some new articles:
""""Larnaca (Cyprus), July 25: The UN Humanitarian Chief (Jan Egeland) has accused Hezbollah of "cowardly blending" among Lebanese civilians and causing the deaths of hundreds during two weeks of cross-border violence with Israel.....
continued on the flip.
.... Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending ... Among women and children," he said. "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men."""""
http://www.zeenews.com/...
http://www.forbes.com/...
ANOTHER ARTICLE
""""Some military analysts say it probably cannot. "Hezbollah is so intertwined with the society and community, it's very difficult to try to destroy the Hezbollah infrastructure without such collateral damage," said Babak Yektafar, an expert on the Middle East at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "If (Israeli forces) were more concerned with collateral damage, they wouldn't be as effective in destroying Hezbollah infrastructure."
Analysts agree that some Hezbollah offices and command posts bombed by Israel are so close to civilian targets that casualties among noncombatants are inevitable. Some Hezbollah offices, for example, share buildings with apartments where civilians live, Yektafar said; others cluster in houses in crowded residential neighborhoods. Many of the mosques Hezbollah supports are community centers where elders meet and where families take their children to study the Quran.
In the densely packed Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut's southern suburbs -- Hezbollah's bedrock of support -- Israeli air strikes in the past week have reduced entire blocks to rubble, collapsing facades of multistory apartment houses into the streets.
"Certain neighborhoods are Hezbollah neighborhoods; you can't hit Hezbollah without hitting civilians," said Mark Burgess, a terrorism expert at the Brussels office of the Washington-based World Security Institute.
A more debated assertion, put forward by some analysts and Israeli officials, say Hezbollah stores arms and ammunition in residential houses and often fires rockets at Israel using civilians who live in the houses as human shields.
"The reality is, we're fighting an organization that stores the missiles it launches against us in people's homes," Dallal said. "They do it on purpose."
Christopher Hamilton, a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Hezbollah had set up special structures inside civilian compounds and fired missiles from inside.
"You have a special structure they build in the house itself so they could shoot a rocket without being in the open, camouflaged so that they couldn't be seen," Hamilton said. "The people who died in these houses were civilians, but they were Hezbollah supporters, since the rockets were there.""""
http://sfgate.com/...
FROM IRAN
""""TEHRAN -- Here in the capital that US officials blame for prodding Hezbollah to attack Israel, city-sponsored posters herald the Lebanese militants as heroes of resistance, and official newspapers portray the bloody Israeli-Lebanese conflict as one of Iran's biggest concerns.
... But from the leafy streets of upscale northern Tehran to the poorer southern neighborhoods, a surprising number of young Iranians yesterday shrugged off the two-week old conflict, and Hezbollah's cause, as minor issues compared with inflation, unemployment, and confining social strictures.
``We're up to our ears in our own problems, so we don't care about this stuff," said Nina Kamarzarian, 21, sipping a banana frappe in a northern Tehran café and fretting about the drop in business at her printer repair shop.
``My government, they want to conceal their own problems," she said. ``All the time, they say, `Lebanon, Palestine, Arabs.' They want to conceal the fact that the majority of the people are dissatisfied.""""
http://www.boston.com/...
UN RELIEF
""""The UN has launched a $150m (£81m) aid appeal for strife-torn Lebanon and the US has announced its own $30m package to ease the suffering of civilians....
.... Mr. Egeland in his appeal for funds, said the money was needed to help aid organisations cover needs of displaced people for three months.
About $24m was on behalf on Unicef for children who have been displaced inside Lebanon or who have fled to Syria.
Mr Egeland said he was asking the Israelis for safe passage for aid ships to enter the northern port of Tripoli and the southern port of Tyre.""""
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
some new developments. moon.