ZoneFlood

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]

From early BBC Reports:

 

Elderly, women and children were among those killed in the raid, which wrought destruction over a wide area. The BBC’s Fergal Keane at the scene saw two small boys pulled from the rubble.

The number of wounded appears small, he says - which indicates very few survived.

Reporters spoke of survivors screaming in grief and anger, as some scrabbled through the debris with bare hands.

“We want this to stop,” a villager shouted.

“May God have mercy on the children. They came here to escape the fighting.”