It also would complicate efforts in the United Nations to arrange a cease-fire and the creation of an international peacekeeping force to police southern Lebanon.

Senior military officials suggest that Israel may have little choice, however. On Thursday, one official admitted that the air war had failed to cripple Hizballah's ability to fire the short-range Katyusha rockets, which form the bulk of the militant Islamic group's aerial arsenal.

"They are still in full capacity to attack our villages," said the official, who briefed a small group of reporters about the military campaign against Hizballah on the condition of anonymity. "In order to stop the firing, we need a major ground offensive against the short-range rockets."

To prove the point, Hizballah fired at least 200 rockets, killing eight people across northern Israel. Four Israeli soldiers also were killed while fighting in southern Lebanon, making Thursday the deadliest day for Israel since fighting began July 12, after Hizballah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in northern Israel.

The military plans came as Hizballah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened to strike Tel Aviv if Israel continues bombarding Beirut.

"If you bomb our capital Beirut, we will bomb the capital of your usurping entity. ... We will bomb Tel Aviv," Nasrallah said in a taped address on Hizballah's TV station, Al Manar.

Nasrallah's latest speech suggests that Hizballah still has the ability to strike deeper into Israel. So far, Nasrallah has made good on every threat he's made, from hitting an Israeli naval vessel with a surprise missile attack off Lebanon's coast to striking Haifa, Israel's third-largest city.

Threats of a dramatic escalation from both sides added urgency to negotiations at the United Nations to force a quick cease-fire to end a conflict that's taken nearly 1,000 lives, created 900,000 Lebanese refugees and raised fears of a further-destabilized Middle East.

Since Hizballah sparked the conflict, 68 Israelis have been killed. Nearly two-thirds of those killed have been Israeli soldiers. In response, Israel unleashed a massive air campaign that's killed some 900 Lebanese, most of them civilians.

Until now, Israel has used a relatively limited number of artillery batteries, tanks and soldiers to push Hizballah back from the border.

Maj. Zvika Golan, who is with the Israeli military's Northern Command, said Thursday that Israel has taken control of 20 Lebanese villages along 4 miles of border and is planning to send more troops into Lebanon to create a buffer zone 9 miles deep.

On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz directed the military to prepare for an even more aggressive push that would reach 18 miles into southern Lebanon in a bid to drive Hizballah north of the Litani River.

That would put Israeli soldiers in control of 200 square miles of Lebanon where about 1 million people, many of them Shi'ite Muslims loyal or sympathetic to Hizballah, live.

It remains unclear whether the Israeli government, which earlier this week shelved one military plan for a wider ground operation, will approve this step. And the move could simply be saber-rattling intended to enhance Israel's bargaining position as diplomats at the United Nations try to reach a cease-fire deal that could be approved by early next week.

But the plan is a direct acknowledgement that the air campaign has failed to end the Hizballah rocket threat.

Regarding a report of the 'israeli' high court issuing a decree allowing the RADICAL zionist group permission to ascend the Temple Mount this action stands to thrust the Muslim world into an even greater state of outrage.

Police brace for clashes in Jerusalem over shrine visit

Wed Aug 2, 2:53 PM ET
JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israeli Police were bracing for clashes in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Jewish extremists who want to enter Islam's third holiest shrine, the Al-Aqsa mosque compound. On Tuesday, Israel's high court had authorised a request by far-right Jewish activists to enter the compound, which is also revered by Jews as the Temple Mount.

You cannot tell me that this is a 'matter-of-fact' happenstance event. This is a purposeful planned agitation meant to evoke a retaliatory response from the ENTIRE Muslim world as well as the Palestinians.

You might ask yourself, What is Tisha b' Av and what does it have to do with anything?

Tisha b'Av is the day that is celebrated or perhaps mourned as the day in which both the First and Second Temple were destroyed. First by Babylon, then later by Rome it fell on the EXACT same day centuries apart. BOTH times interestingly enough, for their DISOBEDIENCE. Talk about proving history repeats itself.

You can familiarize yourself with the event here.

With such a volatile subject why do you suppose that the media delayed reporting this event?

"We have been blessed with the ability to make this happen. We have been entrusted with the responsibility to see to it that it happens. The days of mourning the destruction of the second Temple have ended. The days of mourning our own lethargy regarding the Third Temple will soon be over. The time has arrived to effect the tikkun - the repair - and to establish the 9th of Av as a day of rejoicing forever. The choice is ours - if only we close ranks, and unite to make it happen."

