[...]
One of my first reads this morning was the Washington Post, and I came across the perfect headline:
Cease-Fire Takes Effect; More Fighting Expected
Well, don't that just say it all? U.N. preens, furrows brow, accomplishes nothing, lives to blame Israel another day.
Here's the story, which includes a paragraph that seems a bit suspect after the fauxtography revelations of the past couple weeks:
Most of the Dahiya area has been evacuated during more than a month of repeated bombings of Hezbollah-connected office and residential buildings. But an Associated Press photographer reported that he saw rescuers pull the body of a child out of the wreckage, and local television reported that two civilians were killed. The exact number of dead and wounded was not known, police said, because Hezbollah activists were in charge of the area.
[Read the whole thing here.]
Israel-Lebanon Cease-Fire Goes into Effect
James Joyner
The UN-sponsored Israel-Lebanon cease-fire went into effect as scheduled at 8 a.m. local/ 1 a.m. EST. So far, both sides are complying with the terms.
Israel halted its offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas as a U.N.-imposed cease-fire went into effect Monday after a month of warfare that killed more than 900 people, devastated much of south Lebanon and forced hundreds of thousands of Israelis into bomb shelters. A half hour after the cease-fire took hold, Israeli warplanes — a regular fixture in Lebanese skies during the monthlong war — were absent across huge swaths of the country, including the Bekaa Valley, where airstrikes hit about an hour before.
[...]
And you just have to love the UN:
UN Security-General Kofi Annan sent a letter to the government over the weekend warning that if one side was fired upon, the other side should not respond except in immediate self-defense. A source in the Prime Minister’s Office called Annan’s letter unacceptable and said a team was working on a letter in response that would reiterate the IDF’s right to respond to Hizbullah if it broke the cease-fire.
[Read the whole thing here.]
