The kill ratio is becoming a problem : Israel has been killing about forty Lebanese civilians for every Israel civilian who is killed. They are all being killed by accident, of course, but such a long chain of accidents begins to look like carelessness, and even in Israel and the United States people are getting uneasy about it. Elsewhere, the revulsion at what is happening is almost universal, and the death of so many women and children at Qana has intensified the pressure on Israel and its allies, the United States and Britain, to stop the war.

They are already making tactical con-cessions to lessen the pressure, and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised to let the United Nations Security Council consider a resolution calling for a ceasefire this week. But Israel?s generals still want another ten days to two weeks of war to batter Hezbollah into submission, and neither Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or his loyal allies in Washington and London are really willing to override them yet.

The real trick, in terms of keeping American and British public opinion on side, is to blur the sequence of events that led to the war and present it as a desperate Israeli struggle against an unprovoked onslaught by thousands of terrorist rockets. As Prime Minister Tony Blair told the BBC, "It cannot be that Israel stops taking the action it?s taking but Hezbollah continue to kill, kidnap, and launch rockets into the north of Israel at the civilian population there."

There WAS an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on the Israeli army on 12 July, seeking to kidnap soldiers who could be held as hostages and eventually ex-changed for Lebanese prisoners who have been illegally held in Israel since the latter ended its eighteen-year military occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. And no doubt the reason Israel held onto those prisoners in the first place was to have them as hostages in some future prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. That?s how the game is played locally.

In the course of grabbing the Israeli hostages on 12 July, Hezbollah fired rockets and mortars at the northern Israeli town of Shlomi as a diversion, but nobody was hurt there. And apart from that, NO Hezbollah missiles struck Israel that day. Indeed, none had been fired at Israel for at least four years, although there were regular skirmishes between Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah fighters along the frontier. During the following 24 hours, however, Israel launched massive air strikes and artillery bombardments the length and breadth of Lebanon, striking Beirut airport, Lebanese air force bases, the Beirut-Damascus highway, a power station, and all sorts of other non-Hez-bollah targets and killing many civilians. And it was only on 13 July that Hez-bollah rockets begin to hit cities all across northern Israel.

Nobody has clean hands here. Israel seized on the kidnap operation as the pretext for a massive onslaught aimed at removing it from southern Lebanon -- a perfectly legitimate goal, in line with United Nations resolution 1559, but not one that the UN had envisaged as being accomplished by Israeli bombs. Hezbollah may just have been trying to raise its profile in Lebanon and the wider Arab world with a small but successful operation that humiliated the Israelis -- or it may have foreseen the likelihood of a massive Israeli over-reaction, and calculated that it could ride it out and win from it.

Whether that was its intention or not, it probably will ride it out and win. Having fired at least ninety missiles at Israeli cities every day but two since the war began -- though they only kill an average of one Israeli a day -- Hez-bollah launched only two rockets on Monday (probably a crew that didn?t get the message to stop in time).

If there should be a ceasefire in the next week, it will emerge the victor, since no international peace-keeping force is going to fight the kind of campaign that would be required to dig it and its weapons out of south Lebanon?s hills and villages.

And if there is no ceasefire, then the Israeli Defence Force will be granted a further opportunity to demonstrate that it cannot do so either. At least, not at a cost in Israeli soldiers' lives that would be remotely acceptable to the Israeli public.