Haaretz has yet another rather disturbing article about the war.

It seems that many of the short-range Katyushas were actually not mobile at all but rather entrenched in the farms and groves of local Lebanese farmers hidden by vegetation and thermal blankets.

When Hizbollah wanted missiles launched they told the farmer by cellphone (whom it turns out they were apparently paying) to launch the missiles.

These missiles were found by accident when the IAF hit a grove and the vegetative cover was burnt down revealing the embedded missile launchers with their hydraulic lifts.

While Haaretz is concerned by the lack of intelligence transfer between the various army units I am concerned by something else.

Why didn’t we napalm all the farms (if not at the beginning of the war, then at that point)?

Once we knew the farmers and their farms were active participants we had an obligation to obliterate them completely – yet we did not.

There is no reason our soldiers needed to enter villages with buildings still standing (full of snipers and terrorists), and there is no reason our citizens had to sit in bomb shelters for a month when we could have burnt out their fields and destroyed the launchers hidden there.


Was this an intelligence failure, or actually yet another moral failure?