"Blessed" IS NOT the word that should be used to describe this action. With the help of injecting 'dispensationalism' and the 'rapture' THEORY into the doctrine of 'christianity' it has helped to deflect a CURSE placed upon the disobedient radical element based on the possession of a state and an army as the means by which to OBTAIN salvation. Based on the CURSES the CREATOR places on the disobedient and rebellious in Dueteronomy 27:15-26 the ONLY way to see this as a 'blessing' is to IGNORE THE TRUTH.

Let's have a look at what the Torah says:

15. Whoever has a carved or metal statue [or perhaps maybe a bomb or DU tipped missile would qualify, HEY it might even look something like the one below], anything disgusting to the LORD that was made by a craftsman, and sets it up in secret will be CURSED.


17. Whoever MOVES HIS NEIGHBOR'S BOUNDARIES WILL BE CURSED.

18. Whoever deprives foreigners, orphans, or widows of justice will be CURSED.

There's more - but you get the point. Not much of a 'blessing' when you aren't following the rules. Number 17 &18 pretty much speaks for themselves.

The ONLY way for zionist 'israel' to achieve this perversion is to annihilate the Muslim population in the Middle East and any subsequent 'opposition' that might arise. Strangely enough that would seem to be the policy that they have in mind not only in the Middle East but in Europe and America as well. By demonizing Islam and its followers an aura of fear and mistrust has been cultivated which will eventually lead to an outcry to 'purge the world' of this 'threat' that they have created.

As long as people continue to listen to the hyped up reports of 'radical Islamists' their 'final solution' remains on schedule. Please tell me the last time the media reported a Muslim lobbyist corrupting American politicians or a Muslim 'public relations organization' (read spy agency) obtaining classified documents on American soil and being set free. Maybe an instance of Muslim influences writing foreign policy beneficial to them.

They have their sights set on rebuilding the Third Temple which the zionist 'christian' element believes will usher in the return of 'christ' to take away the 'faithful', but upon further examination it would seem that they would be hard pressed to 'remove the log from their own eye' or 'fit that camel through the eye of a needle' (especially when it is accompanied by an Abrahms tank and an Apache helicopter).

Someone better tell Hagee, Falwell, and Robertson there's a hole in their boat and she's taking on water.... FAST.

But he also threatened to fire rockets at Tel Aviv if central Beirut is attacked. Israeli warplanes have hit Hezbollah strongholds in southern Beirut suburbs repeatedly.

"If you strike Beirut, the Islamic Resistance will strike Tel Aviv and it is able to do so," Nasrallah said.

His comments came as Hezbollah rocket attacks reportedly killed eight people in northern Israel.

The deaths equal the most lethal barrage launched by the Lebanese-based militant group since fighting began more than three weeks ago. On July 16, eight people were killed when a rocket struck a train maintenance depot in Haifa.

At least 100 rockets hit northern Israel within minutes on Thursday. Three Israeli Arabs were killed in Maalot when they ran out of a car to seek shelter and were hit by a rocket, police said.

Meanwhile, four people were left dead after Katushya rockets hit Acre.

Earlier, residents in Beirut reported at least four explosions beginning at 2:30 a.m. local time in Damien, a Shia suburb to the south of the capital.

Lebanese television carried reports saying several buildings in a Hezbollah compound in the al-Ruweis neighbourhood of the capital were hit. The area, which includes a religious education centre, had been targeted by Israeli attacks several times before.

Hezbollah battles Israeli troops

Hezbollah fighters battled Israeli troops in two border areas around Taibeh and Aita al-Shaab. Three Israeli soldiers were killed when an anti-tank rocket hit their tank during fighting in Lebanon, while a fourth was killed in fighting in the town of Taibeh.

Ground fighting was intense along the border as Israeli troops moved "house by house, village by village," the CBC's Peter Armstrong reported from Jerusalem Thursday morning.

In one incident, a family of three was killed when an Israeli missile hit their two-storey house in Taibeh, Lebanese security officials said.

Israeli aircraft also attacked the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre and, for the second time in a day, opened fire on a bridge on the Syrian border in the region of Akkar.

About 10,000 Israeli troops are fighting in south Lebanon. Israeli officials say they have gained control of some 20 villages and towns along the southern border as they attempt to control an area six to eight kilometres into Lebanon and clear it of Hezbollah militants.

