Quite frankly, this is a real possibility, given Hizbullah’s love of the stage. Plus they seem to have had trouble getting their story straight.

Lebanese news outlets reported earlier Sunday that espionage devices placed by the IDF were located and destroyed in an explosion in south Lebanon on Saturday.

The devices were reportedly discovered near a town close to the Israel-Lebanon border, and destroyed in a midnight blast, apparently by the Lebanon-based militant Hezbollah organization.

There were also reports, however, that the Lebanese army blew up the device, as well as claims that the IDF was behind the blast.

The Hezbollah-affilited Al-Manar reported that a drone destroyed the device. The paper said that when Hezbollah operatives arrived near the site, they found another device.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

8:45PM: And now over to Tawil Fadiha, the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage (hat tip: Jawa Report).

7:38PM: What took them so long?

After accusing the United States and Britain of involvement in the suicide attack that took place in south Iran on Sunday, the Islamic Republic on Monday claimed that Israel was also involved in the terror attack.

Revolutionary Guard chief Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari said Monday that the Sunni rebel group, known as Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, is at work to disrupt security in Iran and he vowed to deliver a “crushing” response.

“New evidence has been obtained proving the link between yesterday’s terrorist attack and the US, British and Pakistani intelligence services,” state TV quoted Jafari as saying. “Evidence shows that US, British and Pakistani intelligence supported the group.”

He said the attack was “undoubtedly” planned and ordered by the three nation’s intelligence services and that a delegation would soon travel to Pakistan to present evidence.

When asked how those responsible for the attack would be punished, Jafari said, “The American and Israeli intelligence agencies are behind this. We must pay them back in order to punish them, and, God willing, we hope to be able to do so.”

7:30PM: As expressed in his Jerusalem Post op-ed, Richard Goldstone sees his Jewishness as a motivating factor for accepting the task to head the commission which ultimately produced his report damning Israel. At the same time, he seems clueless to the possibility that others likely also saw his Jewishness as a motivating factor to offer him this role in the first place.

Now, opponents of Israel are predictably using the fact of Goldstone’s Jewishness to argue that the report must be accurate and objective.

Case in point: George Galloway.

5:00PM: Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte on the Goldstone report.

That’s what you get when you adopt a policy of neutrality instead of getting behind the forces of good: the inability to distinguish between right and wrong (hat tip: Media Backspin).

1:18PM: Here’s some Goldstone reading for your pleasure:

• Richard Landes with yet another glorious fisking, this time of Goldstone’s JPost op-ed.
• John Bolton argues that joining the UN Human Rights Council was a mistake Obama should correct.
• An op-ed in The Australian positing the Goldstone report has damaged the UN’s credibility (now that’s an oxymoron)

9:18AM: Here is the half-time entertainment at yesterday’s Maccabi Tel Aviv-New York Knicks exhibition game at Madison Square Garden.

A different sort of cheerleading, to be sure.

6:10AM: According to Ha’aretz, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero “We solved the matter of the settlements with the Americans..I cannot say more than that. If you are interested in hearing more details, ask in Washington.”

I’m not sure what Netanyahu meant, but given our leaders’ track record in giving in to international pressure, I am guessing it is not a good thing.

Meanwhile, the Ha’aretz report contains this curious (read: disturbing) paragraph:

Zapatero told Netanyahu of his visit to the White House two days before his arrival in Jerusalem. He said he was obsessed with Obama, and that there will never be another chance where a man who professes values such as his will be president, and everyone must help him realize his vision.

6:00AM: Richard Goldstone seems to be feeling the pressure, as he has written the following op-ed in the Jerusalem Post to respond to the attacks on his fact-finding mission and report (my sources tell me he approached the Post and not vice versa).

Five weeks after the release of the Report of the Fact Finding Mission on Gaza, there has been no attempt by any of its critics to come to grips with its substance. It has been fulsomely approved by those whose interests it is thought to serve and rejected by those of the opposite view. Those who attack it do so too often by making personal attacks on its authors’ motives and those who approve it rely on its authors’ reputations.

