The Israeli government’s frequent claim that it carries out targeted bombing of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists is stretching credibility, with pointless civilian casualties and attacks on UN peacekeepers suggesting an urgent need to recalibrate its approach.
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In the past week, Israeli airstrikes have hit a hospital tent site in central Gaza and killed at least four people, wounded UN peacekeepers in several attacks in southern Lebanon, and killed 22 people in a mountain village in northern Lebanon.
Amid growing collateral damage, the wider international community is losing patience. There are increasing calls for a ceasefire, and in a telling move, the US has warned Israel to increase the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza within the next 30 days or risk losing access to weapons funding.
The Herald’s Matthew Knott and Kate Geraghty report from Aitou, on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, that the Maronite Christian village is far from the predominantly Shiite Muslim Hezbollah strongholds that have come under intense Israeli bombardments over the past three weeks. But a family who fled the bombing in the south were visited by a Hezbollah official on Tuesday. A bomb arrived shortly after and killed nearly everybody in their house.
Villagers and the Red Cross sift through the rubble of a house flattened by an Israeli air strike in Aitou, Lebanon.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Tripoli resident Ihab Matar, an Australian citizen and a member of Lebanon’s parliament, told Knott and Geraghty that Hezbollah was not going away, but had made a “terrible mistake” firing rockets into northern Israel last year: “What does the war have to do with us?”
Hezbollah, which has been firing rockets into Israel since the current war started, says it is acting in solidarity with Palestinians fighting against Israel in Gaza. Four Israeli soldiers were killed and 58 injured in a recent Hezbollah drone strike near Haifa in northern Israel. The group has vowed to continue pushing deeper into Israel with its attacks.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his nation would “continue to hit Hezbollah mercilessly in all parts of Lebanon”. But clearly the US is fed up with Netanyahu’s intransigence. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said: “There are specific strikes that it would be appropriate for Israel to carry out. But when it comes to the scope and nature of the bombing campaign that we saw in Beirut for the past few weeks, it’s something that we made clear to the government of Israel we had concerns with, and we were opposed to.”
Funding for Israel has long carried weight in US politics; since the war in Gaza began, the US has spent a record $26.7 billion on military aid to Israel. However, the US threat to withdraw access to weapons funding must surely give Netanyahu pause for thought.
The longer the Israel military persists with its policy of “targeted bombing”, the greater the propensity for the sorts of mistakes that kill the innocent. If the Netanyahu government needs another lesson to rethink its war gaming, here it is.
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