Israel has said its troops will remain in the area until an international force is put in place.

Israel is also continuing with its offensive in Gaza, which it launched after a soldier was captured.

On Thursday, witnesses said Israeli forces killed five Palestinian gunmen and three civilians, including a 10-year-old boy, in the Gaza Strip, Reuters reported.

Overseas, diplomats at the United Nations were said to be close to agreeing on a resolution calling for an immediate end to the fighting.

France circulates revised UN resolution

France circulated a revised UN resolution Thursday calling for an immediate halt to Israeli-Hezbollah fighting and spelling out conditions for a permanent ceasefire.

The new draft, which was sent to all 15 council members Wednesday night, calls "for an immediate cessation of hostilities" and emphasizes the need to find "a lasting solution to the current crisis between Israel and Lebanon."

And in Malaysia, members of the Organization of Islamic Conference held a special session to discuss the Mideast crisis. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the conference "an immediate ceasefire should be implemented," and said the ultimate solution should be the "elimination of the Zionist regime."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, meanwhile, told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera he expected a vote on a ceasefire to be held at the United Nations some time next week.

Israel also released findings into the bombing of the Lebanese village of Qana last Sunday in which a number of people were killed. The Israeli military admitted it made a mistake in the attack, but blamed Hezbollah for using civilians as human shields.

Initial reports put the death toll from the attack at 54. But Human Rights Watch has revised that figure to 28 people killed, with another 13 missing.

'We will not accept this and it will turn into a liberation war,' he added.

Rahhal told the Qatar-based satellite channel that Hezbollah wanted 'a halt to the aggression, in a broader sense than a ceasefire.'

'A halt to the aggression ... means a withdrawal of all occupation forces from our land. Otherwise a ceasefire would have no meaning,' he said.

Israel has made multiple incursions into Lebanese territory, involving thousands of troops, since launching a devatasting air and land assault on July 12.

The offensive began after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in an attempt to force a prisoner swap with the Jewish state.

On Tuesday, the largest military force was operating in Lebanon since Israel launched Operation Change of Direction on July 12 following the abduction of two soldiers in a cross-border Hizbullah attack. Paratroopers were operating in the village of Aita al-Sha'ab near Shtula, troops from the Golani Brigade were operating near the village of Al Adisya north of Metula, the Nahal Brigade was operating near the village of Ataybah close by and the Armored Corps 7th Brigade was operating near Maroun a-Ras.

Also Tuesday, thousands of IDF reservists were gearing up for the first incursion of reservists into southern Lebanon.

The IDF, a high-ranking source in the Northern Command said Tuesday, needed at least one more week to clear the area south of the Litani River of Hizbullah guerillas. The troops on the ground, he said, would not spend more than one-to-two days inside the Hizbullah strongholds and would operate at a faster pace than in the past.

"We will sweep through the area in an effort to exterminate the Hizbullah presence in the villages," the officer said, expressing hope that the objective would be achieved before the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire, expected to happen by the end of the week.

Signifying, however, that the IDF might also try to send troops north of the Litani, IAF fighter jets dropped tens of thousands of leaflets over villages north of the river on Tuesday calling on the residents to flee further north in anticipation of IDF operations in the area.

Brig.-Gen. Alon Friedman, deputy commander of the Northern Command, said Tuesday evening that while it would take until the end of the week for the IDF to take up positions within southern Lebanon, it could take over a month to destroy Hizbullah terror infrastructure in the area.

"If we will need to operate north of the Litani," Friedman said, "we will also operate there."
A high-ranking officer said the IDF was slightly disappointed with the progress of the ground operations in southern Lebanon and was hoping that the current incursion would bring the results. "We would have liked things to go faster," the officer said. "The enemy, however, had six years to get ready and infantry units can only go as fast as they can walk."-

Aug. 3, 2006 | The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board," but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.

Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint," to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the entire region.

In order to try to understand the neoconservative road map, senior national security professionals have begun circulating among themselves a 1996 neocon manifesto against the Middle East peace process. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," its half-dozen authors included neoconservatives highly influential with the Bush administration -- Richard Perle, first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East aide.

"A Clean Break" was written at the request of incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and intended to provide "a new set of ideas" for jettisoning the policies of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Instead of trading "land for peace," the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of Likud's terms, "peace for peace." Rather than negotiations with Syria, they proposed "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." They also advanced a wild scenario to "redefine Iraq." Then King Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni monarch would gain "control" of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them "wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria."

