As if to emphasis its role as obedient lap dog for Israel and the United States, the United Nations has changed its “rules of engagement” in Lebanon. “New rules of engagement for U.N. troops in Lebanon permit soldiers to shoot in self-defense, use force to protect civilians and resist armed attempts to interfere with their duties, a U.N. document says,” reports Reuters. In other words, UNIFIL “peacekeepers could respond if small groups did not disarm voluntarily when confronted with U.N. troops,” that is to say Lebanese will be killed if they resist efforts to take away their weapons, as demanded by Israel and the United States.

Hezbollah understands well what will undoubtedly happen if they disarm. As an example, look no further than the open-air prison camps of Gaza and the West Bank. “The main sticking point for Hizbullah is to be found in the resolution’s [UN resolution 1701] requirement that it must stop fighting and begin a process of disarmament at a time when Israeli forces are still occupying Lebanese territory and when there may be a lengthy, if not interminable, wait for their replacement by international peacekeepers,” writes Jonathan Cook. “Not only that, but the resolution allows Israel to continue its military operations for defensive purposes: Hizbullah only has to look to Gaza or the West Bank to see what Israel is likely to consider falling under the rubric of ‘defensive.’”

Disarmed Palestinians and Lebanese, stripped of any possible defense, suffered the massacres of Damour, Tel al-Zaatar, Karantina, and of course Sabra and Shatilla, to name but a few. The Beirut refugee camp Tel al-Zaatar endured heavy artillery shelling by Maronite militiamen, that is to say Phalangist fascists, in 1976. Its Palestinian refugees were then ethnically cleansed—essentially a repeat of what the residents suffered in 1948 at the hands of the Israelis in occupied Palestine—and during this process they were machine-gunned, grenaded, and raped. In the poverty-wracked Beirut district of Karantina (and the Maslakh quarter), the Christian fascists killed more than a thousand Palestinians, Kurds, and Armenians.

“Israel would resume operations in Lebanon if a United Nations force being assembled to deploy in the south of that country did not disarm Hezbollah guerrillas,” reports Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Likely mindful of the historical duplicity of Israel and its proxies of past in Lebanon, “Nasrallah … said his force would not lay down its weapons and Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr said Monday the Lebanese army would not disarm the Shiite militia, which it expects to leave south Lebanon once troops are deployed.” In response, Israel stated “there will have to be another round” of mass murder in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the IOF has stepped up its Gestapo tactics, going house to house in search of people resisting their internment in the world’s largest open-air prison. “Israeli soldiers backed by helicopter gunships, tanks and armored personnel carriers, moved into Palestinian-controlled areas near the main Israel-Gaza cargo crossing on Tuesday, conducting house-to-house searches and arrests,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “Separately, in southern Gaza, the Israeli army moved into farmlands near the town of Khan Younis, firing machine guns into the fields after calling on farmers to evacuate the area, Palestinian security officials said. Cameramen filming the operation said they came under fire but were not wounded.”

In order to shed a favorable light on these continuing “operations,” a “previously unknown Palestinian group” has released a video showing “two [abducted] journalists [Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig] from the US television channel Fox News and demanded that Washington free Muslim prisoners held in the United States within 72 hours,” a demand that will of course not be honored, let alone entertained, but will naturally be exploited to portray Palestinians as heartless and evil monsters, or maybe “beasts on two legs,” as Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former Irgun terrorist Menachem Begin once characterized the Palestinians.

This “previously unknown Palestinian group” is said to be the Holy Jihad Brigades. It should be noted that another group with a similar name—Jihad Brigades in the Land of al-Ribat (Palestine)—swore allegiance to al-Qaeda (that is to say, the CIA, ISI, and recently Mossad) almost exactly a year ago. The Jihad Brigades in the Land of al-Ribat has claimed responsibility for futile and counterproductive rocket attacks on Israeli colonial settlements in Khan Younes, Naved Galin, and Ganital, according to the SITE Institute.

Naturally, such attacks—not unlike previous Hamas suicide bomb attacks—are used by the Israelis as an excuse to “disengage” from the Palestinians, that is to say let them languish in their prison camps surrounded with apartheid walls, subject to bombing and assassination. It should also be noted that Hamas was “aided … directly” by the Israelis as a “direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” according to a former senior CIA official cited by Richard Sale of the UPI (this embarrassing and revealing bit of information would have found its way into the memory hole, if not for the Prisonplanet website).