21-Jul-06: Silent testimony to what Nasrallah wants to achieve

For most of us, the word explosive means 'bang'. It's a reality that until you confront an explosion from up close, the overwhelming power is impossible to imagine. In reality, it's not just 'bang'.

Palestinian terrorists have long understood that they can magnify the deadliness of their explosives by adding nails and ball bearings to the device. These fly off in every direction and kill exactly the way bullets do. When our daughter's bag was handed back to us by the Jerusalem police a week after her murder in August 2001, the tough ballistic nylon case inside of which she had kept her cell phone was shredded to pieces. As we picked the remains of the phone out of the case, nails fell onto the table. They had embedded themselves inside the case, inside the phone and inside the bodies of the victims at the Sbarro restaurant massacre. There's a picture of the phone and one of the nails here and here. (The hand-writing on the bottom of the shattered Nokia phone is our daughter's. Malki had written a reminder to herself in Hebrew: "Never speak ill of other people.")

The other pictures come from Lenny Maschkowski who lives in Haifa (thanks, Lenny). He's captured some important images. One shows a car that was wrecked in one of the many missiles to have fallen in Haifa the past few days. Note the tiny holes that have punctured the metal in a million places. The other two show the ball bearings that caused those tiny little holes and that are intended to puncture people's bodies. These ball bearings, stuffed inside the Katyusha rockets, are Nasrallah's calling cards. It's not explosions he wants to cause. It's the greatest possible havoc, and the greatest possible number of injuries and death that he can wreak.

What's a proportionate response to that?

(If the pictures don't appear in this blog entry, it's because of a temporary technical glitch which we're trying to fix. The links to the pictures however should work fine.)