Talk:Battle of Ayta ash-Shab/Archives/2012/January

Edit
just going to chane the woding in the sentence "four soldiers were killed before noon on August 9 after an antitank missile fired by Hezbollah gunmen hit and destroyed an IDF tank in the village." To make it seem less POV

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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:54, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

POV pushing
The article has been recently rewritten by User:Jokkmokks-Goran in a compete non-neutral POV style. Here is the original state of the article. Flayer (talk) 18:41, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You have flagged the article for:
 * Its factual accuracy is disputed
 * Its use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines
 * Its neutrality is disputed
 * but you have not provided any grounds for this. I welcome any discussion about the article and ways to improve it. But if you are not interested in such a discussion I think you should remove the flaggings. Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 08:39, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Destructive activity
The previous version of the battle of Ayta was very short, incomplete, inaccurate and partly unsourced. Several of its few links - all of them news clippings from August 2006 - were dead.

I therefore made a major revision based what I have read about the battle, including books, military studies, interviews, etc written after the war. Most of the facts were based on Israeli English-language newspaper reports though a few were in Hebrew. I also included some Lebanese Arabic-language sources: newspaper articles or local authority web sites (connected to Hezbollah).

I included the fighting around the nearby villages of Qawzah and Dibil. Lebanese accounts clearly indicate that from their perspective it was really one battle, just as the battles of Maroun ar-Ras and Ainata were really part of the battle of Bint Jbeil. It would not surprise me if the missile that killed 9 paratroopers at Dibil on Aug. 9 was actually fired from Ayta. I did read one Lebanese account that made this claim (lost unfortunately). When the IDF pushed further north towards Rashaf, Hadatha and Yatar they evidently passed on to another Hezbollah regional command.

I don’t assume that I have made a final version of the article and welcome new contributions, additions in particular. A problem I faced was that most Lebanese accounts lack a clear timeline of the battle while most Israeli sources I’ve found are real time newspaper clippings focused primarily on the occurrences of Israeli fatalities. I would be most grateful if someone could direct me to a more detailed Israeli account of the battle itself. I can read Hebrew with a frequent use of a dictionary and am fluent in Arabic.

13 minutes after I submitted my new version a guy (or girl) calling himself “Flayer” (who apparently created the article back in 2006) deleted EVERYTHING I had written. Without a comment. I reverted the change, assuming it was done by a mistake. Not so.

I cannot understand how somebody can decide that every word of a major revision is so wrong that it must be deleted in its entirety. And this in less than 13 minutes!

I have no idea who “Flayer” is, but he clearly has a very strong agenda that is inappropriate to Wikipedia.

Then he changed tack - for a while.

He deleted the entire section with the names of the fatalities, both Lebanese and Israeli, under the pretext that Wikipedia is not a memorial site. The problem is that every Wikipedia article about terrorist acts in Israel contains such a list of names. I somehow doubt that “Flayer” will delete these lists as well. Apart from the general value of such information I believe that it helps us in pinpointing the number of casualties on both sides. Israel claims to have list of over 500 Hezbollah fighters killed in the war. Maybe someone with access to that list can add some names to the list. Assuming of course that the list actually exists.

[I have just realized that I had made a mistake in identifying Lt.(res.) Tzur Zarhi as a fatality of Aita ash-Sha’b – he was actually killed in Tal Nahas up in the north. I say in my defense that I was fooled by the old version of the article which claimed that five – other sources say four - soldiers died in Aita 13 Aug, 2006. Zarhi belonged to the Carmeli brigade that fought in Aita so I assumed that he was the fifth guy. I now know that only four died in this incident and I have deleted Zarhi and corrected the figures.]

Flayer also deleted an entire paragraph claiming it was POV and added dozens of, most of whom were entirely unnecessary. My article was very well provided by sources but if it needs any improvements in this regard I’ll be happy to provide them.

Then he flagged the article for: without explaining any of the reasons for doing so.
 * Its factual accuracy is disputed.
 * Its use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines.
 * Its neutrality is disputed.

Then he apparently had a change of heart and AGAIN deleted my ENTIRE contribution as well as the dispute flaggings.

So I have just reverted “Flayer’s” deletions and hope for some assistance if he persists. I am a reasonable guy and am willing to discuss and change the article. I must say that “Flayer’s” conduct is by far the worst I have come across on Wikipedia - so far, I’m quite new here.

Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 15:53, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Further sabotage
"Flayer", please stop your sabotage campaign.

You have AGAIN removed an entire section of the article containing the names of the fatalities of the battle. You have not even attempted to explain your action, except a reference to WP:NOTMEMORIAL which states: “Memorials. Subjects of encyclopedia articles must satisfy Wikipedia's notability requirements. Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements.”

