Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat
Shmona in northern Israel. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP
This photograph of Israeli children writing on artillery shells bound for targets in Lebanon has caused outrage among many bloggers, not least those from the Arab world.
The debate about the image has, of course, become part of the propaganda war that is running alongside the conflict.
"From the children of Israel, to the children of Lebanon, with love," writes one Greek blogger, Mavrosgatos, showing the image above a very graphic photograph apparently showing the scorched corpse of a Lebanese child. "These [Israeli] children are raised with hatred instead of milk," the blogger writes.
Another blog similarly shows another child victim, a little girl, lying dead in southern Lebanon.
Lisa Goldman (who has also contributed to the Guardian News blog) has attempted to put the image in some kind of context. She writes on her blog, On the Face, that she has done some research into the circumstances around the photograph being taken, calling people who were there.
Goldman says that the children were from Kiryat Shmona, which is right on the border with Lebanon and had been hit by Hizbullah rockets. The AP photographer who took the photograph does not want to speak publicly about it, but Goldman is given an account by a reporter who was there.
The reporter insists that nobody who was there spoke with hatred about the Lebanese.
Goldman is told the children had been scared by the rockets and had been cooped up in underground shelters for five days and were probably a bit giddy at being outside and at the interest from photographers. An Israeli unit was in the town and some 12 photographers were taking pictures, Goldman was told.
According to the account, some of the parents wrote messages to Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and then they handed the markers to the children who started drawing Israeli flags on the shells. The photographers, looking for a powerful image, had found one.
Some bloggers have wondered if the media was culpable for perhaps coaxing the children into writing on the missiles, though Goldman's related account suggests it was the parents who invited the children to write messages.
Goldman adds, however, that the children would not have seen images of dead Lebanese as these kinds of images are not broadcast in Israel, suggesting the children were probably acting with some ignorance about the devastation the missiles were causing. They had seen Mr Nasrallah on television threatening Israel, Goldman says.