Israeli government spokesmen and those who support them have attacked it in the harshest terms and, in particular my participation, in a most personal and hurtful way. The time has now come for more sober reflection on what the report means and appropriate Israeli reactions to it.

I begin with my own motivation, as a Jew who has supported Israel and its people all my life, for having agreed to head the Gaza mission. Over the past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq Oil for Food program. In all of these, allegations reached the highest political echelons. In every instance, I spoke out strongly in favor of full investigations and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

I would have been acting against those principles and my own convictions and conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the context of Operation Cast Lead.

AS A Jew, I felt a greater and not a lesser obligation to do so. It is well documented that as a condition of my participation I insisted upon and received an evenhanded mandate to investigate all sides and that is what we sought to do.

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission’s mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually bother to read it. Our mission obviously could only consider and report on what it saw, heard and read. If the government of Israel failed to bring facts and analyses to our attention, we cannot fairly be blamed for the consequences. Those who feel that our report failed to give adequate attention to specific incidents or issues should be asking the Israeli government why it failed to argue its cause.

Israel missed a golden opportunity to actually have a fair hearing from a UN-sponsored inquiry. Of course, I was aware of and have frequently spoken out against the unfair and exceptional treatment of Israel by the UN and especially by the Human Rights Council.

I did so again last week. Israel could have seized the opportunity provided by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East. Instead, we were shut out.

As I stated in response to a recent letter from the mayor of Sderot, I believed strongly that our mission should have been allowed to visit Sderot and other parts of southern Israel that have been at the receiving end of unlawful attacks by many thousands of rockets and mortars fired at civilian targets by Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza. We were prevented from doing so by, what I believe, was a misguided decision by the Israeli government.

In Gaza, I was surprised and shocked by the destruction and misery there. I had not expected it. I did not anticipate that the IDF would have targeted civilians and civilian objects. I did not anticipate seeing the vast destruction of the economic infrastructure of Gaza including its agricultural lands, industrial factories, water supply and sanitation works. These are not military targets. I have not heard or read any government justification for this destruction.

OF COURSE the children of Sderot and the children of Gaza have the same rights to protection under international law and that is why, notwithstanding the decision of the government of Israel, we took whatever steps were open to us to obtain information from victims and experts in southern Israel about the effects on their lives of sustained rocket and mortar attacks over a period of years. It was on the strength of those investigations that we held those attacks to constitute serious war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

The refusal of cooperation by the government of Israel did not prevent us from reacting positively to a request from Gilad Schalit’s father to speak personally to our mission at its public session in Geneva. No one who heard his evidence could fail to have been moved by the unspeakable pain of a parent whose young son was being held for over three years in unlawful circumstances without any contact with the outside world and not even allowed visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The mission called for his release.

Israel and its courts have always recognized that they are bound by norms of international law that it has formally ratified or that have become binding as customary international law upon all nations. The fact that the United Nations and too many members of the international community have unfairly singled out Israel for condemnation and failed to investigate horrible human rights violations in other countries cannot make Israel immune from the very standards it has accepted as binding upon it.

Israel has a strong history of investigating allegations made against its own officials reaching to the highest levels of government: the inquiries into the Yom Kippur War, Sabra and Shatila, Bus 300 and the Second Lebanon War.

Israel has an internationally renowned and respected judiciary that should be envy of many other countries in the region. It has the means and ability to investigate itself. Has it the will?

International lawyer Alan Baker has responded here.

Excerpt:

While indeed the mission heard, saw and was persuaded by the very one-sided picture elaborately staged by Hamas in Gaza, including hand-picked witness testimony and internationally televised and web-circulated public hearings, Goldstone’s complaint that they were not provided with input from the Israeli side is simply untrue to the point of being ridiculous. Several prominent Israeli and other international lawyers (including myself) and Jewish organizations forwarded to the mission and to Goldstone personally, vast amounts of information, including the official papers issued by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, legal opinions, facts and media cuttings regarding the Hamas rocket barrages, violations, ambulance hijackings and the like.

