The IDF was on Lebanese soil, LAF only defended Lebanese land.

It's not about a "tree" !!! How can anyone be so naive?

For years, we have been waiting for the day the Lebanese Army would protect South Lebanon, and that ONLY the Lebanese Army would claim the responsibility for defending Lebanese borders, instead of the hizbulla militia...

The entire world was pushing and supporting for this step, and now that the Lebanese Army did its duties, all we get is criticism from world media?!

What? You want the Lebanese Army to sit back and let the hizbulla militia control the south?

The IDF was on Lebanese Land, the Lebanese Army defended the land.

RIP LAF's martyrs.

I fear you have been influenced by the recent Lee Smith attacks Walt because I think its quite the opposite. Israel knows fully well how tense the situation is right now. They were just playing with fire. They have been itching to use any excuse to take out Hezbollah once and for all. They have also been trying to get us and France to stop shipment of weapons to Lebanese army. This might be a good turning point to get that resolved.

Having said that, I agree with the rest of your points. The Lebanese were not thinking at all.

Israel informed UNIFIL it would be doing the work and it informed Lebanon it would be doing the work. If UNIFIL wasn't there it wasn't because Israel told them not to come and as such it is hard to see why Israel should be blamed for UNIFIL not being there or for UNIFIL not pruning the bushes.

It is not surprising, even expected, that Steve would try to place some of the blame on Israel, but it is just the predicable knee-jerk 'blame Israel' reaction. Clearly Israel informed all of the right people and was totally in the right here.

And a thought experiment:

If it was Israel who started the exchange of fire, would Steve have blamed it on a single "numbskull", or would he have tried to make more hay out of it and assign some dark motive and larger plan to the Israeli government? My guess is the latter.

It doesn't matter it just shows how jumpy everyone is.

The Lebanese army and the Lebanese government have Nasrallah breathing down their necks, the IDF and the Israelis have nutters like Avigdor Lieberman banging the drum for war. We can only hope that saner heads prevail.

Israel killed a Canadian UN peacekeeper at his well known and recognized UNIFIL post in 2006. No apology from Israel, and no demand for one from puppet Stephen Harper.

Fighting over a cypress tree is certainly a tragedy for both sides, especially when there is casualties involved. But the incident could have been much worse. Hezbollah, with its vast arsenal of rockets and missiles (estimated to be 40,000 strong) could have used the opportunity to provoke violence towards Israel's northern frontier in the name of "protecting Lebanese sovereignty." From thankfully, Hassan Nasrallah chose to stay in the sidelines during the dispute. This shows that Hezbollah is indeed weary of another violent confrontation with Israel, despite its own growing military capability in the Southern Lebanon.

Both the Israeli and Lebanese Governments are meeting with UNIFIL to resolve the incident and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. That's at least a start, and a confirmation that both sides want to hold the fragile peace together.

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As I see it there are two elements that led to this incident. The first as Mr Walt mentions is the tension in both Israel and Lebanon and the larger region that a war is seen to be coming.

In the end this can almost become a self fulfilling prophecy as it will naturally put soldiers on both sides more "on edge" than normal and also makes the political leaders more defensive and more inclined to reassure the voters that they are capable of standing up to the "other side".

The second element to this border clash is due to the vagueness of the border. The "blue line" was drawn and approved by the UN in 2000 and was based on the historic border between the British mandate of Palestine and the French mandate of Lebanon.

However the UN said at the time that it is not going to be the final negotiated border. It was just something both sides could agree to following the Israeli withdrawal (don't forget no peace treaty has ever been signed since the end of the Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon). Making it more vague running a few yards behind the blue line in the technical security fence built by Israel and since it is a small chain-link (electrified) fence going along the whole border many Lebanese consider this to be the real border.

Giving the tension amoung both Israeli and Lebanese populations that another war is coming (which makes both armies edgy) and the vagueness of the border it is easy to see how this situation happened and how war could accidentally start and escalate.

