A short history behind the conflict by BBC correspondent Jim Muir. Muir was recently among a convoy, organised by the Australian Embassy, of civilians fleeing Tyre which was hit by mortars.
History repeats with a vengeance
BBC correspondent Jim Muir, who has been reporting the current conflict from the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre, has covered the upheavals in Lebanon since the original crisis erupted there in 1975.In the first of a two-part series, he looks at how this round of violence compares with - and was born of - previous conflicts.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the initial pretext - reflected in the codename given to the operation, Peace for Galilee - was to push PLO guns about 40km (25 miles) back from the border, beyond range of northern Israel.
Israel hoped to establish a friendly government in Beirut in 1982
The goal sounds familiar today, as Hezbollah rockets hail down on Israel's northern cities.
But the real agenda of then-Defence Minister Ariel Sharon in 1982 swiftly became clear, as Israeli forces raced to Beirut and besieged an Arab capital for the first time.
It was far more ambitious: to decapitate the Palestinian movement by destroying the PLO, to eject Syrian troops from Lebanon, and install a friendly government in Beirut which would make peace with Israel.
The Israelis failed to destroy the PLO, but succeeded in squeezing it out. Yasser Arafat and his fighters were obliged to evacuate on ships and be taken off to Tunis.
But even that was a pyrrhic victory. Yasser Arafat ended up returning to his homeland and died as President of the Palestinian Authority.
Iran and Syria
Israel's other goals were foiled by a banding together of its strategic regional foes - Syria and Iran.
There is little sign so far that Hezbollah has been operationally affected
In 1982, Lebanon's majority Shia community - fed up with paying the price for Palestinian guerrilla adventures against Israel - initially welcomed the Israeli intervention.But its increasing resentment against the continuing Israeli occupation provided fertile ground for Iran and Syria to encourage the formation of a vehicle that was to prove both deadly and effective in driving the Israelis out: Hezbollah, which did not exist before the invasion.
Using suicide bomb attacks and other tactics, Hezbollah joined other Syrian-backed groups in expelling the Multi-National Force (MNF), which had intervened to take over from the Israelis in the Beirut area.
It is a sobering thought for any country considering joining the proposed international force for the south Lebanon border zone.
The MNF, led by the US and including French, Italian and British contingents, pulled out in 1983 when they found themselves embroiled in a militia war and taking casualties for no clear purpose.
It took 17 bloody years and hundreds of casualties for the Israelis, who had fallen back on a broad border security zone, run by their local proxies the South Lebanon Army (SLA), to draw the same conclusion.
In 2000 they pulled out, and the SLA collapsed literally overnight. Hezbollah moved forward into the border zone unopposed.
Now, following Hezbollah's massively provocative cross-border raid on 12 July in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured, history is repeating itself - but with many differences.
Mission impossible?
Israel has launched a stunningly violent attack on Lebanon with flexible but wide-ranging political ambitions, which are partly tied up with the perception that it is fighting part of its American partner's "war on terror".
It would like to destroy Hezbollah and its leadership, or at a minimum, to see it disarmed and pushed beyond missile range of Israel, with either the Lebanese Army or some kind of international "enforcement" troops taking its place in the border zone.
But destroying Hezbollah is not possible. It is deeply rooted in Lebanon's biggest community. In alliance with the more moderate Shia movement Amal, it dominates Shia politics.
However hard the Israelis press, Hezbollah cannot be packed onto ships and sent off to Tunis like the PLO.
By inflicting massive damage on Lebanese civilians and the country's infrastructure, the Israelis apparently intended to exert pressure on the Beirut government to curb Hezbollah.
But that cannot work either. Hezbollah's militia is powerful, well-armed and highly motivated - as the Israelis have found to their cost, both now and before they left Lebanon in 2000.
Having been reconstructed under Syrian auspices before Syria's troop withdrawal last year, the Lebanese Army has many Shia in its ranks.
If it were to be sent against Hezbollah it would almost certainly fall to pieces on sectarian lines, as happened in the 1970s and 80s, raising the prospect of a civil war pitting the Shia against the rest.
US 'contradiction'
In contrast to many previous bouts of violence, there has been an extraordinary lack of US restraint on the Israelis, who have this time pursued a course more violent than anything they have unleashed on Lebanon before.
Washington has said nothing as Israeli jets have blasted targets from Beirut international airport to roads, bridges, factories, petrol stations and other non-military targets all over Lebanon, in addition to strikes on civilian areas and vehicles which have taken a heavy toll of life.
The US is caught in a contradiction here. It is committed to the elected, mainly anti-Syrian government headed by Fuad Siniora, who is being visibly weakened daily by the onslaught on non-Hezbollah economic and infrastructural targets.
So that is a tactic that may have already largely run its course and will be increasingly hard to pursue, with rising international concern over the militarily irrelevant damage and casualties it has inflicted, apart from the fact that it is not working.
It is akin to the tactics adopted by Israel in the Palestinian arena, urging Yasser Arafat and later Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to crack down on Hamas and other radical groups, while simultaneously destroying their ability to do so. The result was Hamas' ascendancy.
Unknown outcome
What other options does Israel have?
Despite the massive destruction inflicted on the teeming southern suburbs of Beirut, where the leadership is based, there is little sign so far that Hezbollah has been operationally affected.
Even if the Israelis succeed in their aim of killing the charismatic Hezbollah chief, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and other leaders, there is no guarantee their deaths would have a functional effect on the conflict.
His predecessor, Abbas Musawi, was killed by an Israeli helicopter strike on his car on a remote road in southern Lebanon in 1992, with no discernible benefit to Israel.
The blitzing of the south has also failed to prevent Hezbollah missiles and rockets raining down on Israel's own civilian population. Hezbollah leaders say they have only used a fraction of their stocks.
