Willy Pete moves to Lebanon:

The AP reported on Monday that at Tyre's Najem Hospital:

"Jawad Najem, a surgeon at the hospital that is named for his family, said patients were admitted Sunday with burns from Israeli phosphorus incendiary weapons. 'Mahmoud Sarour, 14, was admitted to hospital yesterday and was treated for phosphorus burns in his face,' Najem said. Mahmoud's 8-month-old sister, Maryam, also suffered similar burns to her neck and hands when an Israeli rocket hit her family's car just a kilometer from the hospital. The children were with their father, mother and other family members when their car was hit by an Israeli missile. The father died instantly. " [video]

I remember white phosphorus from our little visit to Fallujah back in Nov. 04. Not that we were the first to use willy pete on innocent civilans -- the Israelis do it every time they invade Lebanon: According to HRW: [thanks peacepalestine]

"During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Israeli shelling of villages in southern Lebanon in July 1993, and subsequent shelling attacks, there have been numerous allegations of Israeli forces using phosphorus against civilians. The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government."

The Israelis are supossedly really trying hard not to have another Qana type incident according to Newsweek:

"The Israelis say they are being more careful this time around, not least because they don't want to be forced to stop. 'The presidential approval by Bush, the surprising level of support he's giving Israel, the patience he's giving Israel—it looks as if there's a great amount of slack being cut to us," says a senior Israeli security source, who did not want to be identified by name because he is not authorized to speak on the record. 'Absent a Qana, it might go on.'"

Something tells me willy pete isn't the only thing they're using against civilians. The NYT reports today that doctors at a hospital in Nabatiye said of some victims of Israel's bombs that their skin "dissolved like wet paper when he began to stitch." Now, I wionder what that could be? Some new chemical weapon or an old one?
And speaking of Israel attacks on UN instalations:

The BBC reports: "UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says. The four unarmed UN observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, died after their UN post in the town of Khiam was hit by an Israeli air strike on Tuesday."

Coming to Israel's rescue Tony Snow said "something went really wrong" to cause the deaths, but also said there was no reason to suggest the bombing was deliberate. No, of course not, what wuold make anyone think that? They only bombed the outpost at least fourteen times before they dropped the big one and then continued the shelling while rescurers attempted to pull the bodies out. The BBC says, a diplomat familiar with the report said that "had Israel responded to the requests, 'rather than deliberately ignoring them', the observers would still be alive."

This incident sounds oddly like the Israeli attack on the American spy ship USS Liberty in June of 1967, during the Six Day War, which killed 34 Americans and wounded over a hundred. Then as now, the Americans were close to the fighting and at the time and some theories suggest that Israel; bombed, shelled, torpedoed and napalmed the Liberty in order to keep the Americans reporting Israeli activities in the town of El Arish. (The only thing that kept Israeli troops from being dropped on to the deck of the Liberty by helicopters to finish the job, was that they heard the Liberty's May Day signal being acknowledged by the USS Seretoga.) It is possible the Israelis back then were concerned that the spy ship might have been monitoring their killing of Egyptian prisoners of war and were determined to prevent this news from getting out. Maybe this time the UN observers witnessed something the Israelis were doing they didn't want exposed to the world. The over -the-top effort to completly anihillate the UN outpost is precisely the same way the Israelis went after the Liberty.

In this war many are warning that, through miscalculation or accident, things could suddenly go very wrong. It is instructive to remember that, initially the US navy and president Johnson thought that the ongoing attack on the Liberty was being conducted by the Russians, and in responce Navy fighters loaded with nuclear weapons were launched from the USS America. At the last minute it was determined that the attackers were Israeli and the planes were recalled.
Who knows what the Israelis are up to here, but it is quite clear the Israelis couldn't have been ignorant of the status of the target they repeatedly bombed for hours.