I have just returned from a long, off-line vacation, so I need to catch up on what's been happening while I've been out-of-touch.
In the meantime, Human Rights Watch today released a detailed examination of Israel's conduct during last summer's 34-day war with Hezbollah.
And the conclusions are stark:
"In critical respects, Israel conducted the war with reckless indifference to the fate of Lebanese civilians and violated the laws of war," the report states in its executive summary.
Release of this critical study comes one week after Human Rights Watch issued a separate report on Hezbollah's conduct during the war.
In that report, Human Rights Watch determined that there was "strong evidence" that "some Hezbollah commanders and members were responsible for war crimes" for indiscriminately launching rockets at Israeli civilians during the war.
Civilian deaths, especially on the Lebanese side, were one of the biggest issues during last summer's war. Israel repeatedly expressed regret about the large number of innocent Lebanese civilians killed. But Israeli leaders said they were forced to respond when Hezbollah fighters fired rockets at Israel from towns and villages in southern Lebanon.
But the Human Rights Watch investigation found little evidence to support Israel's claims that Hezbollah was routinely using the civilian population as a human shield.
"Out of the 499 Lebanese civilian casualties of whom Human Rights Watch was able to confirm the age and gender, 302 were women or children," the authors write. "This repeated failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants cannot be explained as mere mismanagement of the war or a collection of mistakes. Our case studies show that Israeli policy was primarily responsible for this deadly failure."
During the war, more than 1,100 Lebanese were killed by Israeli air strikes. The "vast majority," Human Rights Watch found, were civilians.
By contrast, 43 Israeli civilians and 12 Israeli soldiers were killed by the more than 4,000 Hezbollah rocket strikes on northern Israel.
Israel has yet to offer a detailed response to the 250-page report other than to repeat the government's longstanding contention that Hezbollah used civilians as human shields.
Human Rights Watch documents numerous instances of Israel's military killing civilians in places where there was no evidence of Hezbollah military action.
One thing the report highlights is the result of Israel's general military strategy, which is to respond with overwhelming force when it feels Israel is being tested.
In this case, the response backfired and the war ended with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah being hailed as a new Middle East hero for weathering Israel's military attacks and exposing fundamental weaknesses in the most feared military in the region.
The large number of innocent deaths in Israeli strikes also undercut Israel's image during the war. At the start, Israel won widespread backing for responding to the July 12, 2006 Hezbollah attack on an Israeli border patrol that ended with the capture of two Israeli soldiers.
Much of the world stood by Israel at the start. But support began to erode as the number of innocent deaths rose in Lebanon.
In theory, the report might give Israel a chance to examine its strategy and examine whether or not it should do more to minimize civilian deaths when it goes to war.
In reality, the report will probably end up being cast aside by policy makers as the work of a do-good group with an anti-Israeli agenda. Pro-Israeli groups are likely to pick apart the study in search of bias and mistakes.
And that's too bad. The intensive work Human Rights Watch has done in these two reports should not be dismissed so quickly.
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