| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 4:48 am Post subject: Robert Fisk: A war crime? |
| Just saw the following at www.informationclearinghouse.info as Fisk articles are being linked there:
Robert Fisk: A war crime?
This mother and son were in a convoy fleeing danger yesterday when the Israeli air force bombed the rear minibus, causing carnage.
By Robert Fisk
06/24/07 "The Independent" -- - They are in the schools, in empty hospitals, in halls and mosques and in the streets. The Shia Muslim refugees of southern Lebanon, driven from their homes by the Israelis, are arriving in Sidon by the thousand, cared for by Sunni Muslims and then sent north to join the 600,000 displaced Lebanese in Beirut. More than 34,000 have passed through here in the past four days alone, a tide of misery and anger. It will take years to heal their wounds, and billions of dollars to repair their damaged property.
And who can blame them for their flight? For the second time in eight days, the Israelis committed a war crime yesterday. They ordered the villagers of Taire, near the border, to leave their homes and then - as their convoy of cars and minibuses obediently trailed northwards - the Israeli air force fired a missile into the rear minibus, killing three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other civilians. The rocket that killed them is believed to have been a Hellfire missile made by Lockheed Martin in Florida.
Nine days ago, the Israeli army ordered the inhabitants of a neighbouring village, Marwaheen, to leave their homes and then fired rockets into one of their evacuation trucks, blasting the women and children inside to their deaths. And this is the same Israeli air force which was praised last week by one of Israel's greatest defenders - Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz - because it "takes extraordinary steps to minimise civilian casualties".
Nor have the Israelis spared Sidon. A heap of rubble and pancaked walls is all that is left of the Fatima Zahra mosque, a Hizbollah institution in the centre of the city, its minaret crumbled and its dome now sitting on the concrete, a black flag still flying from its top. When Israeli warplanes came early yesterday morning, the 75-year-old caretaker had no time to run from the building; he died of his wounds hours later. His overturned white plastic chair still lies by the gate. The mosque is unlikely to have been used for military purposes; a school belonging to the Hariris, Sidon's all-powerful Sunni family, stands next door; they would never have allowed weapons into the building.
Not that Hizbollah - which killed two more Israeli civilians with their rockets in Haifa yesterday - have respected Sidon, whose population is 95 per cent Sunni. They tried to fire Iranian-made missiles at Israel from the seafront Corniche and from beside the city slaughterhouse last week. On both occasions, residents physically prevented them from opening fire.
The multimillion-dollar Hariri Foundation - created by the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated last year - has helped 24,000 Shia refugees out of the south and on to Beirut but its generosity has not always been happily received. One group of refugees sheltering in a technical school in Meheniyeh punched and taunted Hariri workers. Elsewhere, the foundation's staff have been cursed by fleeing families. "They are telling us that we are working for the Americans and that this is why we are taking them out," said Ghena Hariri - Rafik's niece and a Georgetown graduate. "It is something that drains our energy. We are working 24 hours a day and at the end of the day they curse us. But I feel so sorry for them. Now they are being told by the Israelis to leave their villages on foot and they have to walk dozens of kilometres in this heat."
It's not difficult to see how this war can damage the delicate sectarian framework that exists in Lebanon. One group of Shia families - housed in a school in the Druze mountains of the Chouf - tried to put Hizbollah's yellow banners on the roof and members of Walid Jumblatt's Druze Popular Socialist Party had to tear them down. Their act may have saved the refugees' lives.
Yet many of the Shia in this beautiful Crusader port have learnt how kind their Sunni neighbours can be. "We are here - where else can we go?" Nazek Kadnah asked as she sat in the corner of a mosque which Rafik Hariri built and dedicated to his father, Haj Baha'udin Hariri. "But they look after us here as their brothers and sisters and now we are safe."
These sentiments provoke some dark questions. Why, for example, can't these poor people be shown the same compassion from Tony Blair as he supposedly felt for the Muslims of Kosovo when they were being driven from their homes by the Serbs? These thousands are as terrified and homeless as the Kosovo Albanians who fled to Macedonia in 1998 and for whom Mr Blair claimed he was waging a moral war. But for the Shia Muslims sleeping homeless in Sidon there is to be no such moral posturing - and no ceasefire suggestions from Mr Blair, who has aligned himself with the Israelis and the Americans.
And what exactly is the purpose of driving more than half a million people from their homes? Many of these poor people sit clutching their front-door keys, just as the Palestinians of Galilee did when they arrived in Lebanon 58 years ago to spend the rest of their lives as refugees. Yes, the Shia Muslims of Lebanon probably will go home. But to what? A war between the Hizbollah and a Western intervention force? Or further bombardment by the Israelis?
The Sidon refugees now have 36 schools in which they can shelter - but they are the lucky ones. Across southern Lebanon, the innocent continued to die. One was an eight-year-old boy who was killed in an Israeli air raid on a village close to Tyre. Eight more civilians were wounded when an Israeli missile hit a vehicle outside the Najem hospital in Tyre. And during the morning, one of Lebanon's journalists, Layal Nejib, a photographer for the magazine Al-Jaras whose pictures were also transmitted by Agence France Press, was killed in her taxi by an Israeli air strike near Qana, the same village in which 106 civilians were massacred in a UN base by Israeli artillery shells in 1996. She was only 23.
In her marble-walled home above Sidon, Bahia Hariri - Ghena's mother, the sister of the murdered former prime minister and a local member of parliament - sat grim-faced, scarcely controlling her fury. "We are in this terrible situation but we haven't any window to resolve this situation," she said. "Rafik Hariri is no longer with us. The international community is not with us. Who is with us? God. And the old Lebanese. And the Arab world, we hope, will help us. The only resistance we can show is to be a united Lebanon. But we have only a small margin in which to dream."
