"A very precarious situation". posted by Richard Seymour

Jesus suffering fuck. As Israel continued its assault on Lebanon last night - blowing up two blocks of flats in Beirut and killing twelve civilians in the south of Lebanon - we were advised by the news that Lebanon threatens the non-existent 'ceasefire'. Lebanon falters over truce detail said the Beeb. Lebanon is staggering towards a UN ceasefire said The Guardian. It's a strange story. I have already pointed out that there was no ceasefire to begin with, but for some obscure reason the nation's news makers do not consult me before releasing yet more bilge upon their sorry patrons.

Obviously, Hezbollah will not evacuate themselves from the south of Lebanon until Israel leaves. Everyone knows this. They knew it when they signed the resolution, they knew it when they approved the resolution in Tel Aviv. And everyone knew that Siniora, whose balls are clutched in one American and one Israeli hand, would try to push for Hezbollah to disarm and move north before then, despite his certain knowledge that neither the Lebanese national army nor the UN can stop an Israeli attack. Both Israel and Lebanon know there will be a low-level war of attrition as there was previously in the south. Major General Benny Gantz is quoted by the BBC as envisaging a "period of grey" because "You can't move from black to white easily". So, obviously, the rumblings overnight about "ceasefire in danger" were calculated cack, since nothing has happened that was not entirely predictable and predicted. There is no ceasefire, and the fighting will continue.

Now we're getting all that Middle East hope bollocks, and that won't do either, at least not from the BBC or anyone else with such a track record of pro-Israeli bias. 'Hope' in their hands means that the brown Islamic hordes have been suppressed. There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, however, once you give proper weight to the immense suffering caused by Israel's attacks and the likelihood that this will go on, since the infrastructure has been torn apart. Israel has not ceased, even temporarily, destroying Lebanon because it wanted to. It showed this with its barbaric, vindictive raids on civilians right up until the last minute. What happened is that Israel tasted defeat: Hezbollah and its communist, Christian and nationalist allies have given them a damned good hiding. If the IDF really is asking the Israeli goverment for a speedy withdrawal, it is not because they're good sports. Israel claims to have killed over five hundred Hezbollah fighters, but can name only 180 and no one else has confirmed those. Independent counts have tended to be closer to Hezbollah's estimates than the IDF's, and the last Hezbollah count was that they had lost 65 soldiers. Israel, on its own count, has lost 114 soldiers. Hezbollah does not, to my knowledge, try to count Israel's fatalities for them. Indeed, one of the imbalances in this "assymetrical war" was Israel's extraordinary, full-throated bragging about what it had done to Hezbollah, how much of their infrastructure was destroyed, how many of them had been killed. All of it, we now know, so much intestinal pie. The only thing Israel has been any good throughout this fight, is at delivering airborne death: they have killed over a thousand civilians, wounded about 3,600, displaced one million and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. If Israel could say a tithe of these things about its own condition, the bleating about 'existential threats' might look remotely credible.

The issues of Shebaa and the prisoner exchanges have been deferred under this 'ceasefire agreement', and no action is expected of either party for the agreement to hold. The Israelis have come out with the kind of 'ceasefire' they could have had several weeks ago. They cannot be planning to accept that situation, but neither can they expect to gain much by simply resuming air strikes.

Robert Fisk gazes into his crystal ball:

[T]he Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah's onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.

In all, at least 39 - possibly 43 - Israeli soldiers have been killed in the past day as Hizbollah guerrillas, still launching missiles into Israel itself, have fought back against Israel's massive land invasion into Lebanon.

Israeli military authorities talked of "cleaning" and "mopping up" operations by their soldiers south of the Litani river but, to the Lebanese, it seems as if it is the Hizbollah that have been doing the "mopping up". By last night, the Israelis had not even been able to reach the dead crew of a helicopter - shot down on Saturday night - which crashed into a Lebanese valley.

It has been suggested that Israel was pursuing the same strategy as in 1982, when it used PLO rocket fire to gradually expand its operations until it eventually took Beirut. That may be so, but they haven't even taken the south of Lebanon yet, and there is no way that the resistance are about to allow them to do so under the rubric of UNIFIL and the impotent Lebanese national army. Israel is not about to withdraw and is preparing abundant pretexts for a renewed assault should it fancy another big push. But at the moment, the best guess is that a subdued war of attrition and position is most likely: and it is one that Israel shows no sign of being able to win.