I appeared before the mission in Geneva, together with a senior delegation of Magen David Adom (MDA), in an attempt to persuade it of the seriousness of the terrorization of Israel’s southern population by the Hamas rockets, and the psychological effect on the public. The delegation detailed the wide-ranging activities by MDA in treating those affected – including Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip. Others, including representatives of Israeli families harmed by Hamas, appeared before the mission.

But obviously all this was to no avail, since Goldstone and his team chose, for whatever reason, to ignore this extensive information in favor of a Hamas-organized production and some very selective Israeli and foreign non-governmental organizations known for their criticism of Israel.

Read the entire response, and then go to this site for an extensive treatment of the Goldstone report, which renders Goldstone’s assertion that “there has been no attempt by any of its critics to come to grips with its substance” as laughable.

5:38AM: The UN have sprung into action regarding the alleged detonation of the alleged Israeli spy devices in Lebanon, with UNIFIL releasing the following statement:

“Preliminary indications are that these explosions were caused by explosive charges contained in unattended underground sensors which were placed in this area by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) apparently during the 2006 war,” UNIFIL said in a statement.

Meanwhile, I don’t recall seeing any UNIFIL statement on last week’s explosion at the Hizbullah official’s home, for which there exists strong “preliminary indications” that Hizbullah violated UN resolution 1701.

I’m sure UNIFIL are just itching to investigate the explosion, and if they do find that some Hizbullah terrorists were killed in it, they will take the only action they see fit.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

9:48PM: The IDF has released the following aerial footage, taken shortly after yesterday’s explosion in southern Lebanon, which shows Hizbullah terrorists closing down the area around the warehouse, driving in two trucks and removing weaponry from the site.

They then took the weapons to a known weapons storage facility in the center of the village of Dir a-Nahar about four kilometers away. Only after Hezbollah removed the weaponry did they allow UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army to enter the site of the explosion. The IDF has submitted the footage to UNIFIL to aid in their investigation of the incident.

Unexploded IDF ordinance, my ass.

5:25PM: Looks like the PA are not so happy with Barack Obama.

An internal document circulated among members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s political party says all hopes placed in the Obama administration “have evaporated” because of alleged White House backtracking on key issues to the Palestinians.

The Fatah Party memorandum, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, accuses the United States of backing off from its demands that Israel freeze settlement construction and failing to set a clear agenda for new Mideast peace talks.

Meanwhile, as PMW reports, the editor of the official PA daily has criticized the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama:

“After 10 months as president he [US President Barack Obama] has accomplished nothing. He has not brought peace anywhere, but has only escalated the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq… Obama’s acts are not worthy of any prize; but the opposite, he is a president unable to accomplish his goals and deserves a Nobel Prize for Impotence.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 10, 2009]

My advice to Obama, then, would be to stay clear of these guys.

5:10PM: Turkey has urged Israeli officials to use “common sense” in their statements about the current tension between the two countries.

In its statement the Turkish ministry said the “international part” of the “Turkish exercise” had merely been “postponed,” and “it is inappropriate to draw a political meaning and conclusion from the postponement.”

Therefore, it concluded, “it is impossible to accept the assessments and comments attributed to Israeli officials in the press. We invite Israeli officials to [use] common sense in their stance and statements.”

Meanwhile, here is Turkey’s idea of “common sense in their stance and statements”:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday accused the international community of shifting responsibility for the war in the Gaza Strip from Israel to Muslims.

—-

“People just watched from the comfort of their seats as phosphorus bombs rained on innocent children in Gaza,” The Turkish agency Sabah quoted Erdogan as saying. “In international platforms, efforts ensued to blame Islam for Islamic terror.”

“… When phosphorus bombs were rained on innocent children in Gaza, the whole world, all of humanity, watched from their comfortable chairs and their safe havens,” the Turkish prime minister said.

