To understand the escalation in Lebanon, we must confront what Israelis are thinking

All people involved don't become vengeful and turn to terrorism.

Many victims of terrorists or victims of war or injustice don't quickly become terrorists themselves.

They have video footage of them being kidnapped alive from their jeep.

Even in 2011, when some Hezbollah twat was claiming in a memoir that they’d been killed by the IDF bombing campaign, Israeli officials decried that as nonsense and maintained they had been captured alive but wounded and that we’d never been told how they died.

My interesting take is straight from Ynet, a reputable Israeli news source.

Yes, I blame Hezbollah for their deaths. Nasrallah also led Hezbollah then, so their deaths were on his hands too. It is good he is dead.

My objection on the Lebanon bombing that killed Nasrallah was to levelling residential buildings full of innocent civilians with 85 bunker buster bombs just to get to Nasrallah.

I am not someone who thinks the end justifies the means. Not just from an ethical standpoint, which some might call that a luxury, but also from a purely practical standpoint.

The bombing killed one terrorist leader & his entourage of lackeys, but it has also just created thousands of angry, vengeful civilians who will quickly swell the ranks of Hezbollah, and provide many future leaders & lackeys. Hezbollah also has a charitable wing, and they will be busy using Iranian money to garner sympathy and goodwill and votes for Hezbollah. I expect that support for them among the Lebanese will go up. Which is a concern 🙁 looking long term for myself and anyone who wants Israel to see its 100th birthday.

I mean, they would have looked at the other soldiers who were murdered by Hezbollah that same day and seen the injuries they died from and then compared those to the injuries on the repatriated murdered hostage bodies and seen they had the same injuries. That would mean the most obvious and likely conclusion would be that they died in the same way and at the same time.

Your attempts at trying to cast doubt on this have been noted though. It's definitely an...interesting take on it all. One that I assume most others can also see right through.

I'm done talking about this. You've said you blame Hezbollah for their murder so let's just leave it at that.

@ToBeDetermined ,

‘Except that counter-attacks that are escalatory and/or disporportionate are not considered solely self defence but also provocation.’

Israel has a total population of less than 10 million, Iran 90 million. And even that ratio of 9:1 is dwarfed by the ratio of surface areas. And that is not even including Iran’s proxies and allies.

If Israel wants to survive, it cannot afford to be ‘proportionate’.

I wonder what that ratio would look like for the U.S’s response to 9/11? Would you consider that a provocation?

I do think the ground invasion sealed their fate if they were not already dead, and as far as Israel knew and said it was acting at the time, Israel believed they were still alive.

There is also zero evidence they were not alive from July 12th to August 14th, 2006.

They were kidnapped the morning of July 12th, 2006 and probably killed at any of these points:

• less than 12 hours later during the July 12th massive Israeli bombardment that claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians while destroying all of Hezbollah’s long range rocket capabilities and much of Hezbollah’s elite militia forces. Or

• in the run up or during the 22nd July ground invasion of Lebanon by IDF. Or
• after the cessation of hostilities on 14th August when their usefulness to Hezbollah as live hostages was clearly surplus to requirement as Hezbollah had gotten what they wanted.

If there had been negotiations from the start, instead of massive aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon and then a failed ground invasion, it is my belief that these two soldiers might have lived and been exchanged in a prisoner swap.

As it is, Israel believed they were alive at least until the 14th of August 2006, and chose their actions despite knowing it could mean their deaths either by friendly fire or at the hands of their murderous captors. Israel knew what Hezbollah was.

It wasn’t until months after the ground invasion & cessation of hostilities in August that doubt set in as no proof of life had been received from Hezbollah.

The bodies were not repatriated to Israel until July 2008. There was and still is no forensic technology or way of pinpointing the time of death on a 2yr old refrigerated corpse to early July, late July, or early August. So we don’t know exactly when they died, and there is no way Hezbollah is going to tell the truth given they maliciously lied up to the last second Israeli officials saw the plane door open and saw two black coffins instead of two live Israelis.

This is not to say the deaths are Israel’s fault, that lies fully with Hezbollah, but to point out that the Israeli government’s Machiavellian choice knowingly significantly reduced their chances of survival.

As I said before, a ceasefire and negotiations has been proven over and over again to be the best choice that has the highest probability to get live hostages back.

Second best is special ops type raid to rescue hostages.

While there are currently no hostages in Lebanon with Hezbollah, we are seeing this rule proven once again with the hostages in Gaza.

"It’s a better option than a ground invasion! You know how it ended for the kidnapped soldiers in 2006? They came home in body bags."

Were you not implying that the two hostages were killed because of a ground invasion? That's definitely what it sounded like you were saying. I'm not quite sure how else to read it.

