Proportional response and prisoners

I would very much appreciate hearing your commentators raise the following facts when interviewees speak about proportional response and prisoner exchanges.

1. Proportional response

Hizbullah and the Palestinians have been raining missiles deliberately designed to kill and maim as many civilians as possible in Israel including infants, the elderly and the infirm, Arabs and Jews alike. Over 1,000 have landed in the north alone and another 1,000 plus in the South. Just imagine if each had killed only one person. It is only by divine grace that the missiles have not achieved the full extent of the massacres intended.

Those advocating a proportional response, should explain what they mean. Do they suggest exchanging one missile per missile or is the sensible and moral answer to do everything possible to bring the attacks to a complete end?

Before making recommendations, I ask commentators to read Hizbullah's and Hamas' public declarations of their intention to completely destroy Israel.

2. Kidnapped soldiers

The impression that there is a direct comparison between the captured Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in Israeli jails is fundamentally incorrect. The families of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israel know where their loved ones are. They visit them and communicate by telephone.

By contrast, the Palestinians and Hizbullah, in open defiance of the Geneva Conventions, deliberately keep the families of captives in a state of unbearable anxiety by holding their captives incommunicado. What greater torture can one apply to any parent, than to capture a son, hold him against his will and UNNECESSARILY refuse to give even the slightest credible hint about whether or not he is still alive or his physical condition or even whether he is being tortured.

It would be comforting if your interviewers were to ask a Palestinian or Hizbullah interviewee to show a trace of humanity by allowing the captives to be interviewed by the Red Cross and to make telephone calls to their families in the presence of such third party.