“However, as all this was happening, unfortunately from time to time in international discussion platforms, the term ‘Islamic terror’ began to be used, and efforts were made to place blame on the Muslims and Islam,” he said.

12:40PM: Photo of the day:

Italian U.N peacekeeping soldiers, patrol the area following an explosion in Tayr Filsay, Lebanon, near the port city of Tyre, about six miles (10 kilometers) from the border with Israel, late Monday, Oct. 12, 2009. An explosion ripped through the garage of a Hezbollah member’s home in southern Lebanon on Monday, and security officials said the building might have been used to store weapons. One senior security official said the blast killed one person, but the other officials could not confirm that. The Hezbollah militant group that holds sway in the south said no one was killed but one person was wounded.

Patrolling? Looks more like they are auditioning for a Zoolander sequel.

Then again, I guess we should be thankful they are at least awake.

8:25AM: Today’s Abbas-licking award has two nominees.

1. UN Special Rapporteur on palestinian human rights, Richard Falk (text that follows is from an auto-translation)

The Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Richard Falk, today, a written apology to President Mahmoud Abbas on statements made by Al Jazeera, the following is the text of the apology:

After that you review the records to prove ownership of the company’s National Telecommunications and checked, I verify the absence of any proof to confirm any relationship to the family of Palestinian National Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, specifically sons Yasser, Tarek Abbas, in the ownership of Wataniya Telecom, and on this I apologize for any harm I have unintentionally caused to the family of President Mahmoud Abbas a result of repetitive claims that are untrue that you have stated by Al-Jazeera, in particular, I claimed that the existence of a relationship in the company’s ownership of national communications by the family of President Mahmoud Abbas may explain why the Palestinian Authority in Geneva postponed vote on the report of the Goldstone until March 2010, and I reiterate my deep apologies for any injury and / or unintended damage I have caused them ‘.

Although I suspect that the apology may be motivated, at least partly, by this.

2. United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received a supportive nod from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who on Sunday praised the Palestinian leader’s engagement with UN member states regarding the Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead, and told him he was a credible partner for peace.

The two men spoke by phone, as Abbas faces growing criticism from Palestinians and the Arab world for his decision earlier this month to defer a UN Human Rights Council resolution on the Goldstone Commission’s report, which denounces Israel’s military action in Gaza.

On the same day that Abbas reversed his decision and called for the council to hold a special session on the report, Ban spoke with him about the report as well as the recent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in east Jerusalem, according to his spokeswoman Michele Montas.

Ban “also expressed his support for President Abbas’s engagement with member states on a proper process for the consideration of the Goldstone Report,” said Montas.

“If not now, then when,” Netanyahu reportedly said in the conversations with American officials. “Action must be taken in all areas to increase pressure on Iran and impose crippling sanctions on it.”

Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is remorseful over the whole affair.

Just kidding.

“They can continue to use this case (against Iran) through the media but it was a blow to their arrogance,” said the Iranian leader in reference to the United States and other Western powers.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

2:32PM: Hours before the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, around 150 palestinians have thrown stones at a group of Jews visiting the Temple Mount.

The incident began when a group of tourists entered the Temple Mount compound accompanied by a police force. At a certain stage, some 150 worshippers started gathering around them and calling out towards them.

Some of the worshippers began throwing stones at the group. The police force fired stun grenades in an attempt to gain control of the riot. Nine police officers were lightly injured by stones. Six of them received medical treatment on the site and the rest were evacuated to hospitals.

Fifteen worshippers were injured by stones and two were lightly hurt by the stun grenades and were evacuated to the al-Maqasid Hospital in east Jerusalem. Adult worshippers attempted to calm things down, while the group of tourists was removed from the site.

The palestinian Ma’an News predictably have a different take on events.

At least 26 people were injured and eight arrested as fierce clashes broke out at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem’s Old City on Sunday.

Three of the 17 wounded Palestinians sustained serious eye and head injuries, sources said.

