In Israel the controversy is over "why didn't we win", while in the rest of the world to controversy is over the perception of aggression by the IDF. I would call this a "logic gap".

where is the condemnation from Amnesty?

Once again the lefties are here to save the day...This report was not about the use of weapons or tactics as much as it was about failture of the political leadership and military machine...this commision was tasked to whitewash the political responsibility for the wars failture and point responsibility at past leaders (PM etc.) and commanders as well as point out the deficincies in the operating procedures of the army and general staff. There were of course problems and I am sure much fault lies there. But the direction and leadership mostly comes from those in power namely the PM, the Minister of defense and the chief of staff. While this may be on recomendations from various heads of branches the final decisions are still often left to them to sign off on. I think Olmert should step down but personal opinion aside he should at the very least get up there and say "I am sorry I failed you and made mistakes...I would like to finish of my term..." A little bit of humility from the smug... would go a long way.

Kind of am int to request a NGO [Non Governmental Organization ] terrorist group to have red cross -crescent access to soldiers of a nation ..and ask Hzb renounce roketing civilians .. as tough it had a right to send rockets into any nation at all . war is not a picnic

to amnesty: shove the report up your u know what!

why would the W. Report bother discriminate between civilian population, Hizbullah? Poor Naive Amnesty!

Instead of reporting on human rights abuses in China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, North Korea, Belarus, etc., etc., etc., etc.,....they go after us. A fledgling democracy of 7 million people living under constant threat of bombings, rockets, shootings, and other forms of mass murder in a tiny hamlet of the Middle East. Amnesty International should just rename itself "We hate Jews and Jewish self-determination International". Then their actions, statements, and propaganda wouldn't be deeply flawed at all. They'd be right on message.

What do you know... these things supposedly done by israel are the very things being done by the arabs to practically everybody in israel and africa and around the world. so why does AI only accuse israel of these consparicies??? Because AI is a BLINDED BIGOTED operation hoping to raise more funds by pushing its bigotries. note... the report wants israel to act on AI's unfounded remarks and non-truths that israel commited war crimes. sounds good to the uninitiated... but it is AI that has the burden of proof to give any credibility to its remarks. AI is a BLIND anti-israel BIGOT .

What did you expect from Amnesty?? I guess that firing thousands of rockets into Israeli cities is ok? Or may be firing rockets from Lebanese villages? How about parading body parts of Israeli soldiers?Or holding soldiers in captivity without providing any inormation as required by international laws? Amnesty, you can take this report and SHOVE it!!!

How is Israel the aggressor when the Arabs invaded Israel, murdered and kidnapped it's soldiers from within Israeli territory and then launched rockets at Israeli civilian cities? At act of aggression did Israel commit? None at all, but then again the fact is Israel had NEVER been the aggressor, the Arabs always start wars and then we have to finish them. AI get there was NO WAR CRIMES by Israel. When are you going to address the fact that you are defending war criminals?

When Israel and the United States realized that Hezbollah could not be bombed into submission, they pushed a resolution, 1701, through the United Nations. It placed an expanded international peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hezbollah in check and try to disarm its few thousand fighters. But many significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed, including several that seriously put in question Israel's account of what happened last summer. This is old ground worth revisiting for that reason alone. The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after Hezbollah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border. (A further five troops were killed by a land mine when their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hezbollah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.

Hezbollah didn't distinguish itself from the civilian pop.. I didn't here Smart say anything about that in this regard. Under the circumstances, the IDF did the best it could. Israel isn't the only body with a PR problem.

How does Amnesty know that "military strategies that failed to discriminate between the Lebanese civilian population and Hizbullah combatants and between civilian property and infrastructure and military targets." Were they present when these strategies were created. Ask Hezbollah to wear uniforms and stop shooting from homes before asking the impossible. As always Amnesty is a farce!!

