Israel's Declassified Report on Hezbollah

HonestReporting has background on the report that verifies what Israel said all along about Hezbollah's deceptions and use of human shields:

The New York Times, along with much of the mainstream media, played a key role in propagating the view that Israel had indiscriminately and "disproportionately" targeted civilian areas in response to Hezbollah attacks from Lebanon. Now, the NYTimes reports on a new study that says Hezbollah stored weapons in mosques, battled Israelis from inside empty schools, flew white flags while transporting missiles and launched rockets near UN monitoring posts.

The study also says that 650 out of the 1,084 people the Lebanese government has said were civilians killed in the conflict were in fact Hezbollah terrorists.

The NYTimes coverage includes declassified IDF video and photos that explain how "The construction of a broad military infrastructure, positioned and hidden in populated areas, was intended to minimize Hezbollah's vulnerability. Hezbollah would also gain a propaganda advantage if it could represent Israel as attacking innocent civilians."

Having conspicuously failed to present this side of the conflict at the time, HonestReporting calls on the mainstream media to give as much focus on this study's conclusions as it did to the initial allegations leveled at Israel. This report certainly has important implications, not only on opinion of Israel and Hezbollah's conduct during the war, but also on how the conflict was reported.

Gateway Pundit has a good introduction to the report.

Israel Matzav has blogged about the report in more detail here and here.

Check out the American Jewish Congress website for more--you can also download the entire report from there.

Bottom line: this is all coming out too late.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Hezbollah and Hizbollah and Lebanon.