Israeli police said nine officers were also hurt.

Clashes erupted after groups of Israelis entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday morning, reportedly under the guard of Israeli police. Palestinians threw stones, chairs, and shoes at the Israelis, while police injured 17 Palestinians during attempts to forcefully disperse them with batons and stun grenades.

On Thursday, the Al-Aqsa Foundation warned that Israeli police were planning to permit settlers entrance to the area. Officials in East Jerusalem predicted that the break-in would occur on Sunday under the pretext of marking Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement.

In other words, Jewish people peacefully visiting the holist site in Judaism = break-in. How’s that for peace and tolerance?

Interestingly enough, some of the wording of the Ma’an News report seems to have been changed. According to Elder of Ziyon, this is what the Ma’an report was saying over an hour ago:

At least 13 Palestinians were injured as fierce clahes broke out at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem on Sunday morning after Israeli police permitted settlers to break into the area, witnesses said.

Two of the injured Palestinians reportedly sustained serious injuries to the eye and head. Israeli police said two officers were also hurt.

On Thursday, the Al-Aqsa Foundation had warned of an impending incursion. Officials in Jerusalem said extremists were preparing to break into the holy Muslim area, and accurately predicted that the break-in would occur on Sunday under the pretext of celebrating a religious holiday.

Confrontations erupted after groups of Israelis broke into the compound, reportedly under the guard of Israeli police. Palestinians hurled stones, chairs, and shoes at the Israelis, while police tried to disperse the Palestinians by force, injuring nine people right away, and four more throughout the morning.

It’s almost as if Ma’an realized they had to tone down the language a bit, since it was even too much of a stretch for them.

12:32PM: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again thumbing his nose at the Obama administration and the West.

10:18AM: Hot on the heels of our peace partner Egypt showing their fond feelings for us comes Turkey doing the same thing.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday his country would push the Security Council to discuss a report by United Nations investigators accusing Israel  and Palestinian gunmen of war crimes in the Gaza war.

“We will definitely take the position to discuss this issue on the Security Council,” Erdogan told reporters.

9:00AM: According to some palestinian “political analysts,” Israel’s pinpoint strike on the three Islamic Jihad “ticking bomb” terrorists was not to prevent rockets from being fired on Israel, but rather for more devious purposes.

An Israeli airstrike that killed three Palestinian fighters on Friday night was targeted at Islamic Jihad in a calculated move intended to disrupt a precarious calm in the Gaza Strip, political analysts told Ma’an on Saturday.

The strike targeted Islamic Jihad in hopes that the group would respond violently, thus embarrassing the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, which has assiduously enforced a unilateral ceasefire since the end of Israel’s three-week war on Gaza last January.

I’m just surprised they didn’t claim it was to kill the men so we could steal their organs.

7:54AM: Here’s the latest video of Zionist occupation soldiers carpet bombing Gaza city in order to stop three laborers from delivering pipes to a nearby construction site.

Aussie Dave: Err, sorry there. I invited Richard Goldstone to guest post, but I’m guessing that was not a good idea. Here’s what really happened.

IAF Targets Three Terrorists on Their way to Launch Rockets at Israel

Last evening, Friday, September 25th 2009, An Israel Air Force air-craft targeted and identified hitting three terrorists east of Gaza City who were on their way to fire rockets at Israel’s southern communities.

The three terrorists hit were Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives residing in Gaza City, and part of a terrorist cell that has been firing rockets into Israel for the past few weeks, including rockets that hit the city of Sderot during the holiday of Rosh HaShana (the Jewish New Year) a week ago. The names of the three terrorists are Mahmoud Mussah Rammadan Bana, Kamel Hamdan Ibrahim Dakhdukh and Mohamed Salem Barawi Marshoud.

Approximately 50 rockets and mortar shells were launched at Israel during the last three months, totalling more than 250 since the end of Operation Cast Lead and more than 750 in 2009. Throughout 2008, over 3300 rockets and mortars were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel.

