UNIFIL Tomfoolerey

Today, much ado has been made about the United Nation's Peacekeeping force in Lebanon suffering 257 fatalities over the last 20+years since UNIFIL was formed to patrol the Israeli/Lebanese border. This struck me as an attempt to bolster the image of the impotent UNIFIL as an entity that continually puts the life of its members on the line fighting for peace. And I have never heard of UNIFIL casualties caused by fighting for peace on the border, say attempting to prevent Hezbollah from setting up mines, shooting rockets, or digging bunkers. In fact the only reports I remember are reports of UNIFIL being complicit with the terrorists such as the time several years ago when they watched and filmed as Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and murdered by terrorists wearing UN uniforms, and then covered it up.

I decided to do a little digging. There's a United Nations website dedicated to fatalities suffered by UN forces in all of their missions over the years. And low and behold, the UNIFIL fatality figure doesn't show 257 deaths from the aggressive performance of their mission:

                Accident        Illness        Malicious Act           Other            Total
UNIFIL            108              51                 85                      13                257

I'd love to see a breakdown of the "Malicious Act" number, and find out who was responsible for what.