[civilians] when are they considered combatants

Before getting into the main question, the attack from the Lebanon raised a question:

So, if Nasrallah did not fire the rockets, who did?

Some Arabs claim that Israel fabricated the attack to justify striking against Hezbollah. That is difficult to believe, since the IDF already has too much on its hands and cannot fight on two fronts - despite assurances from Israeli officials that they can simultaneously battle Hamas and Hezbollah.

A more reasonable argument is that Saudi Arabia doctored the attack, through its own proxies in South Lebanon, to incriminate Hezbollah and provoke Israel into striking at the Islamic group. Saudi Arabia, after all, was not pleased with the results of the Lebanon war of 2006, since it failed to break - or even weaken - Hezbollah, which it sees as an extension of Iranian influence in the Arab world.

Coinciding with the latest tension in Lebanon was the emergence of a rival group to Hezbollah on January 7 called the Arab Islamic Resistance - believed to be linked to Saudi Arabia.

"When is a civilian a civilian and when is he a combatant?" An article on the Iraq war dead says:

And there is a more fundamental problem: hospitals had no formal category for "civilian combatants," although some doctors did note militia membership when this was obvious. The principal distinction they drew was between civilians and military personnel -- and this is not synonymous with the distinction between noncombatants and combatants.

Civilian combatants is a tricky category. Would you consider Dad's Army as civilian? If you were being invaded and were neither official military nor militia, would you still not have taken up a cudgel against a German unit if it came to it? Would you not give aid and succour to your nation's troops and aid them in whichever way you could? Would you not sit at a desk at Bletchley and try to decode enemy messages? Is not all of this destructive to the enemy?

What is a civilian in war time?

Hamas plays this game to the nth degree [see youtube above]. The ringleaders say that the civilians are lovingly surrounding the glorious hamas heroes and willingly laying down their lives. Oh really? Hamas have this thing about death is glorious and every Palestinian laying down his grandparents' and children's lives for the cause [see video] but the question still remains, from the point of view of Israel:

"When is a civilian a civilian and when is he a combatant?"

This is the thing it is so difficult to forgive with Hamas - that they will lodge weaponry and military supplies in the centre of supposedly civilian populations to increase the civilian dead and even fire at Israel from in there:

The Hamas tactic of firing rockets from schools, hospitals and mosques dates back to 2005, when Israel ended its occupation of Gaza. Several months ago, the head of the Israeli air force showed me a videotape (now available on YouTube) of a Hamas terrorist deliberately moving his rocket launcher to the front of a U.N. school, firing a rocket and then running away, no doubt hoping that Israel would then respond by attacking the rocket launcher and thus killing Palestinian children in the school.

And what of the "civilians" who suddenly man a rocket launcher, then just as suddenly go back to being shoemakers and housewives the moment the rockets are launched?

Hamas leaders have echoed the mantra of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, that "we are going to win because they love life and we love death."

This is why the bloggers who are waxing lyrical about the wicked Israeli targetting of civilians have their facts skewed.

What absolute bollocks.

It is significant that the individuals and groups saying Israel are "targetting" civilians are largely non-middle-eastern and/or leftist. People on the ground there know full well that Israel is solely targetting anything remotely Hamas:

Major Avital Liebowitz, of the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, told the correspondent that the army had indeed widened its target list in comparison to previous operations, saying Hamas has used ostensibly civilian actions as a cover for military activities. "Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target," she said.

Israel let it be known that they were doing this. Now what did Hamas do? Move all civilians to safe ground which civilized nations do? Not a bit of it. They arrange the maximum possible head count for their own people. And why are Hezbollah not attacking in the north? Why are Egypt and Syria not wading in? Why is Iran not sending troops?

So to quote the civilian casualties of Israel's actions - yes and the blame is laid fairly and squarely at the feet of the people represented in the youtube video which opened this post.

Thank goodness rational bloggers with no axe to grind recognize this:

I posted earlier this week about the double standards on display, but the more ludicrous articles I see from apologists for this violent anti-Semitism, especially the truly disturbing ones that try to make some (sometimes thinly veiled) comparisons with the Holocaust, the more I draw the conclusion that many of these apologists as little more than modern day “noble savages” (though what’s noble about violent ant-Semitism is beyond me).

Stop the rockets. Stop the violence. That's it.

UPDATE: For a more detailed look, try this and this.