At least two Israeli fighter pilots have deliberately missed civilian targets in Lebanon as disquiet grows in the military about flawed intelligence, it has emerged. Sources say the pilots were worried that targets had been wrongly identified as Hezbollah facilities.
Voices expressing concern over the armed forces' failures are getting louder. One Israeli Cabinet minister said last week: "We gave the army so much money. Why are we getting these results?"
Last week saw Hezbollah's guerrilla force, dismissed by senior Israeli military officials as "ragtag," inflict further casualties on one of the world's most powerful armies in southern Lebanon.
PHOTO: AP
At least 12 elite troops have already been killed, and by Saturday afternoon Israel's military death toll had climbed to 45.
As the bodies pile up, so the Israeli media has begun to turn, accusing the military of lacking the proper equipment, training and intelligence to fight a guerrilla war in Lebanon.
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz, on a tour of the front lines, was confronted by troubled reserve soldiers who told him they lacked proper equipment and training.
Israel's chief of staff, Major General Dan Halutz, had vowed to wipe out Hezbollah's missile threat within 10 days. These claims are now being mocked as rockets rain down on Israel's north with ever greater intensity, despite an intense and highly destructive air bombardment.
As one well-connected Israeli expert put it: "If we have such good information in Lebanon, how come we still don't know the hideout of missiles and launchers? ... If we don't know the location of their weapons, why should we know which house is a Hezbollah house."
As international outrage over civilian deaths grows, the spotlight is increasingly turning on Israeli air operations.
One senior commander who has been involved in the air attacks in Lebanon has already raised concerns that some of the air force's actions might be considered "war crimes."
Yonatan Shapiro, a former Black-hawk helicopter pilot dismissed from reserve duty after signing a "refusenik" letter in 2004, said he had spoken with Israeli F-16 pilots in recent days and learnt that some had aborted missions because of concerns about the reliability of intelligence information.
According to Shapiro, some pilots justified aborting missions out of "common sense" and in the context of the Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) moral code of conduct, which says every effort should be made to avoiding harming civilians.
"Some pilots told me they have shot at the side of targets because they're afraid people will be there, and they don't trust any more those who give them the coordinates and targets," Shapiro said.
"One pilot told me he was asked to hit a house on a hill, which was supposed to be a place from where Hezbollah was launching Katyusha missiles. But he was afraid civilians were in the house, so he shot next to the house," he said.
"Pilots are always being told they will be judged on results, but if the results are hundreds of dead civilians while Hezbollah is still able to fire all these rockets, then something is very wrong," he said.
So far none of the pilots has publicly refused to fly missions but some are wobbling, according to Shapiro.
"Their target could be a house firing a cannon at Israel and it could be a house full of children, so it's a real dilemma; it's not black and white. But ... I'm calling on them to refuse, in order save our country from self-destruction," he said.
Meron Rappoport, a former editor at the Israeli daily Haaretz and military analyst, criticized the air force's methods for selecting targets: "The impression is that information is sometimes lacking."
"One squadron leader admitted the evidence used to determine attacks on cars is sometimes circumstantial -- meaning that if people are in an area after Israeli forces warned them to leave, the assumption is that those left behind must be linked to Hezbollah ... This is problematic, as aid agencies have said many people did not leave ... because they could not, or it was unsafe to travel on the roads thanks to Israel's aerial bombardment," Rappoport said.
These revelations raise further serious questions about the airstrike in Qana on July 30 that left dozens dead, which continues to arouse international outrage.
From the outset, the Israeli military's version of events has been shrouded in ambiguity, with the army releasing a video it claims shows Katyusha rockets being fired from Qana, even though the video was dated two days earlier, and claiming that more than 150 rockets had been fired from the location.
Some Israeli military officials have continued to refer vaguely to Katyushas being launched "near houses" in the village and to non-specific "terrorist activity" inside the targeted building.
In a statement on Thursday, the IDF said that the air force did not know there were civilians in what they believed was an empty building, yet paradoxically blamed Hezbollah for using those killed as "human shields."
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion