THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

All the big swinging dicks in the Middle East and the UN are still busy talking about ceasefire, still not sure if they can get a little more before they step away from the table.

Mr. Olmert called the proposal “interesting,” and said he would give it careful study. “The faster we can leave south Lebanon, the happier we will be, especially if we can accomplish our goals,” he said.

At the same time, however, Mr. Olmert said that the country’s security cabinet would meet on Wednesday to discuss a further expansion of the ground campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon if no cease-fire was imminent.

Wednesday is the soonest a cease-fire resolution could be voted on by the United Nations Security Council, because today was set aside for a hearing in which representatives from the Arab League will push for changes to a draft written by France and the United States.

And while they do, this will continue.

Those memories began on the late afternoon of July 16, when his wife, a granddaughter and four of his children, afraid of a possible airstrike, sought shelter in the basement of a nearby building, as theirs lacked one. The building housed the main office for the city’s emergency workers, and the family felt sure it would be safe.

They were wrong. Around 5:30 p.m., missiles struck the building’s foundations and its top floors. Residents now say a Hezbollah official may have been living there. There was no response from the Israeli Defense Ministry to a request, submitted last week, for comment about the target.

Mr. Samra had been sitting with friends elsewhere. He raced to the building and frantically began to dig. He found his 5-year-old daughter, Sally, torn apart. Her torso and an arm lay separate from her legs. Another daughter, Noor, 8, was moving under the rubble. His granddaughter Lynn, not yet 2, had part of her face smashed. His wife, Alia Waabi, had died immediately.

Two other daughters, Zahra and Mirna, made it to safety, though Zahra was badly injured.

“This is my family,” he said, his face creased, sitting under the eaves of the stone houses. “Three of them are buried and three of them are in hospitals.”...

....“My wife was my life,” he said, looking toward a television set up near the couches in the narrow alley.

“My heart aches.”

And Our Dear Embattled Leader continues to vacation, looking through the phone book for the address of the "root causes".