From CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Mideast Reporting in America)
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On April 30, the Cox News Service distributed an article by Craig Nelson that includes a terribly inaccurate and biased description of last summer’s Hezbollah-Israel war. In the San Francisco Chronicle, the article is headlined “Leaked war report heats up calls for Olmert to resign.” The majority of the article is a fair description of reactions to the Winograd report, an Israeli investigation of the Olmert government’s handling of the war. However, the last three paragraphs of Nelson’s article summarize the war and unfortunately include inaccuracies and distortions. The three paragraphs state:
“Last summer’s conflict began July 12, when Hezbollah fighters kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed three others in a cross-border raid. When an Israeli armored unit struck back across the frontier an hour later, five more troops were killed. Hours later, Israeli warplanes began striking targets throughout Lebanon.
The 34-day military campaign ended Aug. 11, three days after the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1701, which called for an enlarged U.N. peacekeeping force to maintain a security zone in southern Lebanon.
The fighting left 159 Israelis dead. About 1,109 Lebanese civilians and 28 Lebanese troops were killed.”
* The article doesn’t mention that Hezbollah started the war by first shooting Katyusha rockets and mortars into Israeli communities. It was a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from another Hezbollah unit that subsequently crossed into Israel, abducting the two Israeli soldiers (Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev) and killing three others.
* In addition, while it points out that Israeli warplanes hit targets in Lebanon, it ignores the fact that thousands of Hezbollah rockets rained down on Israel during the war, forcing over a million Israelis to flee their homes or live in bomb shelters for weeks.
* It says Israeli warplanes began striking “targets throughout Lebanon,” seeming to imply that virtually all of Lebanon was attacked by Israel . Actually, Israel primarily targeted Hezbollah fighters, Hezbollah infrastructure, sites of rocket launchers, as well as routes to Syria that could be used for resupply or to take the Israeli soldiers out of Lebanon. In contrast, Hezbollah randomly fired on Israel, making no attempt to single out military targets and spare civilians.
* Its description of UN Resolution 1701 fails to note the very important part that called for “the unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers.”
* The death tally is completely inaccurate and biased. It states that “about 1,109 Lebanese civilians and 28 Lebanese troops were killed,” while noting that “the fighting left 159 Israelis dead.”
– Israel was not fighting “Lebanese troops,” but Hezbollah. Moreover, even Hezbollah sources say that hundreds of Hezbollah combatants — not 28 — were killed. According to a December 15, 2006 Associated Press report, the deputy chief of Hezbollah’s politburo, Mahmoud Komati, said that at least 250 Hezbollah militants were killed during the war. And Israel estimated that they had killed between 500-600 Hezbollah fighters, and was even able to identify 440 of them by name and address. Taking this into account, the tally of 1109 Lebanese civilians and 28 Lebanese troops is obviously inaccurate by any measure. There were far fewer civilians and many more Hezbollah fighters. For CAMERA’s research on how many from Hezbollah were killed during the war, click here .
Of the approximately 1137 Lebanese reportedly killed (other reports say 1187), most or about half were likely Hezbollah combatants. Many civilians were killed because Hezbollah illegally launched rockets from within residential areas, drawing Israeli fire, and in general used civilians as human shields. For more info on Hezbollah’s human shields, see this report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies.
– The article breaks down the Lebanese death tally by civilians and troops, while it makes no such distinction of civilians vs soldiers with the Israeli dead.
(According to the December 5, 2006 Jerusalem Post, there were 39 Israeli civilians killed and 120 Israeli soldiers. )
from HKO
CAMERA exists just to clarify and correct biased reporting on Israel and the Middle East. There are about 400 international jounalists reporting from Israel making it the most covered nation in the world media; yet much of the reporting is slanted against Israel. The coverage of Israel by the media is an embarassment to the profession.
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