Also of course the majority of the Lebanese Army is Shiite and in many cases hate Israel as much as Hezbollah. Another possible factor in this tragic incident.

As for what was known on August 3rd:

Statement of IDF:

IDF soldiers were installing a remote camera next to the borderline.
Some LAF warned that IDF were in Lebanon territory.
IDF answered thay were clearly in Israel territory.
LAF shot direct fire and RPG.
IDF answered with tank artillery and combat helicopters.
Israel protested with UN and Unifil
Israel investigates about possible Hezbollah wearing LAF uniforms involvement.

Result:
1 dead and many wounded between Israelis.
2 deads and 1 wounded in Lebanon, a bulding destroied.

Media and sources updates of August 4th:

IDF were cutting a tree to allow an observation post the proper visual.
The work were agreed with UNIFIL, confirmed and in execution as usual.

Unifil confirmed that IDF works were planned and known by any side.
Unifil confirmed that IDF were about 200 meters inside Israel territory and never left it.

Lebanon Ministry of Defense confirmed that IDF never left Israel and that at any time IDF were inside Israel

IDF suffered the death of a Lt.Col., killed by a sharp shooter and the serious wound of a Cpt, plus minor wounds at some other military.

The building destroyed was a command/observation post of LAF.
The two killed were probably LAF military within the command post.
The command post is probably the source of the direct fire and the 2 dead of LAF the sniper squad.
The journalist is considered a collateral damage.

There is more than the necessary evidence that LAF was the aggressor.

The short answer is they weren't.
However, the connection between the LAF soldier(s) involved and Hezbollah must be expored/investigated before a definitive answer can be given, With the recent rocket attacks, the UN investigation of the role Hezbollah played in Hiriri's assassination heating up and the efforts to reconvene direct paece talks betwwen Israel and Abbas starting to show fruit, one can not rule out the possibility that the motive was not borne of stupidity, but of an effort to drawn attention away from Hezbollah's role in the assassination (which would not go over well with many Lebanese) as well as potentially side tracking the peacetalks. Look for more of these tyes of events rocket attacks, cross border skirmishes, etc...)asthe paece talks get closer to direct negotiations. The puppet mastersin Iran, no doubt, will be in the background pulling the strings. Unfortubnately for Ahmabuildnukes, he may not be aroundlong enough to play Geppetto if a repeaof todays little event is more successful.

Oh come on.
You know why.

4 million cluster bombs dropped in Lebanon.
Shelling civilian areas.
Deliberate destroying of non military infrastructure.
Constant illegal overflights in Lebanon airspace
Constant Israeli threats....announcing their policy of collective punishment...'we will hold all of Lebanon responsible' and blah,blah,blah.
So the US pampered little monkeys beating their chest and pretending to be silverbacks got 'preemptively' slapped? ....Good.

Your realist credentials are slipping on this one.

The only reason Israel still exist is probably because ' real' realist don't have their finger on the button. If they did Israel's second act of aggression would be have been their last.
There is no cure for psychopathic governments or collective psychosis.

From L.A. Times:

"Widely circulated footage of the incident appears to show an Israeli crane reaching over the Israeli security fence to cut down the tree, drawing fire from Lebanese troops who claimed the Israelis crossed the UN-demarcated Blue Line dividing the two warring countries. Israel says it returned fire with light arms, artillery, and missiles.
The Blue Line was drawn in 2000 after the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and has since been used as a de-facto border, but does not follow the Israeli security fence in several contested areas, often leading to misunderstandings."

To uproot a tree for warfare is an obscenity.

Ippon1

"How come it is always Israel invading other countries Only other person/country to do that in middle east in last sixty years was Saddam Hussein"

Really are you that ignorant of middle east history?

Without using Wikipedia or any other sources off the the top of my head.
The Syrian invasion and occupation of Lebanon till 2008
The current occupation of Turkey in Northern Cyprus
The current occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco
Egyptian troops in Southern Yemen in the 1970's
Iran-Iraq war

If I am not mistaken there were several small border clashes in North Africa in the late 20th century that involved one side invading the others border regions.