The IDF will respond harshly to any attempt to break the calm in Israel’s southern communities.

7:22AM: Here’s the latest interview with Richard Goldstone (in Hebrew with English subtitles)

Israeli President Shimon Peres gave plenty of people a big scare last night when he collapsed at an event.

Peres was standing up and replying to questions by the audience at a Rabin Center function when he collapsed. The president’s personal paramedic on behalf of the national bodyguard unit was present at the scene and administered initial treatment.

According to initial reports, Peres was able to recover and stood up within several minutes. He is said to have left the stage on his feet and was talking to those around him. Magen David Adom ambulance teams rushed to the scene and treated Peres at Dalia Rabin’s room at the site.

The president’s close associates said that he fainted because of a drop in his blood pressure. The sources said that after regaining consciousness, the president yelled at medical teams and his aides, telling them “I want to return to the Presidential Residence, I’m fine.”

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

9:15AM: 95 aid trucks are scheduled to cross into Gaza today.

9:00AM: A UNIFIL spokesman blamed “radicals from Palestinian refugee camps” in southern Lebanon for firing the two Katyusha rockets into Israel on Friday. September 11.

8:58AM: Anne Bayefsky looks at the UN’s treatment of Israel.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – Indian and Spanish UNIFIL officers proposed building an iron fence around the Baathaeel water pool to prevent cows from Israel from wondering into the area, allowing Lebanese shepherds full access to the pool.

Because everyone knows the pressing issue for UNIFIL to deal with is the disturbance caused by those darn Zionist Death Cows.^TM

Israel has expressed to the US government its willingness to withdraw from the Shaba Farms and the northern half of the town of Rajar, on the border with Lebanon, after receiving guarantees from Beirut that the areas would be under UNIFIL control, according to a Lebanese source quoted by the London-based Arab daily Asharq Alawsat, Tuesday.

The source reportedly said that General Claudio Graziano, the commander of the UN force in southern Lebanon, had succeeded in convincing Israel to withdraw from the disputed territories in a series of meeting with Israeli officials.

UNIFIL spokesperson Yasmina Bouzianne confirmed the report, adding that she hoped that a final agreement would be reached soon.

An Israeli diplomatic official was quoted by the paper as saying that the agreement was reached in a telephone conversation between Graziano and Defense Minister Ehud Barak in mid-August.

“An Israeli withdrawal from the Shaba Farms will leave Hizbullah with no more excuses to fight Israel,” the official was quoted as saying. “If Israel hands over those territories it will become clear to the Lebanese people that Hizbullah’s continued use of violence is nothing more than an excuse to continue its involvement in international terror.”

If this is the sole reason why Israel has agreed to hand over the Shaba farms, then I think it is a mistake. Hizbullah will not stop their violence against Israel, and will claim they are fighting the Zionists who have occupied the land of the palestinians for whom they care deeply. They will vow to fight Israel until every inch of “Palestine” has been liberated. And I suspect the Lebanese people will be fine with this, especially considering the existence of palestinian “refugees” in Lebanon.

Commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Maj.-Gen. Claudio Graziano on Thursday accused Israel of violating UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that brought an end to the Second Lebanon War.

During a press conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Graziano cited the IAF forays over Lebanon and the village of Ghajar, which he called “a permanent violation of 1701″ and “a permanent area under occupation.”

A further violation, according to Graziano, was Israel’s failure to provide maps of all the locations where it dropped cluster bombs during the 2006 war.

In contrast, he said that the UN enjoyed excellent cooperation with Hizbullah and with the local Lebanese people.

Ain’t that the truth.

The commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Claudio Graziano has distributed among his troops a contingency plan in case an Israel Air Force aircraft is shot down over Lebanon, the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar reported Tuesday.

The report came amid fears that Israeli aircraft would be targeted.

According to the Lebanese newspaper, in the event that an Israeli plane is shot down, UNIFIL troops must aim to reach the pilot first, and if the pilot is captured by armed militants, they must rescue him. The plan stipulates, however, that if the pilot is captured by the Lebanese army, nothing is to be done.

