Over Three Hundred Dead Civilians in Lebanon

Three hundred dead civilians in Lebanon, untold thousands injured with no access to health care, 500,000 homeless. It's hard to imagine that this disruption and destruction of Lebanon was justified by the kidnapping of two soldiers. Clearly this was planned for a long time, and the kidnapping provided a pretext to act.
Don't get me wrong. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. It had been offered a chance to disarm and join the Lebanese government. It refused. It has stockpiled thousands of rockets and other weapons. Southern Lebanon would be occupied by Israelis if it wasn't for Hezbollah. Perhaps civilian lives would have been spared if that were a practical method in Israeli eyes.
The sad thing about it is that Hezbollah came to be after the Israeli invasion of 1982 targetting the PLO. Iranian Revolutionary Guards came to support and train the Shiite majority in southern Lebanon to defend themselves.
There is no sense in war. And there is no justification to this kind of war, for either party. War is only justified if there is no other choice. Targetting civilians violates all treaties and moral values. I'm astounded that the world stands by and shrugs, doing little more than chiding each side to show "restraint", when no one believes they will.
Welcome to the post 9/11 world.
WaPo

Israeli warplanes continued their punishing airstrikes across Lebanon on Wednesday, including for the first time striking Beirut's main Christian enclave and later bombing a bunker believed to be sheltering Hezbollah leaders. Ground troops meanwhile launched their most significant incursion so far into southern Lebanon, joining attacks that killed more than 50 Lebanese on the deadliest day since hostilities erupted eight days ago.


Hezbollah in return fired more than 100 rockets into northern Israel, hitting Haifa and, for the first time, Nazareth, where two Israeli Arab boys were killed.


[...]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 was estimated at 500,000 in a country with a population of 4 million.


[...]Siniora, in a televised appeal, said about 300 Lebanese had been killed by Israeli air raids over the past eight days. He called on foreign governments to come to Lebanon's aid, adding, "I hope you won't let us down."

Update: Finally the EU speaks up, after all the damage is done. Too little too late.
WaPo

European allies are particularly alarmed about the disproportionately high civilian death toll in Lebanon. They are also concerned that the U.S. position will increase tensions between the Islamic world and the West by fueling militants, playing into the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden and adding to the problems of the U.S.-led coalition force in Iraq.


[...]"The one thing that is guaranteed to send the Arab world and the Persian world over the edge is for the U.S. to be seen ultimately to be doing what they always believed -- to be fully in cahoots with Israel," said a European official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic relations. "The danger of allowing it to continue is that the United States is more and more despised. It's not like the U.S. had a good reputation within the region to start with."

This is winning the war on terror? Hardly. This is doing exactly what Osama predicted, and confirming Arab and Persian fears that the US is indeed the "Great Satan".