we have located a diverse range of activities connected to firing of rockets, beginning from forces commanding this operation â€“ because such an operation needs ongoing command to direct it â€“ and logistical sites that serve this end.”

“From this village rockets are fired almost every day across Israel. The operation carried out overnight is an extension of operations that didn’t start last night but before, and during this night we struck a number of targets in the village. All of the targets are being meticulously sifted,” Eshel added.

UPDATE X 1315hrs PST

The Lebanese Army has fired on Israeli helicopters:

The Lebanese army opened fire on Israeli helicopters trying to land near a town in the Bekaa valley, preventing them from setting down, Lebanese security sources and witnesses said.

The four helicopters appeared to be trying to land Israeli soldiers near the town of Yammouni, they said.

The helicopters flew away before Israeli warplanes launched air raids on the area, the sources said.

Btw…Pam from Atlas Shrugs just arrived in Israel and will be blogging from there, check it out.

UPDATE XI 1415hrs PST

Fox News is reporting that Israel has agreed to stop bombing campaign for 48 hrs to investigate the bombing. If true this is bad news, give Hezbollah time to regroup.

UPDATE XII 1417hrs PST

Just confirmed on CNN:

Israel agrees to suspend air operations over southern Lebanon for 48 hours to investigate strike on Qana, a U.S. State Dept. spokesman said.

What baloney.

Jennifer Griffin on Fox just said it’s a 24hr stoppage. Plus that it’s a stoppage for humanitarian reasons, not for an investigation….obviously the story needs to be fleshed out a bit.

UPDATE XIII 1435hrs PST

Ok, it appears to be both 24 and 48hrs:

Israel has agreed to suspend its aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon for 48 hours, effective immediately, to allow for an investigation into Sunday’s bombing that killed 54 civilians, a U.S. State Department official said early Monday.

Israel will also coordinate with the United Nations to allow a 24-hour window for residents of southern Lebanon to leave the area if they wish, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told a briefing in Jerusalem.

UPDATE XIV 1625hrs PST

Interesting post on a board called Flyer Talk from someone inside Israel:

An interesting point was raised on Israel television today. While Hizbollah managed to fire over 140 rockets at Israel today, almost all of them were into the Galilee panhandle.

The area around my kibbutz, which was the scene of the heaviest fighting for much of the war, received a few of these rockets but much less than we had been getting used to.

Haifa, apparently, has not been hit for five days.

All of this would indicate that Hizbollah has been pushed back quite a bit and/or its rocket facilities close to the border put out of commission. The Galilee panhandle, which extends much further north than the rest of the border, may be the only easy target Hizbollah has left.

On another, perhaps related, issue for the last week or so there have been two temporary army camps which I have been watching grow. Each was of battalion size (400 to 1000 men) and closer to the higher end.

This morning, when I drove to Rosh Pina, I could see both of them. The same was true this afternoon when I drove to Benyamina.

When I drove back in the early evening they were gone.

All that was left in each camp were a few supplies which had been packaged up, a small number of soldiers to guard them, and one or two vehicles.

I wasn’t going to mention this on line as I don’t consider it a wise idea to give any indication of troop movements but I just watched on Israel television as they showed pictures of Israeli tanks lining up along the border. The reporter said that they may well be moving into Lebanon in force — possibly as early as tonight. Given that aired announcement, my letting you know about these two camps would not be violating security.

The fighting, it seems, is still far from over.

Interesting but Haifa has indeed been hit:

08:47 Katyusha rockets land in Haifa; no injuries reported (Haaretz)

12:00 Haifa hospital reportedly hit by rocket (Sky News)

But it does appear that the ability of Hezbollah to hit deep inside Israel has been degraded somewhat. With this ceasefire I doubt it will remain that way for long.

Other's Blogging:

Based on the time discrepancies about the bombing I would not put it past Hezbollah staged this whole thing, including the wholesale slaughter of it’s ownâ€¦.all to create a whirlwind of anger against Israel.

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