[LCM Articles] Robert Fisk: Qana the Sequel God bless America for their mercy and their bombs

[Caline Jarudi]

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> 
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> >>'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'
> >>
> >>Robert Fisk - 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
> >>began 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.
> >
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