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The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
Almost all supposedly independent sources all qoute Lebanese claims that most of the casualties were civillian but is this really true. Numerous sources have since confirmed that Hezbollah actually suffered upto 700 killed and over 1000 wounded.
Unlike many of its counterparts in the media, the Daily Telegraph has been candid about Hezbollah?s efforts to hide its casualties. An Aug. 4 piece by Con Coughlin in the Telegraph noted that -
"Although Hizbollah has refused to make public the extent of the casualties it has suffered, Lebanese officials estimate that up to 500 fighters have been killed in the past three weeks of hostilities with Israel, and another 1,500 injured. Lebanese officials have also disclosed that many of Hizbollah's wounded are being treated in hospitals in Syria to conceal the true extent of the casualties. They are said to have been taken through al-Arissa border crossing with the help of Syrian security forces. ... "
A few weeks later, Patrick Bishop of the Daily Telegraph reported:
UN officials believe that Hizbollah will not want to reignite the conflict, at least for a while. The organisation's culture of secrecy has disguised the true number of its casualties. Funerals of "martyrs'' are being staggered to soften the impact of the losses. Some were interred without ceremony for re-burial later. A UN official estimated the deaths at 500, 10 per cent of the force Hizbollah is thought to muster ... (August 22, 2006)
Additionally, the Kuwait Times on August 30 reprinted a Stratfor article which reported that "Hezbollah has buried more than 700 fighters" from the recent fighting. This is in accord with a statement by Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former senior officer in Israeli military intelligence, who said in a public briefing reported by UPI, that:
... Hezbollah lost more than 500 men, even though it confirmed only some 60-odd killed. Israel identified 440 dead guerillas by name and address, and experience shows that Israeli figures are half to two-thirds of the enemy's real casualties. Therefore, Amidror estimated, Hezbollah's real death toll might be as high as 700. (Sept. 7, 2006)
For more information see
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=63&x_article=1195
Why then when there are sources available confirming Israels' assessment - both ARAB and non-Arab includin UN officials - that the Hezbollah suffered hundreds of dead does the media on the whole still claim that most of the Lebanese casualties were civillian?
Submitted on Wed, 2006-12-13 23:21
Re: The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
This seems to have shut a few people up. Come on, where are you arabists and islamic fascists? Come out from under your stones and prove these facts wrong. hezbollah took a mauling, sorry to burst your bubble.
Re: The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
Pretty much all the papers and sources i have read or heard estimated that hizbolla lost 500 to 700 fighters and that the civilian casualties on lebanese side was just under 1200. Is the fact that hizbolla lost so many meant to mean the war was justified?!
The civilian death count on israeli side was 44, in a whole month of relentless bombing that was supposedly purposely targeting civilians they only hit 44, on the other hand, israel, who was supposedly not targeting civilians killed more then a thousand, hmmm.
Batman You stated, in an earlier post, that 70 percent of hizbolla's rockets hit open areas, now they maybe inaccurate, but not that inaccurate, this, accompanied by the meagre civilian death count on israeli side, would suggest that hizbolla was not purposely going for the most civilian deaths, but simply trying to terrify their enemy.
The Israeli airforce, on the other hand, routinely bombed single targets twice with 12 minute intervals, the second bombing being reserved especially for the ambulances and trauma teams.
Re: The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
skipp
'Pretty much all the papers and sources i have read or heard estimated that hizbolla lost 500 to 700 fighters and that the civilian casualties on lebanese side was just under 1200. Is the fact that hizbolla lost so many meant to mean the war was justified?!'
I think you'll find that throughout the entire war the media constantly reported Lebanese casualties as being civillian along with Israeli military and civillian deaths. Reading the media today you can take the BBC as a perfect example. The popular phrase is 'Lebanon suffered 1200 deaths mostly civillian and Israel suffered 156 mostly soldiers. Nowhere have I read that Lebanon suffered 1700 deaths. If you take even the lower estimate of 500 Hezbollah from the highest total loss of 1200 you can't with any journalistic honesty use the above phrase.
'Is the fact that hizbolla lost so many meant to mean the war was justified?! '
The war would have been justified had the hezbollah lost only 1 fighter. Lets not forget who started the war though.
'The civilian death count on israeli side was 44, in a whole month of relentless bombing that was supposedly purposely targeting civilians they only hit 44, on the other hand, israel, who was supposedly not targeting civilians killed more then a thousand, hmmm.'
75% of Hezbollah rockets landed in open fields. That means about 1000 or so rockets landed in Israeli cities indescriminately so the death count, which thankfully included many Israeli arabs, was simply down to luck. Don't forget that during the first Gulf War Iraq fired 39 scuds into Israel causing not one direct fatality. At the same time of the scuds that landed on the far greater area of Saudi arabia, one single attack killed dozens of US troops. As for Israeli strikes there were I believe about 20,000 strikes that resulted in only 600 or so civillian deaths. Had the Hezbollah not used human shields this figure would have been far less.
'Batman You stated, in an earlier post, that 70 percent of hizbolla's rockets hit open areas, now they maybe inaccurate, but not that inaccurate, this, accompanied by the meagre civilian death count on israeli side, would suggest that hizbolla was not purposely going for the most civilian deaths, but simply trying to terrify their enemy.'
