ZoneFlood

From AP:

Hezbollah guerrillas fired more 100 rockets at Israeli towns on Wednesday - raising the total since the start of the conflict to 3,333 - including several medium-range missiles that landed near the West Bank town of Jenin and south of the Israeli city of Afula, police said.

By mid-afternoon, the guerrillas had fired 132 rockets, but no casualties were immediately reported, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

Five of the rockets landed near a Palestinian town in the West Bank on Wednesday, Palestinian security officials said. There were no casualties.

From the Los Angeles Times:

As the Bush administration seeks to negotiate a diplomatic end to the fighting in the Middle East, it finds it has a strikingly weak hand.

The war in Iraq, a halting U.S. response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now the prolonged fighting in Lebanon and Israel have led to intense anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Alliances with longtime Arab friends are strained. And the U.S. lacks relations with two key regional players: Iran and Syria.

From the Independent:

Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets at towns across northern Israel on Sunday killing 10 reserve soldiers, according to reports.

The raid is the worst rocket attack on Israel since the violence began on July 12, rescue services said. Reports coming out of Israel indicate that those killed in the raid were reserve soldiers.

Germany’s Der Spiegal have more on the environmental disaster in Lebanon:

In an interview with the BBC, the ministry’s director general, Berj Hatjian, compared the oil slick to that caused by the Exxon Valdez tanker, “with 20,000 to 30,000 tons reaching the shoreline.” When the tanker sank off the coast of Alaska in 1989, 40,000 tons of oil were released into the sea. The result was the worst ever maritime environmental disaster. Hundreds of thousands of animals died, and because the oil spill could not be completely cleaned up animals are still being poisoned today.

The environmental impact of the current oil slick is not confined to Lebanon and risks spreading through the Mediterranean. The Regional Marine Pollution Emergency Response Center (Rempec), based in Malta, has already recorded the first traces of oil on the Syrian coast — confirming reports of contamination made by the port authority at Syria’s coastal town of Tartus. Environmental groups in Lebanon are also warning that the pollution could reach the coasts of Turkey and Cyprus.

The MyLeftWing website has done some good background research on the Wazzani Springs, including this nugget from DEBKAfile, which is written by former (and current?) Israeli intelligence officers:

Perhaps the most important gain from the crisis is Israel’s recovery of control over its main sources of water, the Wazzani springs in the divided Ghajar village.

Extremely large but instructive image map showing just how complete the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure has been. Click on the image.

The Bush administration may have badly miscalculated in insisting that any Mideast cease-fire be tied to long-term objectives. As the toll on Lebanese civilians has soared, even moderate Arab governments have turned into U.S. critics, and Hezbollah’s support has climbed across the region.

Bush’s most steadfast ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, joined the ranks of those expressing frustration after Israel’s Sunday bombing in the village of Qana that killed many civilians, most of them women and children. “We have to speed this whole process up,” Blair said. “This has got to stop and stop on both sides.”

Anger was brewing all across the Arab world as the U.N. Security Council prepared to take up the issue. Calls for an immediate cease-fire were coming from traditional U.S. allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

Even the democratically elected prime minister of Lebanon, Fuad Saniora — whose leadership Bush often salutes — insisted that talk of a larger peace package must wait until the firing stops. “We will not negotiate until the Israeli war stops shedding the blood of innocent people,” said Saniora. 

And where Saniora initially was critical of Hezbollah, he is now praising the militant group and its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, for helping to defend Lebanon.

These haven’t been good days for Bush’s goal of spreading democracy through the Middle East.

[Associated Press | July 31, 2006]

The U.N. Security Council called Sunday for an end to violence in Lebanon and expressed “extreme shock and distress” over Israel’s bombing of civilians in the village of Qana which killed 56 people, almost all of them women and children.

But the presidential statement, adopted unanimously by the 15-member council in an emergency session, stopped short of condemning the Israeli airstrike Sunday.

The council said it “strongly deplores this loss of innocent life and the killing of civilians in the present conflict” and called for the council to work without delay to adopt a resolution for a lasting settlement of the crisis.

“The Security Council expresses its extreme shock and distress at the shelling by the Israeli Defense Forces of a residential building in Qana, in southern Lebanon, which has caused the killing of dozens of civilians, mostly children, and injured many others,” it said.

Earlier Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had called again for an immediate halt to violence between Israel and Hezbollah, telling the council he was “deeply dismayed” that his previous appeals went unheeded.

He said the region was becoming impatient that the council, the most powerful U.N. body, had yet to issue a meaningful response after three weeks of war in Lebanon.

“Action is needed now before many more children, women and men become casualties of a conflict over which they have no control,” Annan said.

 [Associated Press | July 30, 2006]

Israel has agreed to a 48-hour halt in aerial activity over southern Lebanon, a U.S. official said Sunday amid widespread outrage over an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, when it leveled a building where they had taken shelter.

The announcement of the pause in overflights — made by State Department spokesman Adam Ereli — appeared to reflect American pressure on Israel. Ereli, who was in Israel with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said Israel has reserved the right to hit targets if it learns that attacks are being prepared against them. There was no immediate confirmation by Israeli officials.

The stunning bloodshed in Lebanon earlier on Sunday prompted Rice to cut short her Mideast mission and intensified world demands on Washington to back an immediate end to the fighting.

[Associated Press | July 30, 2006]

There’s a mix of public and private communications going on between Jerusalem and Damascus. Israel is trying to assure Damascus that they don’t plan or want to expand the war to include Syria. Syria is clearly worried that they will and has their troops on full alert. Israel is also warning in no uncertain terms that Syria getting involved will spark massive retaliation.

But there are persistent signs that the US is egging Israel on to bring the war to Damascus.

Here’s a clip from the end of an article today in the Jerusalem Post …

[Israeli] Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the United States that the US would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.

And there are other ominous indications of the US pressing for expansion the Israelis don’t seem to want.

There’s more here than the US not wanting a ceasefire before meaningful changes on the ground have happened in south Lebanon. Or at least I fear there is. This started because Israel doesn’t want and won’t tolerate a menacing militia building up on their northern border and lashing out with occasional raids or missile attacks, especially in the context of withdrawals from other areas.

[Talking Points Memo | July 30, 2006]