Netanyahu, at first, attempted to follow the "clean break" strategy, but under persistent pressure from the Clinton administration he felt compelled to enter into U.S.-led negotiations with the Palestinians. In the 1998 Wye River accords, concluded through the personal involvement of President Clinton and a dying King Hussein, the Palestinians agreed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from a portion of the occupied West Bank. Further negotiations, conducted by his successor Ehud Barak, that nearly settled the conflict ended in dramatic failure, but potentially set the stage for new ones.

At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show for force by one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean break" not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his father.

In the current Middle East crisis, once again, the elder Bush's wise men have stepped forward to offer unsolicited and unheeded advice. (In private they are scathing.) Edward Djerejian, a former ambassador to Israel and Syria and now the director of the James Baker Institute at Rice University, urged on July 23, on CNN, negotiations with Syria and Iran. "I come from the school of diplomacy that you negotiate conflict resolution and peace with your enemies and adversaries, not with your friends," he said. "We've done it in the past, we can do it again."

Charles Freeman, the elder Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, remarked, "The irony now is that the most likely candidate to back Hezbollah in the long term is no longer Iran but the Arab Shiite tyranny of the majority we have installed in Baghdad." Indeed, when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington in the last week of July he preceded his visit with harsh statements against Israel. And in a closed meeting with U.S. senators, when asked to offer criticism of Hezbollah, he steadfastly refused.

Richard Haass, the Middle East advisor on the elder Bush's National Security Council and President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director, and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, openly scoffed at Bush's Middle East policy in an interview on July 30 in the Washington Post: "The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction. The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights." When asked about the president's optimism, he replied, "An opportunity? Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?"

The same day that Haass' comments appeared Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor and still his close friend, published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post written more or less as an open letter to his erstwhile and errant protégé Condoleezza Rice. Undoubtedly, Scowcroft reflects the views of the former President Bush. Adopting the tone of an instructor to a stubborn pupil, Scowcroft detailed a plan for an immediate end to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and for restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "the source of the problem." His program is a last attempt to turn the president back to the ways of his father. If the elder Bush and his team were in power and following the Scowcroft plan, a cease-fire would have been declared. But Scowcroft's plan resembles that of the Europeans, already rejected by the Bush administration, and Rice is the one offering a counterproposal that has put diplomacy into a stall.

Despite Rice's shunning of the advice of the Bush I sages, the neoconservatives have made her a convenient target in their effort to undermine all diplomatic initiatives. "Dump Condi," read the headline in the right-wing Insight Magazine on July 25. "Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration's national security and foreign policy agenda," the article reported. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a member of the Defense Policy Board, was quoted: "We are sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things you're doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you'll get out of us is talk."

A month earlier, Perle, in a June 25 Op-Ed in the Washington Post, revived an old trope from the height of the Cold War, accusing those who propose diplomacy of being like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appease Hitler. "Condoleezza Rice," wrote Perle, "has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away. What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice's influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of and increasingly represents a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries."

Rice, agent of the nefarious State Department, is supposedly the enemy within. "We are in the early stages of World War III," Gingrich told Insight. "Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."

Confused, ineffectual and incapable of filling her office with power, Rice has become the voodoo doll that Powell was in the first term. Even her feeble and counterproductive gestures toward diplomacy leave her open to the harshest attacks from neoconservatives. Scowcroft and the Bush I team are simply ignored. The sustained assault on Rice is a means to an end -- restoring the ascendancy of neoconservatism.

Bush's rejection of and reluctance to embrace the peace process concluded with the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. This failure was followed by a refusal to engage Hamas, potentially splitting its new governmental ministers from its more radical leadership in Damascus. Predictably, the most radical elements of Hamas found a way to lash out. And Hezbollah seized the moment by staging its own provocation.

Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of "A Clean Break."

By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences -- from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.

On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she believes the U.N. Security Council can agree on a resolution to end the Israel-Hezbollah fighting within days.

Differences between the United States and France have slowed progress on a resolution.

France insists a cease-fire should precede any deployment of an international force, while the United States wants peacekeeping troops in place first.

In other developments, Lebanon's parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri appealed to Russia Friday to help bring an end to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Hariri spoke after meeting with Russia's Security Council head in Moscow.

Elsewhere, Malaysia's defense chief says his country plans to send 1,000 peacekeepers to Lebanon as soon as a cease-fire is declared.

Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.

You probably did not read far before realizing that I have switched "Israel" for "Hezbollah" and "Ehud Olmert" for "Hassan Nasrallah." The paragraph was taken from an opinion piece by Jonathan Freedland published in Britain's Guardian newspaper on Aug. 2. My attempt at deception was probably futile because no one seems to seriously believe that criticisms of the kind expressed above can be leveled against Israel.

Freedland, like most commentators in our media, assumes that Hezbollah is using the Lebanese population as "human shields," hiding its fighters, arsenals, and rocket launchers inside civilian areas. "Cowardly" behavior rather than the nature of Israel's air strikes, in his view, explains the spiraling death toll among Lebanese civilians. This perception of Hezbollah's tactics grows more common by the day, even though it flies in the face of the available evidence and the research of independent observers in Lebanon such as Human Rights Watch.

Explaining the findings of its latest report, HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, blames Israel for targeting civilians indiscriminately in Lebanon. "The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military's disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians. Our research shows that Israel's claim that Hezbollah fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare."

HRW has analyzed the casualty figures from two dozen Israeli air strikes and found that more than 40 percent of the dead are children: 63 out of 153 fatalities. Conservatively, HRW puts the civilian death toll so far at over 500. Lebanese hospital records suggest the figure is now well over 750, with potentially many more bodies yet to be excavated from the rubble of buildings obliterated by Israeli attacks.

Giving the lie to the "human shields" theory, HRW says its researchers "found numerous cases in which the IDF [Israeli army] launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians."

In fact, of the 24 incidents they document, HRW researchers could find no evidence that Hezbollah was operating in or near the areas that were attacked by the Israeli air force. Roth states: "The image that Israel has promoted of such [human] shielding as the cause of so high a civilian death toll is wrong. In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around."

The impression that Hezbollah is using civilians as human shields has been reinforced, according to HRW, by official Israeli statements that have "blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants, arguing that only people associated with Hezbollah remain in southern Lebanon, so all are legitimate targets of attack."

Freedland makes a similar point. Echoing comments by the UN's Jan Egeland, he says Hezbollah fighters are "cowardly blending" with Lebanon's civilian population. It is difficult to know what to make of this observation. If Freedland means that Hezbollah fighters come from Lebanese towns and villages and have families living there whom they visit and live among, he is right. But exactly the same can be said of Israel and its soldiers, who return from the battlefront (in this case inside Lebanon, as they are now an invading army) to live with parents or spouses in Israeli communities. Armed and uniformed soldiers can be seen all over Israel, sitting in trains, queuing in banks, waiting with civilians at bus stops. Does that mean they are "cowardly blending" with Israel's civilian population?

Egeland and Freedland's criticism seems to amount to little more than blaming Hezbollah fighters for not standing in open fields waiting to be picked off by Israeli tanks and war planes. That, presumably, would be brave. But in reality, no army fights in this way, and Hezbollah can hardly be criticized for using the only strategic defenses it has: its underground bunkers and the crumbling fortifications of Lebanese villages ruined by Israeli pounding. An army defending itself from invasion has to make the most of whatever protection it can find - as long as it does not intentionally put civilians at risk. But HRW's research shows convincingly that Hezbollah is not doing this.

So if Israeli officials have been deceiving us about what has been occurring inside Lebanon, have they also been misleading us about Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israel? Should we take at face value government and army statements that Hezbollah's strikes into Israel are targeting civilians indiscriminately, or do they need more serious investigation?

Although we should not romanticize Hezbollah, equally we should not be quick to demonize it either - unless there is convincing evidence suggesting it has been firing on civilian targets. The problem is that Israel has been abusing very successfully its military censorship rules governing both its domestic media and the reporting of visiting foreign journalists to prevent meaningful discussion of what Hezbollah has been trying to hit inside Israel.

I live in northern Israel in the Arab city of Nazareth. A week into the war we were hit by Hezbollah rockets that killed two young brothers. The attack, it was widely claimed, was proof either that Hezbollah was indiscriminately targeting civilians (so indiscriminately, the argument went, that it was hitting fellow Arabs) or that the Shi'ite militia was so committed to a fanatical war against the Judeo-Christian world that it was happy to kill Nazareth's Christian Arabs too. The latter claim could be easily dismissed: it depended both on a "clash of civilizations" philosophy not shared by Hezbollah and on the mistaken assumption that Nazareth is a Christian city, when in fact, as is well-known to Hezbollah, Nazareth has a convincing Muslim majority.

