On: Israeli strikes kill 31 in southern Lebanon as Netanyahu expands ground campaign

Diary Entry

This morning’s news from Lebanon sits heavy on my mind. Thirty-one lives lost, among them women and children - a toll that would give any reasonable man pause. War, like fire, spreads where it is fed, and I fear this campaign grows beyond its intended bounds.

I recall the folly of our own conflicts - how easily a skirmish becomes a conflagration when men in offices, far from the smoke and screams, make decisions by ledger and map. A general may call it strategy; a mother burying her child calls it murder. There is no proverb neat enough to tidy this.

The arithmetic of war is simple: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. Strike a village, and you plant seeds of vengeance in the survivors. Burn a house, and you forge a rebel. I have seen it in my time - the way violence begets violence, until no one remembers how it began, only that it must continue.

If I were to counsel those now bent on escalation (though none have asked), I would say: measure twice, cut once. But they are deep in the cutting now, and reason has left the room.

A sad business. And like all sad businesses, it will end - too late, and at too high a cost.