Our movements on the ground were restricted by the army to a limited area of the village, but neighbouring buildings and communities appeared, from a distance, to be untouched.
These incursions seem – so far – to be more “limited and targeted” geographically than militarily.
The graffiti on a building commandeered by troops read: “We wanted peace, you wanted war”.
“Most of the terrorists ran away,” Col Malka told me. “[But] dozens of houses were booby-trapped. When we went house to house, we discovered booby-traps and weapons. We had no choice but to destroy them.”
We only have the army’s account of what happened here.
I asked an army spokesman whether any women or children were present when the operation here began. He replied that all civilians had been given ample warning to leave.
The human rights group Amnesty International this week described Israel’s evacuation warnings in southern Lebanon as inadequate and overly general, and said they did not absolve the country of its obligations under international law.
We were also shown three caches of weapons it said were found inside civilian homes here, including boxes of brand-new mortars, new anti-tank missiles and mines, as well as sophisticated shoulder launched rockets and night-scopes.
One anti-tank missile we saw was already semi-assembled.
