Left I on the News  

I first wrote about the Israeli cluster bombs littering (sounds positively benign, doesn't it?) southern Lebanon more than three weeks ago, and then two weeks ago we had the first estimates of the extent of the situation. Now, directly from the mouths of one of the perpetrators, we learn that the situation is even worse than we thought, so bad that even that perpetrator is feeling guilty about it:

"What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.

Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.

In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.

The rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known to be highly inaccurate.

According to the commander, in order to compensate for the inaccuracy of the rockets and the inability to strike individual targets precisely, units would "flood" the battlefield with munitions, accounting for the littered and explosive landscape of post-war Lebanon.

Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war.

Of course that's not all. When it comes to Israeli brutality, as with U.S. and British brutality, it rarely is:

It has come to light that IDF soldiers fired phosphorous rounds in order to cause fires in Lebanon. An artillery commander has admitted to seeing trucks loaded with phosphorous rounds on their way to artillery crews in the north of Israel.

A direct hit from a phosphorous shell typically causes severe burns and a slow, painful death.

I'm sure most Palestinians and Lebanese would join me in saying we don't wish a "slow, painful death" for the Israeli regime. A quick, painless one would suit us just fine. Alas, that isn't in the cards, and also alas, most of the pain involved in that process is going to be felt by the Palestinians, not by the Israelis. Nevertheless, I join Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in saying that the Israeli regime, just like the U.S. regime (and I don't just mean the "Bush regime" in the words of World Can't Wait), is going to vanish from the pages of time. The light at the end of the long, dark tunnel which precedes that day is, unfortunately, not yet visible.