This is clearly NOT applicable in this case. I have no personal relation, however remote, to any or the victims of this battle, Israeli or Lebanese. The article is definitely not a memorial. It is an article about an important battle in the 2006 Lebanon war and the list of fatalities is only a minor but important part of the article.

If you believe that lists of names of victims don’t belong to Wikipedia I think that you are facing an uphill battle. It is standard procedure in virtually EVERY article on terrorist acts in Israel. Just check through the incidents referred to in this List of Israeli civilian casualties in the Second Intifada. I have personally no problems with these lists. Quite the opposite. But I promise you that if you can convince the rest of the Wikipedia community that we should remove all these lists of names I will personally remove the list in the Ayta ash-Sha’b article as well.

Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 10:02, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Copyright violation?
I have uploaded an image to Wikimedia Commons. I copied an image from Wikimapia and added some labels. I'm no expert on copyrights issues but I assumed that this was OK. Is it? Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 11:21, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Information on Rajamin and Ramiya
I want to include more information on the fighting outside Ayta ash-Sha'b proper, especially in the small shiite village of Ramiya, close to the border, but I have seen very little information about it. There are general info about fighting there and about IDF conquering the place, but no details, maybe because IDF did not suffer any fatalities. I'm interested in any info, in English, Arabic or Hebrew.

I have read about a mysterious village or "town" where IDF really suffered some casualties (at least twice), called Rajmin, or Rajamin (in "Israeli" translitterations, so it could be Ghajamin or something similar). But I cannot find anything like that on any map. Supposedly 4 km from the border in the Western sector. Now Arkin writes: "Rajmin (see Ramiya)". Though Ramiya is much closer to the border. Could Rajmin be a locality in/near Ramiya? If so, it should be included in the narrative about the battle of Ayta. Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 22:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

A note on the number of casualties
Israeli casualties

I have counted 28 Israeli fatalities at Ayta ash-Sha'b and nearby Dibil. There may be one or two more as the Israeli account of their fatalities became less precise as the war progressed. In general I believe there is no reason to question the official Israeli number of fatalities. Somebody added "(IDF claim)" after the number but I find that unnecessary, since it isn't challenged by anybody.

The number of Israeli wounded is however a a much more tricky question. As far as I know there is no official Israeli number for this battle. More than 100 wounded are mentioned in the sources reported the article. The Winograd report says that 628 soldiers were wounded throughout the war (p. 353). Yet the daily summaries add up to 1244 wounded soldiers (p. 598-609). I'm not sure what explains this discrepancy. Almost a quarter (23%) of all Israeli fatalities of the war occurred at Ayta. Applying this proportion to the number of wounded would yield 145-288. Though this is just a guesstimate, or "Original Research". The Hezbollah estimate of around 200 casualties thus seem quite reasonable.

Lebanese casualties

According to the as-Safir article 11 named Hezbollah fighters died in the battle. (Two more were captured by IDF.) This account of the battle was based on interviews with Hezbollah commanders and fighters as well as local inhabitants. There is no published official Hezbollah figure of casualties for the battle. Other sources mentions 8 or 9 Ayta local inhabitants killed in the war and buried at the local cemetery. If we assume that 2 or 3 were from outside the town these accounts add up. We know that at least one was from Tayiba and one of the captured was from Beirut. One Ayta resident was also killed at another place in South Lebanon. If we assume that several dozens additional fighters were wounded Hezbollah suffered relatively heavy casualties in the battle.

According to all accounts the town was only defended by 100 (mainly local) fighters or less. Israel apparently claims that 40 Hezbollah fighters died in the battle, though I have not seen a first hand source. If we assume that the corresponding number of wounded would be much higher than that then the Hezbollah force defending the town would have been more or less exterminated. There is very little indication of that since Hezbollah managed to pull off 3 deadly attacks on Israeli forces in the last days of the battle, killing 17 IDF soldiers. It is also inconceivable that the IDF would not have succeeded in capturing the town after killing or wounding almost every defender. As far as we know IDF held positions inside Ayta but never permanently occupied important sections of the town where it could collect or count Hezbollah dead on the battlefield. If we assume that the majority of the additional 29 dead Hezbollah fighters were locals it is also highly unlikely that they were not buried with their comrades in the local cemetery. It is however conceivable that an additional number of Hezbollah non-local fighters were killed in nearby localities (Ramiya, Dibil, etc,) though we have no information about that.

I therefore conclude that the IDF claims on the number of killed most probably is incorrect and mainly reflect war time propaganda. Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 09:54, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You own WP:OR cant be part of the article please bring WP:RS to your claims.--Shrike (talk) 11:18, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree with you. That's why it's not in the article but on the discussion page to encourage others to improve the article.Jokkmokks-Goran (talk) 12:08, 2 January 2012 (UTC)