So when does Israel stop?
The International Committee of the Red Cross and other international aid agencies cited growing concern over the number of Lebanese civilians being displaced by the Israeli air campaign, particularly in the hard-hit villages and towns of southern Lebanon. The number forced to leave their homes by Wednesday was estimated at 500,000 in a country with a population of 4 million.[...]
In Tyre, aid officials said estimated that some 12,000 residents remained caught in a worsening humanitarian crisis. Food stocks were dwindling and medicine was in short supply. For days, electricity and water have been cut. Many residents feared that roads leading out were too dangerous to travel. Others headed for Beirut, flying white flags from their car antennas or sunroofs.
"If you don't die of something from Israel, you're going to die of sickness, food or thirst," said Katya Taleb, 26, who gathered Wednesday with hundreds of others at the beachfront Tyre Rest House, seeking shelter and hoping for evacuation.
I have plenty of sympathy for their unwillingness to allow Hezbollah's aggression to go unchallenged, but to displace 500,000 civilians in a futile effort to bomb a diffuse terrorist group out of existence demonstrates extreme myopia and courts questions of cruelty. No one believes Hezbollah will actually cease to exist after Israel finishes pounding Lebanon -- they will reconstitute, and they will find their recruits in the froth of despair and hatred comprised when hundreds of thousands of middle class innocents find their their livelihoods destroyed, their homes rubble, and their new residences refugee camps. Israel, who's already seen attacks and terrorist sympathizers spring from Palestinian refugee camps should know better. And even if they have a tactical disagreement, their own sense of justice should confine their vengeance to some rough approximation of the guilty.
There's been some talk about how the sustained deployment is radicalizing once-sympathetic Lebanese. Less covered, but true in my experience, is that the ferocity and seeming indiscriminate nature of the counterattack is discomfiting and disappointing their Western supporters as well. At a point, saying "Israel, right or wrong" is really just a way to avoid saying, "Israel, wrong."
