Who Will Act for Civilization?

(Michael Kamber, NYT)

A Hezbollah rocket killed 12 IDF reservists yesterday in a parking lot on Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee. It was the deadliest attack by Hezbollah since it began its war against Israel three weeks ago.

How does a single rocket cause this?  The answer is in the story in today’s New York Times:

The most destructive [attack Sunday] was a single rocket packed with ball bearings that slammed into a parking lot at Kfar Giladi, a kibbutz in the northeastern panhandle, scoring a direct hit on Israeli reservists who were staying there.  The rocket sprayed the bearings in a deadly cloud up to 60 yards in diameter, leaving a scene that witnesses, including a war-weary ambulance driver, described as the most horrific carnage they had ever seen.

Sixty yards — more than half a football field. 

When we visited Haifa last week, and viewed an apartment complex nearly demolished by a Hezbollah rocket, we noted that the more stunning damage was actually to the buildings across the street and down the road, 15 to 30 yards away.  Those buildings still stood — but with walls pock-marked with hundreds of holes:

To get a sense of how significant each hole is (and the force necessary to have created all of them), you have to put a finger in the hole and see how far it goes, and how much bigger it is than a finger: 

The victims at Kfar Giladi yesterday were military reservists, but since the target of the rockets was a kibbutz, the intended victims were probably civilians.

Israel is fighting an enemy that crossed an international border in an unprovoked act of war, with no legitimate border or other territorial claims, that amassed more than 12,000 rockets and still retains thousands of them, that is supplied by countries dedicated to the destruction of Israel, and that intentionally fires rockets indiscriminately against civilian targets loaded with ball bearings calculated to maximize civilian casualties — and whose publicly-declared objective is the genocidal destruction of a U.N. member. 

If the U.N. and the West cannot stand up to this, they cannot stand up to anything.

The Israelis killed yesterday at Kfar Giladi were: Eliyahu Elkariaf, 34; Yosef Karkash, 41; Shlomo Buchris, 36; Yehuda Greenfeld, 27; Ziv Balali, 28; Daniel Ben David, 38; Marion Berkovitch, 31; Ro’I Yaish, 27; Shaul Shai Michlovitch, 21; and Shmuel Halfon, 41.  Reservists (civilians until three weeks ago), aged 21 to 41.