A few more stipulations:

• If the “armed militants” threaten the UNIFIL troops, the troops must run away. As fast as they can.
• UNIFIL troops should try to refrain from saluting the “armed militants”
• UNIFIL troops should only attempt a rescue during daylight hours, when the boogeyman is clearly out of play.

But instead of doing the responsible thing and removing the soldiers, the UN has defended their actions!

Israel is calling for removal of two United Nations soldiers from Lebanon after photographs surfaced of the soldiers saluting the coffins of Hezbollah terrorists during a prisoner exchange Wednesday.

Associated Press photographer Mohammed Zaatari captured an image of the troops paying homage to fallen Hezbollah fighters as trucks bearing their coffins drove through the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.

The blue-helmet U.N. troops, who operate under the auspices of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), are meant disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and be an impartial buffer along the country’s border with Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, said he was “shocked and horrified” by the photograph and that it was time for the saluting soldiers to go.

“I think they should be recalled and be sent back to whichever country they came from,” said Gillerman. “I think they’ve definitely compromised their impartiality and have in a very big way,

in a very serious way, compromised the integrity of the United Nations.”

But a UNIFIL spokeswoman said the salute was nothing out of the ordinary.

“It is customary in most armies for military personnel in uniform to salute whenever a coffin passes in a procession,” UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane said. “They were merely following this customary military tradition and saluted coffins draped in Lebanese national flags at their own initiative.”

The identity of the troops wasn’t certain, but Getty Images reports they were from Italy.

The incident occurred as Israel released five living Hezbollah prisoners and the bodies of 199 Lebanese and Palestinian militants killed in recent conflicts. In exchange, Hezbollah returned the remains of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped during a cross-border raid in 2006.

The truck bearing the coffins also featured a large image of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah mastermind who was killed in February in Damascus.

Israeli officials said UNIFIL troops were saluting the symbol of the violence they are meant to oppose and defuse.

“I think this is a very tragic and sad day for the United Nations when its soldiers who were sent there because of Hezbollah terrorist activities salute the terrorists and the killers,” Gillerman said.

“They are there as peacekeepers with a very clear mandate to disarm Hezbollah — they’re not there to honor terrorists,” he said.

The United Nations rejected the suggestion that its troops favored Hezbollah and told FOXNews.com that UNIFIL troops were doing their job and remained an unbiased force.

“They are impartial with regards to the forces on the ground,” Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman, said. “(UNIFIL) is an impartial source — it doesn’t show a bias for either side.”

Such assurances have done little to assuage Israel’s representatives, who said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon should be “appalled” by the action and called for disciplinary action.
“I think [Secretary Ban] should remove them from wearing those helmets and from serving the United Nations,” Gillerman said.

Nothing to see here..move along.

Notice the UNIFIL spokeswoman’s mention of the “coffins draped in Lebanese national flags”, meant to imply the soldiers thought they were saluting dead of the Lebanese army and not of Hizbullah. Tellingly, she does not mention the huge picture of Hizbullah arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.

I also very much doubt it is “customary in most armies for military personnel in uniform” to stop everything and salute a procession of coffins of the very people the armies are supposed to be fighting. But I’ll leave it to someone in the know to confirm whether or not this is the case.

In any event, we once again see why Israel should never have accepted UN Resolution 1701.

U.N. soldiers salute as a tractor-trailer loaded with coffins of nearly 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters and bearing the picture of slain Hezbollah top leader Imad Mughniyeh, right, arrives in the southern city of Tyre, Lebanon, Thursday, July 17, 2008. Eight tractor-trailers loaded with coffins are driving from south Lebanon to Beirut a day after a prisoner swap between Israel and Lebanon.

It is one thing to be utterly incompetent. It is another to be siding with evil.

Either way, agreeing to UN Resolution 1701 was clearly yet another of Israel’s huge mistakes.