They came home in body bags because Hezbollah are immoral, murderous, genocidal terrorists. Not because of a ground invasion.

They would not be bombing so indiscriminately if those countries had Jewish residents. To the Israeli government, Arab life doesn't matter.

I was under the impression there were Israeli Arabs in the knesset.

They would not be bombing so indiscriminately if those countries had Jewish residents. To the Israeli government, Arab life doesn't matter.

I completely understand why Israelis would want Hezbollah and Hamas neutralised. I am not sure many rational thinking people wouldn't. They are evil barbaric unpredictable terrorist organisations that have no place in a modern progressive world. What I can't understand or accept is the complete disregard for innocent human lives in achieving that aim. All innocent lives matter and need to be protected

Please don’t prejudge a Palestinian state.

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4806998,00.html

https://time.com/archive/6939498/a-mothers-anguish-renewed/

King Hussein called them 'the worst kind of people' , he asked for Israeli help to rid them from Jordan. Not sure about the current Jordanian king's views, Rania is quite vocal.

I did not post a chart. I posted a BBC report that is reporting data from the ACLED which does in fact count scale using a hierarchy of events.

Your data integrity concerns are unfounded.

There would never be an event of 1000 rockets from one Actor being counted as 1 attack while 10 rockets from another Actor being counted as 10 attacks.

Even if it were as you said (and it isn’t) by looking at the impact of the attacks on the affected regions, it is clear that Israel’s retaliatory attacks have had a significantly greater impact than the Hezbollah attacks in terms of damage to infrastructure and deaths. Where ACLED falls short is they do not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths or terror/military infrastructure or civilian infrastructure- the BBC report I posted did the rest of that analysis drawing from other databases which do.

The difference in overall damage & deaths supports the ACLED analysis reported by the BBC that Israel has indeed responded to Hezbollah attacks at a 5:1 ratio. Which isn’t a punch for a punch, but a disproportionate response and ultimately an escalation in the cross border violence.

Just to add thar Samir Kuntar murdered a little 4 year old girl by smashing her head in after killing her father in front of her eyes. He was feted as a hero by Hezbollah.

The girl's mother had hidden in a crawlspace with their 2 year old. She accidentally suffocated her daughter to keep her from giving away the hiding space as she was crying.

Since everyone thought they were still alive, including Israel, then it did in fact influence the Israeli military response at least for several months.

Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were either dead before they even reached Lebanon or died very shortly thereafter, Hezbollah just pretended they were still alive so they could use it as more leverage. Their deaths had absolutely nothing to do with Israel's response to the heinous and unprovoked attack.

Their families thought they were still alive up until the bodies were returned in exchange for grotesque terrorists such as Samir Kumar.

We went over this, events don’t count scale in your chart. So Hezbollah could launch 1000 rockets at once and Israel could launch 10 separate rockets targeting the units that fired at them and it would look like Israel had launched 10 attacks vs Hezbollahs 1 on the basis of how events are counted.

If someone is firing and refusing to stop, you fire back (I tried to demonstrate this to you earlier). If Hezbollah had stopped firing Israel would have stopped firing because they already have a war on.

I think though you expect Israel to sit still and allow itself to be attacked with impunity. I suspect that anything Israel did in response would be seen as an escalation by you.

Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were either dead before they even reached Lebanon or died very shortly thereafter, Hezbollah just pretended they were still alive so they could use it as more leverage. Their deaths had absolutely nothing to do with Israel's response to the heinous and unprovoked attack.

Their families thought they were still alive up until the bodies were returned in exchange for grotesque terrorists such as Samir Kumar.

Not sure you can blame the Palestinians for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

We went over this, events don’t count scale in your chart. So Hezbollah could launch 1000 rockets at once and Israel could launch 10 separate rockets targeting the units that fired at them and it would look like Israel had launched 10 attacks vs Hezbollahs 1 on the basis of how events are counted.

If someone is firing and refusing to stop, you fire back (I tried to demonstrate this to you earlier). If Hezbollah had stopped firing Israel would have stopped firing because they already have a war on.

I think though you expect Israel to sit still and allow itself to be attacked with impunity. I suspect that anything Israel did in response would be seen as an escalation by you.

Except that counter-attacks that are escalatory and/or disporportionate are not considered solely self defence but also provocation.

It’s a better option than a ground invasion! You know how it ended for the kidnapped soldiers in 2006? They came home in body bags.

I did not reframe 2006 as Israeli aggression. I stated quite calmly that we are on the path of a rerun of 2006…and where we are in the re-run is post the terrorist provocation and currently on the cusp of the part where Israel might invade Lebanon.

The best option is a ceasefire and negotiations, that has the highest success rate bar none of getting living hostages back, and stopping the deaths of innocents.