David, thank you so much for the information about the Harvard study on media coverage of the Lebanon war. I found it and read it with great attention. It is a great study: clear, lucid and well sourced. You are right that it will never receive the same attention accorded to the Walt Mearsheimer report - unless some journalist with high credibility takes the trouble to write an article or column about it. As for your questions, please be aware that I am only repeating what I have been told. The sources are very credible, but this is second-hand information so I cannot take responsibility for its veracity: 1. As far as I have heard from Israeli human rights lawyers, the Hezbollah prisoners are held in the same jails as Palestinian political prisoners. However, unlike the Palestinian prisoners they do not have contact with their families or the Red Cross. 2. I don't know what the motivations for abducting them are. They're certainly not choirboys, but as far as I have understood it is not easy to tease out a cause-and-effect - i.e., I don't know if they were abducted in response to something they did, or as a preventative measure. As I wrote before, there was a cat-and-mouse game played by both sides. 3. As for the IAF flyovers across the Blue Line: sometimes they are in response to a Hezbollah violation of the Blue Line, and sometimes they are just a warning / reminder. However, Lebanese who are not Hezbollah supporters are affected by the sonic booms (I don't know if you've ever experienced them, but they're pretty scary) so I think they may be counter-productive in the sense that they anger Lebanese who might otherwise be more inclined to sympathize with Israel's position vis a vis the Hezbollah. Sure, sonic booms are scary but not dangerous, whereas Katyushas are both scary and dangerous. But from a pragmatic perspective, I don't think Israel is achieving any positive goals with the flyovers. They're not scaring Hezbollah, but they are angering Lebanese who do not support Hezbollah. I did read a few articles in the American media that presented Hezbollah as a benign social movement. There is some truth to that: just as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt gained support because it provided free health care and subsidized food to the poor, and Shas offered free all-day kindergartens with free lunch to gain support amongst the religious-Sephardic sector in Israel, so does Hezbollah offer social services that the Lebanese government does not provide. But of course that is not all they do. I also read a pretty laughable article that claimed Hezbollah doesn't fight amongst civilians in Salon (link). It is indeed very unfortunate that some people who consider themselves leftists are so blindly and reflexively anti-Israel, they are willing to spin tall tales and support a racist, sexist, violent theocratic organization simply because it is also anti-Israel.