Sadly, most Israelis view any criticism of the Jewish State as being “anti-Semitic” by nature. That's the problem with using the adjective "Jewish" as the modifier of the noun "State". Any and all critical commentary is easily dismissed as racist diatribe. This same fundamental flaw applies to the Islamic Republic(s) and to any self-described "Christian Nation". These exclusive self-descriptions, in the 21st century, are anachronistic at best. For nations that use a religious modifier to describe themselves, dismissing criticism, as abusive bigotry, is a clever way to ignore constructive criticism and to avoid needed self-examination and vital internal re-evaluation. It may be comforting, but it can eventually lead to pathological self-delusion. Israel often ignores International Law and routinely violates the accepted norms of human decency; but legitimate criticism is repeatedly dismissed as nothing more than anti-Semitic bigotry. Self-defense is the usual justification for these amoral state-policies. No, the ends do not justify the means, even for Zionism. While claiming to be the only rule-of-law, secular democracy in the ME, the Israeli government operates on a moral plane very similar to that of its despotic and theocratic, neighbors. The price of Israeli self-delusion is compassion fatigue for the Jewish State concept. Sympathy burnout for the descendants of the Holocaust victims, in the USA and elsewhere, poses a potential "existential threat" to the "Jewish State" idea. Apartheid in the Occupied Territories, "Jim Crow" for Arab-Israelis, pre-emptive wars with neighboring states, state-sponsored assassinations and meddling in US foreign policy formation at the highest levels - these are the kinds of issues that illustrate the failure of Herzl's well-intentioned utopian scheme. Israel is rapidly becoming a pariah state. It’s just not working out as advertised. The US needs to quickly divest and disassociate itself from the militarized, faith-based, race-based colonial enterprise in Palestine, before we are drawn into fighting another costly war at Israel’s behest. Bring the Diaspora to America! Let the discredited Zionists fend for themselves.

AND WHAT WAS HEZBOLAH DOING? PICKING DAISIES! OH YEA I FORGOT THEY DIFFERENTIATE... THEY ONLY FIRE ON CIVILIANS, AND THEY APOLOGIZE IF THEY MISTAKENLY HIT MILITARY PERSONNEL.

Israel did not win, but mostly over why Israel had to pay such a dear price in order to push this criminal militia called Hezbollah north of the Litani. Just for your information, Israel is now readier than ever to meet Hezbollah any time they dare start again. Israel will always defend its people, but this time for real and for keeps. In the process, if Hezbollah continue to hide behind their women's skirts, so be it. They will account for their criminal and imoral behaviour in the end. They cannot and should not use children and old people as baricades and come out on the higher moral ground. As for Amnesty International nothing surprises me, least of all their partiality. If the Vinograd report didn't meet their expectations, theirs surely didn't meet MY expectations. They never touched the raw part of the problem, namely, why did Hezbollah illegally cross an international border to kill and kidnap Israeli soldiers ? They must have known this much that such a blatant act of piracy Hezbollah undertook can cause a lot of misfortune to the Lebanese population. Do you believe that we should simply renounce our very lives for the good of Amnesty reports ? This way Amnesty can only achieve one thing - IRRELEVANCE.

Their report would have condemned the Allies for not discriminating between Germans & Nazis. Pehaps there would have been a reference to some slaughter of some German citizens as part of the cycle of violence that engulfed Europe. (Can Amnesty and Treason Now, I mean, Peace Now, please move their offices to Sderot?)

... also known as "double standard disease". Who committed war crimes? The Israelis trying to hit the Hizballah, in the attempt to stop rockets bombing, or the Hizbullah using as human shields the Lebanese population? There was ANY discrimination used by Hiballah militas in rocketing Israel? Were they trying to hit "military targets" or were they hitting ANY target? In Israel there is a CLEAR distinction from military bases and residential areas, there is a CLEAR distinction between civilian and soldiers. No doubt, in both cases, WHO is a war criminal: Hizballah and their supporters: Iran and Syria.

WHEN WILL THESE SELF RIGHTEOUS ORGANIZATIONS (AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY FOR THAT MATTER) UNDERSTAND?: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAMAS AND THE CIVILIAN POPULATION (or they'd do something about it no??). THEY ARE ONE AND THE SAME. HOW BLIND ARE OR ISRAEL HATING ARE YOU??

One of Israel's main claims during the war was that it made every effort to protect Lebanese civilians from its aerial bombardments. The casualty figures suggested otherwise, and increasingly so too does other evidence. A shocking aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at least a million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were left littering south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire. Israeli commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the UN puts the figure closer to 3 million. At the time, it looked suspiciously as if Israel had taken the brief opportunity before the war's end to make south Lebanon – the heartland of both the country's Shi'ite population and its militia, Hezbollah – uninhabitable, and to prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites who had fled Israel's earlier bombing campaigns.

