No, proportionality does not rest on whether they were military targets or not - that's a different metric - the "not a war crime" metric. Killing ten times as many people isn't "proportionate". Blowing up hundreds of times as many buildings isn't proportionate.

It also isn't doing much good. As far as I can determine Israel has reduced Hezbollah's missile launch capability by about 20%.

Still, Israeli target selection - hitting fleeing civilians, ambulances, hospitals etc... displays a great deal of flexibility. I suppose it's theoretically possible that all (or most) of those buildings had Hezbollah military facilities in them, but I'm betting not. (Note: military facilities. Unless people want to agree that Israeli hospitals, clinics and schools are legitimate targets because they're Israeli.)

And I'm sure the pilots recognized that the fleeing refugees looked like Hezbollah military members. The women, the children - they all grow up to be Hezbollah, don't they?

A lot of the ones who survive will.

I don't mean that Israel's behavior is praiseworthy, but when has war been praiseworthy?

I don't mean that Israel's reaction is proportionate either. I am just not sure. After all, this is a war in which civil casualties are that count. "Disproportionate" perhaps means "a good killing ratio." It is what a government needs to keep its own constituencies as satisfied as possible when rockets rain down in Haifa and other towns killing and injuring civilians as innocent as the Lebanese Shiites that the Israelis target - either to kill or displace them to the north.

Casualty figures both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli frontier crucially depend on a) the type of war, and b) the balance of might as between the parties in conflict. The type of war is more Hizbollah's choice than Israel's. After some years in southern Lebanon trying to uproot Hizbollah, Israel withdrew in 2000 because of a total failure. The Shiite militia was so embedded in the social fabric that Israel realized that it was not a war on a well-defined group but on a whole community that amounts to almost forty per cent of the Lebanese population. Present-day war is simply that previous war, resumed.

Summing up, I don't feel like being able to say whether or not the Israeli reaction is proportionate. It looks like disproportionate according to our standards, but is it really so? I really don't know.

...then the notion of poroportionality as it applies to determining whether a conflict is just is a useful rhetorical tool. If you want to discuss policy, then my view is that it sucks pretty bad. Proportionality is a useful tool for governing how conflicts are waged but it just doesn't work when it comes to governing the initiation of hostilities (and I would point out that one can't even begin to evaluate an argument founded on proportionality regarding the justice of this war using just one overhead - and that was the argument made). If it's such a great tool when dealing with the justice of a given war (as opposed to how they are waged), why is it so universally ignored? Hell, the guys that promulgated the doctrine used it much more as a selling tool than as a sanction.

You want to use proportionality as a means of evaluating how this conflict is being waged and come to the conclusion that the IAF has some 'splaining to do - welcome to the chorus. I think my posts over the course of three and a half years make it quite clear that I'm a charter member of that club and I don't much appreciate you not acknowledging that in your zeal for the sarcastic rhetorical point in the last 'graf.

As to the attrition to Hezbollah's missile launch capability, I don't have much faith in a 20% estimate. The capability's been degraded more than that just due to the amount of ordnance that Hezbollah has expended.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

given Hezbollah's structure, that there were targets under those buildings sufficient to justify such attacks. In the relatively small residential area where the damage is worst, I can count about a dozen 6-12-story buildings destroyed down to the ground, with about the same number with major damage (ie, entire floors missing, facades blown off and so on). It's kind of unlikely that there were two dozen eg. command and control bunkers within that very small area.

...either didn't quite know what their aim points were (other than Nasrallah's house, which looks to be the big pile), or they were deliberately striking those structures or under them. Media accouts that they are putting out assert that that specific region of Beirut is closed off and no one but Hizbollah loyalists is allowed in. How true that is, I dunno - but it might have an effect on the weaponeering.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this damage is not random - the thing that the small segment of the overhead doesn't show is that this damage is relatively spatially confined. If one looks at this image (caution, it is very large) it is clear that the damage, though extremely extensive, is spatially discrete - at least over the coverage of the overhead.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

although it also looks like it would be a pretty difficult area to close off completely. The other possibility is that this is tied to that very strange Jerusalam Post article,
where a senior IAF officer told officials that the IDF CoS had ordered that 10 apartments in the Dahiya suburb of Beirut for every rocket that fell on Haifa. About all the IDF could muster was that the officer was 'mistaken'. But this looks like the damage that could result from such a policy.