Please before you post something, do some homework, you are embarrassing your side.

I do not know if you read these posts but I must commend you for saying what we are all feeling. This was a stupid and pointless loss of life.

I am convinced that the 1# reason why this happened is because their are no official channels of communication between Israel and Lebanon.

If you notice these things do not happen on Israel's border between Jordan and Egypt, that is because they have channels to talk when one side needs to do border work like trimming a freaking tree.
In the case of Syria there is the UNDOF which physically separates both armies by several hundred meters.
So either UNIFIL will create such a zone (not likely and Lebanon will rightfully object) or an official channel must be established between the two sides.

Walt, I call on you to ask for such a channel, maybe Lebanon will listen if you and others like you call for it, and I am sure if they agree, America will convince Israel to go along with it.

if we look at the casualties then we can see that Israel lost a senior military commander and Lebanon lost only two foot soldiers. A senior military officer is always worth more than many foot soldiers. So I have to say even if it was a targeted assasination by the LAF as claimed by the IDF and the Zionist bigots , it was a thing which is beneficial in the long run.

I would like to contribute to the debate regarding the anemic conditions in Gaza. There is no dobut that the siege is restricting the import of iron-rich food so needed to the Gazan children that is the biggest reason for the anemic conditions prevalant in Gaza.

Remember Dove Weisgloss , a senior aide to the former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon , said that "We are going to put the palestinians on a diet course".

I agree with all your points about the torture and degradation Syrians have inflicted upon their own population. One thing you have evidently forgotten is the massacre perpetrated upon the people of Hama by the very same Syrian state. And their crime ? They were being faithful Muslims.

I have to say that the western idea of nation state can not and will not work in the context of the Muslim world. There is no difierence b/w a Syrian,an Iraqi,a Kurd,a Lebanese or a Turk , only this rotten idea of nation state and national boundaries divide people from each other.

So the unification of the Muslim world under a benevolent,pious and just order is the need of the hour.

I would like to say that the West also need to think beyond the idea of sovereign nation states. What do you think ?

If are going to cut down a tree right next to a neighbour’s fence, it is sensible to call on the neighbour in good time and tell him what you want to do, what will be involved, and ask whether this or that time would be OK for him. You would apologise in advance for any inconvenience, exchange a word or two and that would be that.

If you have fallen out with the neighbour and normally glower at each other across the fence, then a polite note expressing the same intention is even more sensible.

Either of those would provoke the thought: It was nice of them to ask.

You may have every right to cut the tree down and feel no obligation to tell anyone but, if you do adopt that as an attitude, you will likely provoke trouble. That is commonsense.

I just want to inform the readers here of an article by Gideon Levy in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on this matter, "Only we´re allowed",
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/only-we-re-allowed-1.306104

According to Mr Levy, the matter is perhaps not so very clear and obvious as Prof. Walt describes the incident. Perhaps we haven´t learnt the whole truth about it, as yet.

You failed to note, and the first 1/3 of the comments failed to note that Islam places a special reverence for trees. The Koran says that no one may fell a single tree in battle. Further, the Cedar tree is the very symbol of Lebanon.

If the facts are indeed as you presented them, the Lebanese acted impetuously. That said, it wouldn't be the first time that Israel attacked or had competitors to Hezbollah/Hamas attack Israel to discredit these independent resistors.

Trees have out sized value in Islam. Their symbolic significance is greater than they would be Christians. Add to this the immense value of trees in drier arid climes. You Yankees have little appreciation for trees, I dare say you take them for granted. Texans have long had a better sense of the Middle East experience, particularly relating to the value of water and trees, than our East coast elite.

There is clear video showing an Israeli machine with a mechanical arm extended over the border fence into Lebanese territory attempting to prune or cut the tree.

I suspect our dishonest broker America has once again twisted UNFIL's arm to give a biased, servile to Americans and Jews, verdict.

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