In his latest televised message, Hassan Nasrallah has warned that the strikes would be carried beyond Haifa, and then deeper still. All his warnings so far, have been carried out.
With their air strikes apparently unable to silence the missiles, the Israelis resorted to ground incursions, despite a national consensus that Lebanon is a dangerous swamp in which to become mired.
That truism was immediately validated by the results of the incursion so far.
In the battle for the small border village of Maroun al-Ras, the Israelis conceded at least seven of their soldiers were killed. Pushing on to the regional town of Bint Jbeil, they lost even more to carefully-planned Hezbollah ambushes and counterattacks, despite the massive firepower thrown in to support their ground forces.
Border control?
Israeli leaders talk of establishing some kind of security belt along the Lebanese side of the border, an idea tried in many permutations with painful results from the invasion of the south in 1978 until the final withdrawal in 2000.
Unless there is a very significant degradation of Hezbollah's capabilities - at the current rate of progress in the Maroun al-Ras/Bint Jbeil area - it would take Israel many weeks and many scores of military casualties to secure a contiguous strip of any depth along the entire border, far less the entire area up to the Litani River which seems to be the plan.
And if they did, what then?
Israeli officials have suggested they would hand the strip over to a robust international force, with "an enforcement role", as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it.
Or to the Lebanese Army, if it can be sent down.
A peacekeeping force with no peace to keep? If there is no ceasefire agreement with political underpinnings, which nation will commit troops to do Israel's fighting for it, to engage Hezbollah in a struggle which the Israelis themselves have not been able to win?
More likely, the Israelis would themselves be left in control of that border strip.
Any fixed presence would clearly act as a magnet for more attacks by Hezbollah and perhaps other Lebanese and Palestinian groups, rallying against a new occupation of Lebanese soil that would further bolster Hezbollah's raison d'etre as a resistance movement.
History repeating itself, again.
Dozens killed in Lebanon air raid
BBCMore than 54 civilians, at least 34 of them children, have been killed in a town in south Lebanon in the deadliest Israeli strike of the conflict so far.
Displaced families had been sheltering in the basement of a house in Qana, which was crushed after a direct hit.
Lebanon's prime minister denounced "Israeli war criminals" and cancelled talks with the US secretary of state.
Israel said it regretted the incident - but added that civilians had been warned to flee the village.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel would "continue to act with no hesitation against Hezbollah" which has been firing rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon.
Hundreds of Lebanese protesters staged a violent demonstration, ransacking the UN headquarters in Beirut, chanting slogans against the US and Israel and in support of the Hezbollah militants.
Several countries have condemned the attack and renewed their calls for an immediate ceasefire - opposed by Israel and the US.
At an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, Mr Annan urged members to strongly condemn the Qana attack and to put aside differences to call for an immediate ceasefire.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Sunday the situation could not continue and that all hostilities ought to cease once a UN resolution is adopted.
Lebanon's health minister now says about 750 people - mainly civilians - have been killed by Israeli action in Lebanon since their operations began 19 days ago.
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate after the Qana attack. Several Katyusha rockets hit the border town of Kiryat Shemona on Sunday, wounding several people, in what residents described as the worst day so far.
A total of 51 Israelis, including at least 18 civilians, have been killed in the conflict, sparked by Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on 12 July.
Intense bombing
Witnesses said the early-morning strike hit the three-storey building where families had been sheltering in the basement, crushing it sideways into an enormous crater.
One survivor said the "bombing was so intense that no-one could move".
Elderly, women and children were among those killed in the raid, which wrought destruction over a wide area.
Reporters spoke of survivors screaming in grief and anger, as some scrabbled through the debris with bare hands.
"We want this to stop," a villager shouted.
"May God have mercy on the children. They came here to escape the fighting."
Rescuers found the experience too much to cope with.
Our correspondent saw a Red Cross rescue worker sitting in the sunshine just sobbing, overcome with emotion.
Israel said the Shia militant group was responsible for the Qana strike, because it used the town to launch rockets.
The BBC's Jim Muir, in Qana, says many did not have the means - or were too frightened - to flee.
'Heinous crime'
Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora denounced Israel's "heinous crimes against civilians", and said there was "no room on this sad morning" for talks until Israel had halted its attacks.
He called for an "immediate, unconditional ceasefire", and praised Hezbollah militants who were "sacrificing their lives for Lebanon's independence".
The US secretary of state said she was "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of innocent life.
"We are also pushing for an urgent end to the current hostilities, but the views of the parties on how to achieve this are different," she said.
Correspondents say the town holds bitter memories for the Lebanese.
Qana was the site of an Israeli bombing of a UN base in 1996 that killed more than 100 people sheltering there during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" offensive, which was also aimed at destroying Hezbollah.
The New York Daily News has a longstanding pro-Israel editorial stance. I don't know much about the Canadian whatever.
In a single attack Israel increased the Lebanese civilian death toll by about twice that of the Israeli civilian death toll over the course of this conflict. How can one not urge restraint?
The disregard for foreseeable civilian casualties is inexcusable and tantamount to war crimes - which due to U.S. backing undoubtedly the countries leadership will never be held to account - especially when one considers that Hezbollah rocket attacks have only continued and intensified over the course of this action. The military action is achieving nothing but a destabilisation of the Lebanese government and increase in pro-Hezbollah/anti-Israeli sentiment among the civilians who have had their families displaced or killed by Israeli bombing. And the eventual outcome of this will probably end in a prisoner exchange besides.
Originally posted by Bardock42
Not really, you don't know what he experienced in his life. he might have much..much..much more experience than you or other older people. Especially since his intelligence might make it much easier for him to actually acquire experience.
"he" lives in the US and is a college student. So he is basing his knowledge I am assuming off recent news.