AP has compiled a very useful tally of the major statistics regarding the Lebanon war, thus telling us how much each side has lost in this ghastly enterprise. This is from The Guardian:
LEBANON:
– Deaths: 845 total – 743 civilians, 34 soldiers and 68 Hezbollah. Israel says it killed about 530 guerrillas. The Higher Relief Council put the overall death toll at 1,181 and said one-third were children and the majority were civilians.
– Wounded: 4,051.
– Number of buildings destroyed: More than 15,000 homes – houses or individual apartments within buildings. About 900 commercial structures, including farms and factories.
– Number of strikes: Lebanese officials reported, unofficially, more than 4,500 Israeli bombing raids on Lebanon. Israel would provide no figures of the number of its strikes in Lebanon.
– Number of displaced people: 916,000, or about one-fourth of the population.
– Figures on business days lost were not available, but up to 75 percent of the people were unemployed or unable to work because of fighting or gasoline shortages.
– Tourism: Hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue and repairs to facilities, but no specific figure available.
– Damage to transportation system: 400 miles of roads; 80 bridges; the international airport.
– Overall damage: At least $3.5 billion to infrastructure; $9.4 billion overall, including clean up of a major oil spill from an Israeli strike on a storage facility at a Beirut power plant.
– Access to water and electricity was severely interrupted. About $180 million in damage to the electricity grid; $70 million to the water treatment and delivery system.
ISRAEL:
– Deaths: 157 total – 118 soldiers and 39 civilians.
– Wounded: 860.
– Number of buildings destroyed: no official figures, but tax authorities report more than 6,000 claims for damaged buildings and more are expected as displaced people return home.
– Number of strikes: 3970 Hezbollah rockets, 901 of them inside cities.
– Number of displaced people: 300,000.
– Many businesses in the north of the country were closed throughout the war. No specific figures were available.
– Tourism: $80 million of lost revenue during the war, many hundreds of millions in projected losses in the future months because of the war.
– Overall damage: Media reports say about $3 billion in damages and lost revenue, but do not give a source for that estimate. Israeli Finance Minister Avraham Hirschon could give no precise figure but said it would be “many billions.”
And has this really gotten us anywhere? 🙁