Israel Agrees Peace Deal But Keeps Tanks Rolling

Despite agreeing to the UN's peace deal, Israel's Ehud Olmert has no intention of stopping attacks just yet and Israel is still trying to get weapons from the U.S. that will make sure even more civilians get killed.

From the Guardian:

Israel's cabinet will meet tomorrow to decide whether to accept the UN security council's ceasefire resolution, but until then the government made clear its troops would continue to advance into Lebanon.

In an apparent gambit to win time for the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to make gains on the battlefield, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, signalled last night that he would recommend acceptance of the peace plan, but would not act on it until tommorrow's meeting.

The delay seemed likely to cause anger on the world stage, and trigger a Hizbullah response that would make imposing a ceasefire even harder. But Israeli officials insisted that the move was justified as Hizbullah rockets continued to fall on northern Israeli towns yesterday.

Mr Olmert had ordered the launch of an all-out ground offensive only a few hours before the UN vote was taken, and massed Israeli tanks along the northern border were seen making final preparations to move into southern Lebanon, where they were intended, according to the IDF plan, to advance as much as 30km up to the Litani river.

Despite the UN agreement, Mr Olmert did not call his forces back and IDF officials were quoted in the Haaretz newspaper as saying the offensive would "continue forward with full power" and that all the units assigned to take part in the invasion force had been deployed to forward positions.

The IDF general staff, which has been criticised for failing to suppress Hizbullah rocket fire in the first month of fighting, is determined to inflict more damage on the Shia militia before a halt is called. A failure to neutralise Hizbullah would widely be seen as a military defeat inside Israel.

According to the New York Times, Israel has asked the US to supply the IDF with short range anti-personnel rockets which scatter fragmentation grenades over a wide area. The report said Israel intended to use them against Hizbullah rocket launcher sites, which have so far proved elusive to Israeli artillery.

The report said the delivery of the weapons was likely despite state department concerns that they could cause high civilian casualties.

First those rockets - M-26 artillery rockets according to Reuters, which also says the shipemnt will go through as it has already been approved. Let me define "wide area" for you. A football field sized area per rocket scattered with softball-sized submunitions (644 per rocket), about 5% of which will not detonate on impact but will instead lie around until disturbed by vehicles, aid workers or kids. Each is capable of blowing a hole through four inches of armor or killing everyone in an eight yard area. The rockets are launched in salvos of 12 from a mobile launcher (MLRS) and each has a range of 32 Km. They are unguided. A full salvo will cover 60 acres with 7,728 instruments of sudden death. The U.S. Center for Army Lessons Learned says of this weapon: "Commanders must still consider the precision error and large submunitions dispersion patterns when applying this method of attack due to the high probability of extensive collateral damage".

Now Olmert's weaseling. Given that Israel refuses to stop operations in place in the face of a full Security Council resolution and is actively still seeking to obtain, deploy and use a weapon which will inevitably lead to massive civilian deaths, it seems clear that they are voluntarily placing themselves in the same category as their Hizboullan enemy - that of barbaric commiters of atrocity and terrorism. Those who support Israel's plans for criminal aggresion are no better than those who support other terroristic violence, no matter what the source.

Remind my why one is an ally and one an enemy?