A high-ranking IAF officer caused a storm on Monday in an off-record briefing during which he told reporters that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz had ordered the military to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut in retaliation to every Katyusha rocket strike on Haifa.

The officer said that the equation was created by Halutz and that every rocket strike on Haifa would be answered by IAF missile strikes on 10 12-story buildings in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiya, a Hizbullah stronghold. Since the beginning of Operation Change of Direction, launched on July 12 following the abduction of two soldiers during a Hizbullah cross-border attack, over 80 buildings in the neighborhood have been destroyed.

xlink

Halutz has complete air superiority and vast resources of ordinance. No way he means he is reasonably certain there are bunkers under all ten of those buildings or he'd have been striking them already.

...this one sounds fishy. The IDF has denied the statement, FWIW:

The IDF Spokesperson's Office later retracted its accusation that reporters had misquoted the officer and issued a second statement claiming that the high-ranking officer had made a mistake and was wrong in claiming that Halutz had issued such a directive.

Additionally, it's clear from the timestamp on the overhead (July 22) and the date for the statement given in the article (July 24) that the buildings had already been struck (i.e., he had been "striking them already"). What I suspect we're looking at is the aftermath of the widely described strike on July 20 where the IAF dropped 23 tons of ordnance in south Beirut, allegedly going after Hizbullah bunkers. Hizbullah's response to the attack was that no fighters were killed, though they asserted that a partially completed mosque had been destroyed - they were notably silent on the subject of civilian casualties.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

I guess we need an additional piece of information here. As they have backed off on the claim that this "high ranking officer" was misquoted (in 2006, when everyone has some kind of voice recorder on hand, even a cell phone, it tends to make "he never said that" less tenable) is this officer claiming he was present at a meeting where Halutz (or someone in a position to transmit Halutz's directives) said this?

Or is this a case where scuttlebutt went around that this was Halutz's policy?

Pretty irresponsible thing for a "high ranking officer" to do, to interpret scuttlebutt not transmitted through the chain of command as a "directive" or a "policy", neh? Considering this specific a wording?

"every rocket strike on Haifa would be answered by IAF missile strikes on 10 12-story buildings in the Beirut neighborhood of Dahiya, a Hizbullah stronghold"

...admit in the context of wanting the international community to let them keep pounding on Hezbollah. I can't think of anything they could say that would make it harder, actually - barring something to the effect of eating babies for breakfast. The Google Earth link set makes it clear that there were a lot of strikes in that area. FWIW, this links to the "before" shot (note that the original image was oriented with north to the left).

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

...I personally know guys who went into Beirut during the first invasion who told me that on more than one occasion when they took sniper fire from high-rises the response was to call in an airstrike and down the entire structure. YMMV on this one, I guess.

One funny story out of that mess for me as a recovering archaeologist was one that an Israeli archaeologist told my old supervisor - they were advancing to contact somewhere in southern Lebanon when they started taking incoming. They were hugely exposed, so they looked wildly around for shelter and saw a ditch -- everybody legged it for the ditch and dove in with the archaeologist on the bottom. He said he lay there on his side with his whole squad mashed on top of him, and right there in front of his eyes he noticed a profile with microliths from one of the periods that he specializes in falling out in handfuls - apparently he said it was the only time when he's ever been completely uninterested in a find like that.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

that the senior Air Force officer was not misquoted, but that he was mistaken. This seems extraordarily unlikely to me: the idea that a senior Air Force officer would believe that such a policy existed when it didn't is no less far-fetched than the idea that the IDF would have such a policy.

One mighte also note that the chronology works as well: the rocket strike on Haifa that killed 8 Israelis was on the 16th, give a couple of days for such a policy to be generated, and then there's a massive attack on the 20th. And dissemination to Hezbollah (if not to Western reporters) of a policy like that might be seen as a major deterrent.

This seems extraordarily unlikely to me: the idea that a senior Air Force officer would believe that such a policy existed when it didn't is no less far-fetched than the idea that the IDF would have such a policy.