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Hi Family and Friends—

Want to become a war correspondent and outscoop the major networks? Go up north in Israel, look just about anywhere, and start taking pictures.

We noted that news sites on the Internet showed little but pictures of damage at and near military targets in Lebanon (and many of those pictures turned out to have been staged or Photoshopped). So the day after the “ceasefire”, Tamir, Coren and I drove up north to see for ourselves some of the pitifully under-reported destruction caused by the 3500+ powerful missiles that pounded civilian targets (a runaway world record – call the Guinness Record Book people) in Israel last month.

We were overwhelmed by the scope of the destruction and took about 150 pictures within a few hours, mostly in two neighborhoods, in Sfat and Kiryat Shmona. We photographed homes, streets, playgrounds, vehicles, schools, synagogues – destruction was extensive and not hard to find. (I selected four typical pictures below to send — they show a home, a car, a school, and a synagogue)

A man in Sfat invited us in to show us the legacy of the katushya that hit the thick reinforced-cement roof of his home:

Here’s one of many exploded vehicles we saw. The crater in the road from the katushya was a few meters away, yet the car was completely demolished. Note the holes in the roof from flying pieces of the exploded shell. Many of the cars we saw looked Swiss-cheese-like, riddled with holes from pieces in the shells that are designed to shoot out upon impact to increase harm to anybody or anything within a wide radius

Here’s a wall in a school (classes are supposed to start in three weeks…)

Like the car pictured above, this synagogue was several meters away from the crater of the missile that slammed into the ground, but it still suffered extensive interior and exterior damage:

These four pictures above that we have shared are just a small sample of those we took, and what we saw that afternoon is just a small sample of the widespread destruction in the north. We had planned to travel the next day to Metulla and Nahariya, and we probably should have, but the truth is that we are not professionals and we had witnessed enough –- we had sort of overdosed on seeing so many destroyed homes and depressing sights, and we just headed home.

While we photographed, we asked people if any news organizations had bothered to send people out to take pictures, and the answer was almost always “no,”  so we are sharing these pictures to enable you to see at least a little bit of the Israeli side of the story. You certainly have our permission to forward this to any parties that might be interested.

Yakir, Tamir, and Coren