70-75%, call it luck. The fact is the Hezbollah targeted Israeli cities andonly a moron would claim they tried to avoid civillian deaths. Oh, I forgot who I was talking to. Are you saying that these islamic fundamentalists would respond to what they claimed was Israeli massacres by simply trying to scare the Israeli public? LOL what a comedian. The fact is that Hezbollah lost its entire long range missile fleet in the first 39 minutes of the war in an operation the IAF claimed was as important and succesfull as the opening strikes of the 6 Day War. Nasrallah would have loved nothing more than to send missiles in to Tel-Aviv and certainly bigger missiles into Haifa. I accept you're a little embarrassed by these findings but Hezbollah will get another chance soon enough.
'The Israeli airforce, on the other hand, routinely bombed single targets twice with 12 minute intervals, the second bombing being reserved especially for the ambulances and trauma teams.'
Is that right skippy? Please do share your sources with us.
Re: The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=32224
Hezbollah holding commanders accountable for Lebanon disaster. One strike in particular against its logistics centre killed 50 operatives. That would account for all of their casualties if we believe the media's reporting.
Re: The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
> http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=32224
>
> Hezbollah holding commanders accountable for Lebanon
> disaster. One strike in particular against its
> logistics centre killed 50 operatives. That would
> account for all of their casualties if we believe the
> media's reporting.
the BBC were very keen to make out that the recent killing of al-qaeda terrorists in Somalia were all civilian casualties. Since Gilligan and the Gulf war I do not trust them at all.
Re: The TRUE hezbollah casualty count in the recent war
No Coverage of Hezbollah Casualties: All About the Money?
August 17, 2006 - 10:28.
Look at any of the casualty figures coming out of Lebanon in the world's major media organizations, and you'll see something very close to this:
The Lebanese death toll, meanwhile, rose to 842 when rescue workers pulled 32 bodies from the rubble in the southern town of Srifa, target of some of Israel's heaviest bombardment in the 34-day conflict. The figure was assembled from reports by security and police officials, doctors and civil defense workers, morgue attendants as well as the military.
The Israeli toll was 157, including 118 soldiers, according to its military and government.
What is missing from this death toll (which CBS News has now quietly removed from this web report) are the casualties sustained by Hezbollah.
Many people would presumably be interested in knowing the toll the war has had on Hezbollah, as Hezbollah's actions did indeed trigger this latest war. But a recalcitrant media has steadfastly refused to provide these figures.
The Israel Defense Forces, as a standard practice, makes an effort to photograph and document each Hezbollah fighter confirmed killed, and also estimates the number of unconfirmed/unclaimed Hezbollah casualties from air strikes and artillery fire. Certainly, a media that has spent a considerable amount of their time and resources ferreting out and reporting America's secret national security programs could easily access unclassified information, some of which has been published on the IDF's own web site. Even a cursory analysis of the world's media reporting out of Lebanon reveals that in photographs, on video and radio broadcasts, and in print, Hezbollah casualties are almost never reported. So why does the media choose to underreport Hezbollah's casualties?
The answer may at least partially lie in stories of Lebanese casualties that the world media does choose to report. Story after story, photo after photo, dead and distraught Lebanese civilians clog the mediastream, building a false, grim montage of a war in which primarily Israeli soldiers and Lebanese civilians die.
This is not the whole truth of this war, but a partial truth developed through complacency and an apparent willful disregard to report the facts on the ground. Instead of seeking and publishing the entire truth, newsrooms have decided that they will publish the stories and images framed by foreign, mostly Arab Muslim reporters, even though their own cultural interests in these events are a clear and undeniable conflict of interest precluding even a pretense of unbiased reporting.
This is beyond bias, it is a reckless and willful disregard for reporting the whole truth in favor of reporting "news" that is easier to sell in a larger world media market. The casualty statistics are there, but the media sticks to the narrative they have helped create because while honest reporting is a goal, the business of the media business is business.
If it "bleeds it leads," but only if what leads sells advertising. News consumers around the world consume the news that more closely matches their perceptions of how reality should be, and stories critical of Hezbollah, stories that show their failures and deaths, don't sell in world population featuring 1.3 billion Muslims that hope for Israel's demise, or at the very best are indifferent to their fate. It is anti-Semitism by cashflow, a pocketbook jihad that buys the media's silence.
This morning I received a comment from an IDF sergeant, stating in part:
It's not classified, but I dought[sic] you'll ever see these figures in the MSM. According to our statistics we (the IDF) have scored OVER 600 CONFIRMED enemy kills (photgrphed [sic], documented, claimed and added to the killboard, I personally scored 2 kills to add to my record) and another 800-1200 unconfirmed/unclaimed kills (this estimation includes kills form airstrikes/artillary shelling). The Hizb'Allah losses aren't counted, on the most part, against the official number of Lebanease[sic] casualties.
Hezbollah has suffered 500-600+ confirmed fatalities, and estimates are that another 800-1200 are dead; perhaps half of Hezbollah's armed forces, and yet the media chooses to ignore these readily accessed figures in favor of a more marketable Lebanese civilian body count.
The media chooses to underreport Hezbollah's casualties because it is bad for business, while it unashamedly pimps civilian corpses for profit. That is just one of the ugly realities of this war that isn't considered "all the news that's fit to print."
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