DARK WITH BLOOD

Just surgical strikes, Israel's army commanders proudly proclaimed as they showed off video images of smart bombs intersecting cross hairs. This little war against Hizballah guerrillas in Lebanon was only a high-tech blitz on a bunch of terrorists, targeting specific buildings and vehicles hiding the enemy, avoiding nasty civilian casualties. In fact, two ambulances had been hit, three power plants had been damaged, and several hundred Lebanese, most of them noncombatants, had been killed or wounded. Still, for the first seven days, Israelis applauded the offensive, and much of the world tolerated it. But even the vaunted Israeli military machine proved no better than its crudest cog. On the eighth day, when 155-mm howitzer shells crashed into a U.N. post and slaughtered more than 100 Lebanese refugees, wounding at least 100 others, it was a shattering reminder that there are no such things as truly smart weapons--or wars.

The artillery was, to be sure, directed by modern U.S.-made counterbattery radar, which artfully tracked the trajectory of Hizballah's Katyusha rockets raining onto the soil of northern Israel and spotted the exact place in Lebanon from which they had been fired. But in this case, by the time the Israelis had aimed their guns and let fly from less than six miles away, the Shi'ite guerrillas and the Katyusha launcher had gone. Instead the shells slammed down across the area and exploded inside the compound of a battalion of Fijian peacekeepers, where more than 600 refugees had been sheltering for a week, hanging out their laundry on the fences and tethering their livestock nearby.

The shells--at least a dozen--fell on the unprotected civilians for 11 or 12 minutes while U.N. officials frantically tried to get the Israelis to stop. Even after the official request had been made and acknowledged by Israel, one to two minutes into the barrage, the guns kept firing. Says U.N. spokesman Timor Goksel: "We asked Israel several times to stop firing on the Fijian headquarters, telling them that we had civilian victims, but in vain."

The devastation was sickening, a carnage of incinerated corpses, body parts and blood. "I couldn't count the bodies," said Swedish U.N. Captain Mikael Lindvall at the compound right after the attack. "There were babies without heads. There were people without arms and legs." No one is sure precisely how many men, women and children died or even who they were, because so many were literally blown to pieces. Even on Saturday, two days after the attack, the number of dead was still climbing.