Mideast crisis--Blog from Jerusalem
Many Israelis who raise livestock refuse to leave their homes, praying the Katyusha rockets won't fall on them. "We have 150 calves," said Geula Feldinger, a tough mother of four from Sde Yaakov, an Israeli farming community. "One of our neighbors has a dairy farm and another has a chicken coop. No one is leaving. If we do, our animals will die."
In south Lebanon's villages, farmers don't have much choice. The Israeli military has called for them to leave their homes in order not to be injured by the attacks on Hezbollah targets. AHAVA is now asking the Army not to bomb pastures, stables, and dairy farms. "We are very worried; their situation is difficult," More told me.
AHAVA, which has done many cross-border rescues in the past, plans to coordinate with the Israeli Army the transfer of Lebanese animals across the border. "The animals are not terrorists," said the overworked volunteer. "If people will be willing to come to the border to pass their animals to us, we will take them—even the injured ones—and return them whenever they want."
July 18
Jerusalem — Attempting to deny Hezbollah any information useful for better aiming at targets, Israeli authorities have instructed the media not to identify the exact locations where the Katyusha rockets fall.
But driven by competition, ratings, and the Israeli public's appetite for information, TV networks and newspaper photographers are racing to the site of the latest hit. Israel's military censor is aware of the problem. "We are flexible," said Yehezkel, a worker at the censorship headquarters who declined to give his full name.
Part of the reason is that the censors have to be. "If it happened on a city street where people were killed, it's impossible to stop [the media]," Yehezkel told me.
Indeed, Amir Bar Shalom, chief military correspondent for Israel's Channel 1 television, said he got the instructions from the censor, "but I do what I want." Still, he told me, "I don't want to help Hezbollah."
So he's careful. "I show the site where Katyushas fell, I just don't show the long shot."
And he's never had a problem.
Crews for the pan-Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera have.
Israeli police have detained crews of the Qatari-owned network four times in the last two days, taking them three times to a police station and holding them for a few hours. "Then they apologize and let us go," said Al-Jazeera's bureau chief, Walid al-Omary. "They didn't ask anything, they didn't take any equipment. Nothing."
On one occasion, the Al-Jazeera crew members were filming at a point in Haifa where many TV networks line up with their cameras, including the Associated Press, Reuters, Fox News, and the Israeli channels. "The police walked over to us, asked us who we were and told us we had to go with them," al-Omary told me. Another couple of hours at the police station followed. (Al-Jazeera's crew members are all Palestinian citizens of Israel with the exception of one, a Jerusalemite, who carries an Israeli ID.)
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