Image Credit: Cooperative Monitoring Center (CMC) Sandia National Laboratories Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mid to late 1970's.
UN Peacekeepers killed by Israeli Fire
UN via BBSNews 2006-07-26 -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a statement yesterday in Rome in response to the deaths of at least two UN Peacekeepers bombed by Israel:
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Sinai Field Mission Watch Station at Mitla East during the mid to late 1970's.
Image Credit: Cooperative Monitoring Center (CMC) Sandia National Laboratories Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mid to late 1970's. |
"I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defense Forces of a United Nations observer post in southern Lebanon that has killed two United Nations military observers, with two more feared dead.--This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long established and clearly marked United Nations post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that United Nations positions would be spared Israeli fire. Furthermore, General Alain Pelligrini, the United Nations Force Commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular United Nations position from attack.
I call on the Government of Israel to conduct a full investigation into this very disturbing incident, and demand that any further attack on United Nations positions and personnel must stop.
The names and nationalities of those killed are being withheld pending notification of their families. I extend sincere condolences to the families of our fallen peacekeepers."
The current crisis in Lebanon was preceded by an escalation in Israeli shelling of civilians in Gaza by the IDF in return for homemade and largely ineffective Hamas rockets sporadically fired from Gaza towards Israel. The "withdrawal" by Israel wa in name only. The reality was that a people who are prevented in any way to really interact with the world and who are still subjagated by Israeli air-power; helicopters ever hovering and targeting someone and not being able to be a contiguous state; that increased pressure that culminated in the killing of a family on a beach in Gaza during a picnic by an Israeli Navy gunboat, likely from a 155mm artillery shell. Israel denied responsibility and shortly thereafter a Hamas self-imposed truce that had held for an unprecedented time was halted.
In a different tactic, instead of targeting civilians, Israeli soldiers were targeted by Hamas and in that incident; one Israeli, IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit, was captured by the Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed.
Israel responded by a widespread and destructive incursion back into Gaza, razing civilian and government buildings, arresting Palestinian officials, and destroying huge amounts of technical infrastructure largely paid for, over and over, by Western and other interests that invariably are tied up in other conflicts when the unanswered questions of imprpoerly implemented UN Rosolutions come up. Case in point; renewed Taliban activity and fierceness in Afghanistan and the US led war in Iraq, that most observers conclude is a drag on the stability of the region.
Hezbollah, in what some may term either one-upmanship in Arab machismo or some other explanation, may have struck a blow in "Palestinian solidarity" . . . not at the behest of far away masters; but simply as a matter of normal local expedience. After the decades long occupation of Arab territory by Israel outlined in many UN Resolutions ignored by them (and the US) for decades, the war rages on until all UN Resolutions are fairly and completely enforced on all parties.
Complete and utter destruction of Lebanon; once again, is directly in front of the world view. It remains to be seen if the world will come to a fair consensus and enforce all UN Resolutions in a fair and what some may call a long overdue 'first come first served' sense of justice.
This article was last updated on 2006-07-28.
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