Hezbollah and the civilians

Via Juan Cole, I came across this piece in Salon. I don't have any way of knowing if this is accurate, but it's worth keeping an ear to the ground to try to find out:

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around those targets to destroy them, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians like the plague. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.

One thing that does seem to be clear, nonetheless, is that Hezbollah doesn't seem to mind targeting innocent civilians with its rockets. For that, they should be condemned.