"The time for calling for restraint has passed, since too many on both sides show no signs of exercising any," wrote Britain's The Guardian Monday. The newspaper warned that after Hezbollah's attack on a train station in Haifa on Sunday, the danger in the region cannot be underestimated. "Lebanon's government bears signs of collapsing into a failed state," it continued, adding that it would be unrealistic to expect Lebanon to successfully disarm Hezbollah militants while Israeli jets pound Tyre and Beirut. That would continue to "inflict collective punishment and undermine its fragile economy".

Belgium's De Morgen wrote Saturday that before Russia got involved, "it had been the European Union's task to slow down Israel and maintain a non-partisan appearance" -- a task Europe wasn't successful at." "When Israel pockets money from the Palestinians or destroys power plants, Europe restricts itself to goody-goody, almost inaudible verbal protests and reaches for its checkbook," continued the newspaper, saying Europe played a kind of "Mother Theresa" who tried to "alleviate humanitarian suffering" and "pay the hospitals' oil bills".

Russia's Kommersant claimed that calling "the indiscriminate use of force inadmissible does not function in the case of Lebanon." According to the paper, Israel doesn't have alternatives to the path it's taken with the Hezbollah. "In addition to freeing hostages," wrote the Russian newspaper Monday, "the Israelis also have to find a fundamental answer to the Hezbollah problem" -- a difficult task no one can take care of for them".

France's Le Figaro was critical Monday that the US neither "mobilized when the crisis escalated after the abduction of Israeli soldiers" nor sent any high-ranking representatives." The French paper also found fault with the US for trying to draw "something positive out of this double war against 'extremists' -- out of this wreckage of weapons and blood, at least that of civilians."

"The pictures from Beirut and Haifa all look depressing," wrote Poland's Polityka Monday. "But on television everything usually looks more terrible than it really is because it's a stylized image of violence". Monday's editorial stressed that the residents of the Middle East have "survived so many wars, so many attacks, assassinations and alarms that they've been numbed to it." The dream of the Arab extremists, wrote the Polish paper, is to conduct a war on all fronts, "the second biggest military-political conflict in the Middle East next to Iraq." Arabic and Iranian extremists groups, continued the editorial, "want to pull Israel into the conflict and Israel's difficult task is to not let itself be provoked."