'How can we stand by and allow this to go
on?'
By Robert Fisk
07/31/06 "The
Independent" -- -- They wrote the names of the dead
children on their plastic shrouds. "Mehdi Hashem, aged seven - Qana," was
written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay.
"Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 - Qana',' "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one -
Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body,
it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's
shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre
government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children.
When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in
carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from
their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the
outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This
slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force
truly bombs with the "pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war
crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen
from the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified this massacre.
Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror"
threatening "western civilisation" - as if the Hizbollah had killed all
these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years
ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106
Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a
UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel
later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft
over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue
when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft
over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that
this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been
damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there
was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It
came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For
use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it
"combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in
which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the
basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of
them died.
I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital
in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his
execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was
written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So
had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six.
"We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in
the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of God have we done to deserve
this? So many of the dead are children, the old, women. Some of the
children were still awake and playing. Why does the world do this to
us?"
Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total civilian
dead in Lebanon since Israel's air, sea and land bombardment of the
country begun on 12 July after Hizbollah members crossed the frontier
wire, killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But
yesterday's slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within
the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian politicians
denounced what they described as "an ugly crime".
Thousands of
protesters attacked the largest United Nations building in Beirut,
screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv, destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime
Minister, the normally unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent peace-making
trip to Beirut.
No one in this country can forget how President
George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have repeatedly refused to call for
an immediate ceasefire - a truce that would have saved all those lives
yesterday. Ms Rice would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as
possible,'' a remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended
to maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two
weeks.
Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence workers
dug through the ruins of the building with spades and with their hands,
tearing at the muck until they found one body after another still dressed
in colourful clothes. In one section of the rubble, they found what was
left of a single room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were
women. All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so
grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these
villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had
dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet
twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered
villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as
they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000
Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun - close to the
scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil - and yet none of
them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.
And Mr Olmert's
reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he announced that: "We will
not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents [sic] this morning.
We will continue the activity, and if necessary it will be broadened
without hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened? Lebanon's
infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its villages razed, its
people more and more terrorised - and terror is the word they used - by
Israel's American-made fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are
Iranian-made, and it was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal
and provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the
civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western diplomats who
have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of humanitarian workers from the Red
Cross and major aid agencies.
Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied
safe passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to the
south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief supplies to the
south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three quarters of a million
Lebanese have now fled their homes, but there is still no accurate figure
for the total number still trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who
survived amid the wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the
Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the village,
which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two weeks. The
seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is littered with civilian homes
in ruins and burnt-out family cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's
Al-Mashriq radio, which broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told residents
that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if missiles were fired
from them. But anyone who has watched Israel's bombing these past two
weeks knows that, in many cases, the Israelis do not know the location in
which the Hizbollah are firing missiles, and - when they do - they
frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the Hizbollah
from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah do take cover beside
civilian houses - just as Israeli troops entering Bint Jbeil last week
also used civilian homes for cover. But can this be the excuse for
slaughter on such a scale?
Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats
in Beirut yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now
only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested any longer in
a political package to go with it. Needless to say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman,
whose country made the bomb which killed the innocents of Qana yesterday,
chose not to attend.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