But to anyone living in Nazareth, it was clear the rocket attack on the city was not indiscriminate either. It was a mistake - something Nasrallah quickly confirmed in one of his televised speeches. The real target of the strike was known to Nazarenes: close by the city are a military weapons factory and a large army camp. Hezbollah knows the locations of these military targets because this year, as was widely reported in the Israeli media at the time, it managed to fly an unmanned drone over the Galilee photographing the area in detail - employing the same spying techniques used for many years by Israel against Lebanon.

One of Hezbollah's first rocket attacks after the outbreak of hostilities - after Israel went on a bombing offensive by blitzing targets across Lebanon - was on a kibbutz overlooking the border with Lebanon. Some foreign correspondents noted at the time (though given Israel's press censorship laws I cannot confirm) that the rocket strike targeted a top-secret military traffic control center built into the Galilee's hills.

There are hundreds of similar military installations next to or inside Israel's northern communities. Some distance from Nazareth, for example, Israel has built a large weapons factory virtually on top of an Arab town - so close to it, in fact, that the factory's perimeter fence is only a few meters from the main building of the local junior school. There have been reports of rockets landing close to that Arab community.

How these kind of attacks are being unfairly presented in the Israeli and foreign media was highlighted recently when it was widely reported that a Hezbollah rocket had landed "near a hospital" in a named Israeli city, not the first time that such a claim has been made over the past few weeks. I cannot name the city, again because of Israel's press censorship laws and because I also want to point out that very "near" that hospital is an army camp. The media suggested that Hezbollah was trying to hit the hospital, but it is also more than possible it was trying to strike - and may have struck - the army camp.

Israel's military censorship laws are therefore allowing officials to represent, unchallenged, any attack by Hezbollah as an indiscriminate strike against civilian targets.

Audiences ought to be alerted to this danger by their media. Any reports touching on "security matters" are supposed to be submitted to the country's military censor, but few media are pointing this out. Most justify this deception to themselves on the grounds that in practice they never run their reports by the censor as it would delay publication.

Instead, they avoid problems with the military censor either by self-censoring their reporting of security issues or by relying on what has already been published in the Israeli media on the assumption that in these ways they are unlikely to contravene the rules.

An e-mail memo, written by a senior BBC editor and leaked more than a week ago, discusses the growing restrictions being placed on the organization's reporters in Israel. It hints at some of the problems noted above, observing that "the more general we are, the freer hand we have; more specific and it becomes increasingly tricky." The editor says the channel will notify viewers of these restrictions in "the narrative of the story." "The teams on the ground will make clear what they can and cannot say - and if necessary make clear that we're operating under reporting restrictions." In practice, however, BBC correspondents, like most of their media colleagues, rarely alert us to the fact they are operating under censorship, and self-censorship, or that they cannot give us the full picture of what is happening.

Because of this, commentators like Freedland are drawing conclusions that cannot be sustained by the available evidence. He notes in his article that "this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one." He is right, but does not seem to know who is really winning the propaganda offensive.

Israel still holds several ministers from the Hamas-led Palestinian government and members of parliament.

Mr Kabha, Minister for Prisoners' Affairs, told the Associated Press news agency that he had been released because there was no proof of Israeli allegations that he was a member of a terrorist organisation.

'Dirty mattresses'

"I spent 11 days under heavy interrogation," he said by telephone from the West Bank town of Jenin.

"They would take me at 0500 in the morning, hands and legs cuffed, and place me in a chair without a back until 1700.

"The only rest I got was during the sirens when Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel. They would take me down into a cell underground and they would leave to take shelter somewhere in the jail."

His cell, he added, was "a small place with four dirty mattresses on the ground and with two very dirty and old blankets".

Hasan Khurayshah, a deputy speaker in the Palestinian parliament, earlier painted a similar picture of conditions he had allegedly experienced in custody along with Mr Kabha and Palestinian Finance Minister Omar Abdal Razeq.

"Everybody was treated in the same bad way," he told the pro-Hamas Palestinian Information Centre.

"They bound our legs and hands to a chair and put blindfolds so we could not see anything. There was very little water and food and they were unfit for human consumption. The jailers were cursing and insulting us."

Israel's Prisons Authority says all prisoners received clean clothes, sheets and toiletries.