There seems to be a growing renewed animus against Israel lately. Arun Gandhi, grandson of the purported humanist Mahatma Gandhi, thinks Israel and Jews in general are prone to, and singularly responsible for, most of the world’s violence. The Oxford Union is taking up the question of whether Israel even has a right to continue to exist. Our generation no longer speaks of a “Palestinian problem,” but rather of an “Israeli problem.” So perhaps it is time for a new global approach to deal with Israel and its occupation. Perhaps we ought to broaden our multinational and multicultural horizons by transcending the old comprehensive settlements, roadmaps, and Quartet when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a dispute which originated with the creation of Israel. Why not simply hold an international conference on all of these issues — albeit in a far more global context, outside the Middle East? The ensuing general accords and principles could be applied to Israel and the West Bank, where the number of people involved, the casualties incurred, and the number of refugees affected are far smaller and far more manageable. Perhaps there could be five U.N. sessions: disputed capitals; the right of return for refugees; land under occupation; the creation of artificial post-World War II states; and the use of inordinate force against suspected Islamic terrorists. In the first session, we should try to solve the status of Nicosia, which is currently divided into Greek and Turkish sectors by a U.N. Greek Line. Perhaps European Union investigators could adjudicate Turkish claims that the division originated from unwarranted threats to the Turkish Muslim population on Cyprus. Some sort of big power or U.N. roadmap then might be imposed on the two parties, in hopes that the Nicosia solution would work for Jerusalem as well. In the second discussion, diplomats might find common ground about displaced populations, many from the post-war, late 1940s. Perhaps it would be best to start with the millions of Germans who were expelled from East Prussia in 1945, or Indians who were uprooted from ancestral homes in what is now Pakistan, or over half-a-million Jews that were ethnically cleansed from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria following the 1967 war. Where are these refugees now? Were they ever adequately compensated for lost property and damages? Can they be given promises of the right to return to their ancestral homes under protection of their host countries? The ensuring solutions might shed light on the Palestinian aspirations to return to land lost sixty years ago to Israel. A third panel would take up the delicate issue of returning territory lost by defeat in war. Ten percent of historic Germany is now part of Poland. The Russians still occupy many of the Kurile Islands, and Greek Cyprus lost sizable territory in 1974 after the invasion by Turkey. The Western Sahara is still annexed by Morocco, while over 15 percent of disputed Azerbaijan has been controlled by Armenia since 1994. Additionally, all of independent Tibet has been under Chinese occupation since 1950-1. Surely if some general framework concerning these occupations could first be worked out comprehensively, the results might then be applied to the much smaller West Bank and Golan Heights.

In a fourth panel, the international conference should take up the thorny issue of recently artificially created states. Given the tension over Kashmir, was Pakistan a mistake — particularly the notion of a homeland for Indian Muslims? North Korea was only created after the stalemate of 1950-3; so should we debate whether this rogue nation still needs to exist, given its violent history and threats to world peace? Fifth, and finally, is there a global propensity to use inordinate force against Muslim terrorists that results in indiscriminate collateral damage? The Russians during the second Chechnyan War of 1999-2000 reportedly sent tactical missiles into the very core of Grozny, and may have killed tens of thousands of civilians in their hunt for Chechnyan terrorists — explaining why the United Nations later called that city the most destroyed city on earth. Syria has never admitted to the complete destruction of Hama, once home to Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. The city suffered the fate of Carthage and was completely obliterated in 1982 by the al-Assad government, with over 30,000 missing or killed. Did the Indian government look the other way in 2002 when hundreds of Muslim civilians in Gujarat were killed in reprisal for Islamic violence against Hindus? The lessons learned in this final session might reassure a world still furious over the 52 Palestinians lost in Jenin. In other words, after a half-century of failed attempts to solve the Middle East crisis in isolation, isn’t it time we look for guidance in a far more global fashion, and in contexts where more lives have been lost, more territory annexed, and more people made refugees in places as diverse as China, Russia, and the broader Middle East? The solutions that these countries have worked out to deal with similar problems apparently have proven successful — at least if the inattention of the world, the apparent inaction of the United Nations, and the relative silence of European governments are any indication. So let the international community begin its humanitarian work! Greek Cypriots can advise Israel about concessions necessary to Muslims involving a divided Jerusalem. Russians and Syrians can advise the IDF on how to deal properly and humanely with Islamic terrorists. Poland, Russia, China, and Armenia might offer the proper blueprint for giving back land to the defeated that they once gained by force. A North Korea or Pakistan can offer Israel humanitarian lessons that might blunt criticisms that such a recently created country has no right to exist. Iraq and Egypt would lend insight about proper reparation and the rights of return, given its own successful solutions to the problems of their own fleeing Jewish communities. But why limit the agenda to such a small array of issues? The world has much to teach Israel about humility and concessions, on issues ranging from how other countries in the past have dealt with missiles sent into their homeland, to cross-border incursions by bellicose neighbors. No doubt, Middle East humanitarians such as Jimmy Carter, Arun Gandhi, and Tariq Ramadan could preside, drawing on and offering their collective past wisdom in solving such global problems to those of a lesser magnitude along the West Bank.

