Jerebus:

The UN in Lebanon says the Israeli air force destroyed [an] observer post, in which four military observers were sheltering.

It said the four, from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, had taken shelter in a bunker under the post after it was earlier shelled 14 times by Israeli artillery.

A rescue team was also shelled as it tried to clear the rubble.

Beyond being tragic, this seems so blindingly stupid. Abulances have been hit too (photo), along with power plants, sewer systems, trucks full of food, and plenty of other stuff that doesn't make much damn sense to me.

It's hard to even imagine what the hell is supposed to be accomplished here. The Hez dropping rockets on a train yard is just as bad, but the motives there are at least clearer: provokation. This just is senseless. It's out of control. Terrible.

....

Billmon:

Morality aside (since terror now seems to be the order of the day on both sides) this is a very bad sign for the Israelis. It has the smell of panic about it. It's like the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi -- an exercise that served no rational purpose other than to vent Richard Nixon's rage at his own inability to bend the North Vietnamese government to his will.

The difference is that Nixon could get away with it -- he'd just won a landslide re-election, and the destruction of Hanoi wasn't being covered in real time by every television network on the planet.

I hope that the sheer brutal idiocy of all this forces everyone to step back, but I fear that with so many egos (personal and national) on the line, the response from the People In Charge will be to push further forward, to escalate again in some way.