As expected, Israel plans to completely flatten southern Lebanon and murder anybody who remains there, no matter there are thousands of people unable to leave-the sick, elderly, and those without resources.

"Everyone remaining in southern Lebanon will be regarded as a terrorist, Israel's justice minister said yesterday as the military prepared to employ 'huge firepower' from the air in its campaign to crush Hizbollah," reports the Telegraph.

"What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in," insisted Haim Ramon, member of the "moderate" Kadima party and "Minister of Justice," that is to say justice for Israelis, not for Arabs, who are considered untermenschen worthy of slaughter. "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah. Our great advantage vis-à-vis Hizbollah is our firepower, not in face-to-face combat." Obviously, this includes babies, grade school kids, and old people-all who will soon be blasted with white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions.

"The government's unrelenting line has the backing of the Israeli media, which are demanding a harsh response to an ambush in the Hizbollah stronghold of Bint Jbeil, in which eight soldiers died."

In other words, the entire population must suffer for the fact Hezbollah successful repelled the invading Israelis at Bint Jbeil. This is collective punishment, a war crime-but then Israel and its patron, the United States, don't do the Geneva Conventions or humanitarian law.

"According to Elias Hanna, a researcher of military affairs, the decision to limit the ground campaigns was made because 'Israelis are traumatized by their negative experience during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982,'" reports the Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper.

Translation: the Israelis are now keen to limit their casualties, as dead IOF soldiers eventually resulted in Israel pulling out of Lebanon in 2000 under public pressure. Instead, the Israeli government will carpet bomb southern Lebanon and kill everything that moves. This will be far more acceptable to the Israeli population at large, as few-beyond a handful of Israeli antiwar and peace activists-sincerely care what happens to their neighbors to the north.

Nearly 90 percent of all Lebanese now support Hezbollah, as similar numbers would support resistance groups in America if it was invaded. Thus, according to Israeli logic, millions of people are terrorists who must be eradicated, sort of like cockroaches.

"In Lebanon, the entire political spectrum is becoming more radicalized as a consequence of this," Wayne White, former head of the Middle East desk at the US State Department's Intelligence and Research, tells the Christian Science Monitor. "I think [Israel] can substantially destroy the existing Hizbullah infrastructure, but how long will it take? And in the end, they'll reconstitute themselves and they'll be turning recruits away by the thousands."

Contrary to Israel's Grapes of Wrath invasion in 1996, the current "offensive is very different," according to BBC correspondent Jim Muir. "This time, neither Israel nor the US wants to accept Hezbollah as a party to anything, nor do they want its patrons Syria or Iran to be involved, except apparently in a capitulation. For them, any settlement must be based on the defeat of Hezbollah and the humiliation of its Syrian and Iranian sponsors."

Of course, this absolutist, Manichean demand-at the root of the Zionist and neocon agenda to "reshape" (through DU and bunker-busters) the Middle East-will translate into hundreds of thousands of dead people, earmarked as terrorists, making it easier to slaughter them in large numbers, possibly with nukes.

"Already, there are signs of a rapprochement between radical Sunni and Shia factions which could rebound massively on the US if it gains wider ground," Muir continues. Any such reconciliation between the two sects of Islam would spell big trouble for both Israel and the United States. But then the neocons have long attempted to create a larger, wider conflict, thus pushing the United States to commit itself to "World War Three," as Newt Gingrich recently characterized the simmering "clash of civilizations" project. Drawing Syria and Iran into the conflict will all but ensure Gingrich and the Machiavellian neocons realize their wildest, if not demented and psychopathic, dreams.

Meanwhile, the Moonie owned newspaper, the Washington Times, claims "the leader of Hezbollah is hiding in a foreign mission in Beirut, possibly the Iranian Embassy," thus providing a pretext to widen the invasion.

"If confirmed, the reports could lead to an Israeli air strike on the embassy, possibly leading to a widening of the conflict, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Foreign embassies are sovereign territory and an attack on an embassy could be considered an act of war."

However, in order to cover all bases, the Washington Times posits "Sheik Nasrallah may be in Damascus. A Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Seyassah, reported from the Syrian capital yesterday that Sheik Nasrallah was seen moving through the city with Syrian guards in an intelligence agency car, Associated Press reported. He was dressed in civilian clothes, not his normal clerical robe."

Now that most foreign nationals have skedaddled from Lebanon, Israel is free to carpet bomb and kill everything that moves-not that the Israelis have any special commitment to protect foreign nationals (not killing them, several Canadians not withstanding, is a public relations move).

In this genocidal process, as virtually all Lebanese are now considered terrorists, we can expect the Iranian embassy to be flattened, and possibly an attack on Damascus under the pretext of going after Nasrallah, thus drawing both of these countries into the conflict.

Of course, this will suck in the United States, as planned by the neocons, thus realizing Gingrich's "World War Three," or as some neocons call it, World War Four.