The entire attack was a war crime. Every "soldier" in the occupation army who illegally attacked Lebanon is a war criminal and should be treated as such. Hezbollah was defending Lebanon and attacking illegal occupation settlements. Every Hezbollah target was near an actual militiary base. Israel intentionally puts its civilians including Palestinians in harms way through locating military targets near them. The ICC must start trials now.

There has been plenty of self reference regarding the aerial bombing campaign against Germany and probably had Amnesty existed as an organisation it would have found much to condemn. But that does not excuse israel's war crimes. Often the weak cry of - but they did it so why can't we - emanates from israel to excuse its barbarous behaviour. What sort of arguiment is that. No country has ever committed an entire people to collective punishment and imprisoned them as Israel has to Gaza. Not even the repulsive white S Africans behaved so atrociously.

should be obvious ... YES ! When AI is able to report on the Islamist terror groups without having their arms twisted, when AI can report on all those torturing and starving their own populations, when AI is able to report on 7th century behavior of killing rape victims (honor killings) treating women like animals etc that we all know exist in scores of countries, in the same manner as they gleefully report on Israel defending herself against endless terror attacks, stabbings, suicide bombings - decades and decades, THEN and only then can they and will they be considered even handed and legit. Otherwise , they are no better then a UN group about to have their second Jew Bash fest in S Africa - or so you think they're also legit and not anti Semitic?

Human Rights Watch researchers found numerous cases in which the IDF launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians. In one case, an Israeli air strike on July 13 destroyed the home of a cleric known to have sympathy for Hezbollah but who was not known to have taken any active part in the hostilities. Even if the IDF considered him a legitimate target (and Human Rights Watch has no evidence that he was), the strike killed him, his wife, their 10 children and the family’s Sri Lankan maid.

Please Shut Up!!!

I am a supporter of either Moledet or the New Hatikva party and I agree with this conclusion. The Lebanese are not political Arabs like most other Arab state citizens or at least to the same extent. A majority of the population didn't hate us as human beings until that war. True, the only real friends we have EVER, EVER had in the history of the world were brutally stabbed in the back by us in 2000 but now even those who don't want war with us hate us. I believe that when it is needed and to a reasonable degree, a certain amount of punishment AS A RESULT of defensive measures can be unavoidable to a population ONLY when most of that population support the actions of their leaders. In Lebanon this is not and NEVER was the case at least until we screwed them. Even many of the Shiites didn't really hate us until our reaction. Who are we trying to help there? The Sunnis? The ONLY group who can NEVER possibly truly like us? A response was due to the seven years of rocket fire (a result, once again of the diseased minded policies of the Israeli LEFT) but that much disregard and a certain amount of contempt for Lebanese civilian rights there was DISGUSTING. Lebanese are the ONLY Arabic speakers that I don't blame for hating Israel. We have taught them that the only way they can solve their problems with us is to support the 'Palestinian' 'right of return'. Even those who were potential allies. The only way out is this:- To offer a transit buffer to Lebanon along a line through the Golan to Jordan. To offer them to be the first country to have their UNRWA problem solved and give naval transit for UNRWA residents there to Lebanon. In exchange for this they will stop shooting at us and hopefully although unlikely, sign a bilateral deal. Oh and to give LOADS of compensation to ex SLA men wherever they may be..