Blair calls for UN force in Lebanon
Tony Blair today led calls for an international stabilisation force to be deployed in southern Lebanon to halt the conflict between Israel and Lebanese Hizbullah militants.
The prime minister, speaking after private talks with the United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said: “The only way we are going to have a cessation of violence is if we have an international force deployed into that area.”
The Finnish foreign minister, Erkki Tuomoija, whose country holds the revolving EU presidency, said in Brussels that the EU or UN may deploy such a force to end the conflict. A small UN contingent has been in the area for many years.
However, Israel said it was too early to talk about a new international military force being deployed in southern Lebanon to monitor the border area once hostilities with Hizbullah guerrillas ceased.
Asked about a new international military presence, the Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said: “I don’t think we’re at that stage yet. We’re at the stage where we want to be sure that Hizbullah is not deployed at our northern border.”
Some analysts believe that a major ground invasion of southern Lebanon is being considered by Israel.
Israeli fighters continued to bomb Lebanon today after warplanes extended the bombing to the north of the country overnight.
Planes and artillery struck 60 targets overnight, Israel said, and there were reports that at least 23 people had been killed in Lebanon in that strike.
At least 140 Lebanese civilians have died since the violence broke out last week after Hizbullah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. At least 12 Israeli civilians have died in Hizbullah rocket attacks on Israel, as well as 12 Israeli soldiers and sailors.
guardian.co.uk
As the bombs rain down, a refugee crisis unfolds on the streets of Beirut
‡ Thousands of homeless or trapped Shia seek shelter
‡ Fleeing families killed in Israeli attacks on roads
Lebanon was on the brink of a humanitarian crisis yesterday as Israeli forces continued their bombardment and thousands of Shia Muslims either fled their homes or found themselves trapped.
In Beirut, where Israel has dropped leaflets from the air urging residents to leave the teeming suburbs controlled by Hizbullah, schools are being overwhelmed as families set up temporary homes in classrooms. Hundreds of others are sleeping out in the open.
Among them were 600 homeless Shia, 70% of them children, who spent Saturday night in Sanayeh park, not far from the city centre. Police were turning journalists away yesterday. “No photographs,” one said.
Left-wing rally: Negotiate with Hamas, Hizbullah
Some 1,000 protestors joined Sunday evening in a rally in Tel Aviv to protest the IDF strikes in Southern Lebanon. Police have arrested three of the protesters claiming they were holding a demonstration without a permit.
The protesters, who marched from Hen Boulevards toward King George Street, chanted slogans such as “Olmert agreed with Bush: War and occupation.” “Stop the war monstrosity,” and “Say no to the brutal bombardments on Gaza.” They also accused Defense Minister Amir Peretz of murdering children in Gaza, and recited: “Peretz, don’t worry, we’ll be seeing you at The Hague.”
An Interview with George Galloway
… I am dismally aware of the extent to which the blood of Palestinians is not worth anything like the blood of Israelis, still less the blood of Westerners. A good case in point was on the BBC’s Question Time when every single member of the panel knew the name of the Israeli occupation soldier ‘kidnapped’ by the resistance, and they felt they had to pay endless sympathies to his family.
I found myself screaming at the television: “Can any of you name a single Palestinian victim, just say in the last 12 days, when 24 Palestinians, mostly women and children were killed by Israel in bomb, shell and rocket attacks?” No one knows the names of these victims, no one describes the Palestinian leaders who were kidnapped and languish in Israeli dungeons. All were seized in exactly the same way as this Israeli solder was seized. This is a double standard that does not occur to most people, but is endlessly burrowing away in my mind.
MOORE: I guess you’d say that the lack of recognition for the democratically elected Hamas Government is another example of Western double standards.
GALLOWAY: That is just one of many contradictions. Palestine is the only Arab country in which there is a free vote, and in it the Islamist party won, and the response from external powers was that the party that won should immediately scrap the policy on which it won the election and adopt the policy of the party it defeated. When they refused to do this, an economic and political siege was imposed on the entire kidnapped Palestinian population, because of their temerity at electing politicians of whom the West does not approve.
Behind The Crisis: How Iran is wielding its influence to wage a stealthy war against Israel and America-msnbc
…But battles and battle lines are rarely if ever simple in the Middle East. Nasrallah knows that. So do the Israelis, who saw hidden hands behind the Lebanese and Palestinian militants. They accused Syria, which harbors the Hamas leadership in exile and has a longstanding alliance with Hizbullah in Lebanon, of complicity. But they also saw the long arm of their ultimate enemy, Iran, the creator of Hizbullah, a patron of Hamas, the ally of Syria, the provider of rockets that struck 22 miles deep into Israel last week and a missile that crippled an Israeli warship. Iran, developer of nuclear technology and eventually, perhaps, nuclear weapons.
In an exclusive interview with NEWSWEEK’s Richard Wolffe, President George W. Bush said he thinks those suspicions are legitimate: “There’s a lot of people who believe that the Iranians are trying to exert more and more influence over the entire region and the use of Hizbullah is to create more chaos to advance their strategy.” He called that “a theory that’s got some legs to it as far as I’m concerned.”
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