They are in the schools, in empty hospitals, in halls and mosques and in the streets. The Shia Muslim refugees of southern Lebanon, driven from their homes by the Israelis, are arriving in Sidon by the thousand, cared for by Sunni Muslims and then sent north to join the 600,000 displaced Lebanese in Beirut. More than 34,000 have passed through here in the past four days alone, a tide of misery and anger. It will take years to heal their wounds, and billions of dollars to repair their damaged property.
And who can blame them for their flight? For the second time in eight days, the Israelis committed a war crime yesterday. They ordered the villagers of Taire, near the border, to leave their homes and then - as their convoy of cars and minibuses obediently trailed northwards - the Israeli air force fired a missile into the rear minibus, killing three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other civilians. The rocket that killed them is believed to have been a Hellfire missile made by Lockheed Martin in Florida.
Nine days ago, the Israeli army ordered the inhabitants of a neighbouring village, Marwaheen, to leave their homes and then fired rockets into one of their evacuation trucks, blasting the women and children inside to their deaths. And this is the same Israeli air force which was praised last week by one of Israel's greatest defenders - Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz - because it "takes extraordinary steps to minimise civilian casualties".
Nor have the Israelis spared Sidon. A heap of rubble and pancaked walls is all that is left of the Fatima Zahra mosque, a Hizbollah institution in the centre of the city, its minaret crumbled and its dome now sitting on the concrete, a black flag still flying from its top. When Israeli warplanes came early yesterday morning, the 75-year-old caretaker had no time to run from the building; he died of his wounds hours later. His overturned white plastic chair still lies by the gate. The mosque is unlikely to have been used for military purposes; a school belonging to the Hariris, Sidon's all-powerful Sunni family, stands next door; they would never have allowed weapons into the building.
Not that Hizbollah - which killed two more Israeli civilians with their rockets in Haifa yesterday - have respected Sidon, whose population is 95 per cent Sunni. They tried to fire Iranian-made missiles at Israel from the seafront Corniche and from beside the city slaughterhouse last week. On both occasions, residents physically prevented them from opening fire.
The multimillion-dollar Hariri Foundation - created by the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated last year - has helped 24,000 Shia refugees out of the south and on to Beirut but its generosity has not always been happily received. One group of refugees sheltering in a technical school in Meheniyeh punched and taunted Hariri workers. Elsewhere, the foundation's staff have been cursed by fleeing families. "They are telling us that we are working for the Americans and that this is why we are taking them out," said Ghena Hariri - Rafik's niece and a Georgetown graduate. "It is something that drains our energy. We are working 24 hours a day and at the end of the day they curse us. But I feel so sorry for them. Now they are being told by the Israelis to leave their villages on foot and they have to walk dozens of kilometres in this heat."
It's not difficult to see how this war can damage the delicate sectarian framework that exists in Lebanon. One group of Shia families - housed in a school in the Druze mountains of the Chouf - tried to put Hizbollah's yellow banners on the roof and members of Walid Jumblatt's Druze Popular Socialist Party had to tear them down. Their act may have saved the refugees' lives.
Yet many of the Shia in this beautiful Crusader port have learnt how kind their Sunni neighbours can be. "We are here - where else can we go?" Nazek Kadnah asked as she sat in the corner of a mosque which Rafik Hariri built and dedicated to his father, Haj Baha'udin Hariri. "But they look after us here as their brothers and sisters and now we are safe."
These sentiments provoke some dark questions. Why, for example, can't these poor people be shown the same compassion from Tony Blair as he supposedly felt for the Muslims of Kosovo when they were being driven from their homes by the Serbs? These thousands are as terrified and homeless as the Kosovo Albanians who fled to Macedonia in 1998 and for whom Mr Blair claimed he was waging a moral war. But for the Shia Muslims sleeping homeless in Sidon there is to be no such moral posturing - and no ceasefire suggestions from Mr Blair, who has aligned himself with the Israelis and the Americans.
And what exactly is the purpose of driving more than half a million people from their homes? Many of these poor people sit clutching their front-door keys, just as the Palestinians of Galilee did when they arrived in Lebanon 58 years ago to spend the rest of their lives as refugees. Yes, the Shia Muslims of Lebanon probably will go home. But to what? A war between the Hizbollah and a Western intervention force? Or further bombardment by the Israelis?
The Sidon refugees now have 36 schools in which they can shelter - but they are the lucky ones. Across southern Lebanon, the innocent continued to die. One was an eight-year-old boy who was killed in an Israeli air raid on a village close to Tyre. Eight more civilians were wounded when an Israeli missile hit a vehicle outside the Najem hospital in Tyre. And during the morning, one of Lebanon's journalists, Layal Nejib, a photographer for the magazine Al-Jaras whose pictures were also transmitted by Agence France Press, was killed in her taxi by an Israeli air strike near Qana, the same village in which 106 civilians were massacred in a UN base by Israeli artillery shells in 1996. She was only 23.
In her marble-walled home above Sidon, Bahia Hariri - Ghena's mother, the sister of the murdered former prime minister and a local member of parliament - sat grim-faced, scarcely controlling her fury. "We are in this terrible situation but we haven't any window to resolve this situation," she said. "Rafik Hariri is no longer with us. The international community is not with us. Who is with us? God. And the old Lebanese. And the Arab world, we hope, will help us. The only resistance we can show is to be a united Lebanon. But we have only a small margin in which to dream."
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 5:25 am Post subject: Red Cross ambulances destroyed in Israeli air strike on resc |
| Red Cross ambulances destroyed in Israeli air strike on rescue mission
· Volunteer paramedics demand UN guarantees
· Flags and lights prove no protection for aid teams
Suzanne Goldenberg in Tyre
Tuesday July 25, 2006
The Guardian
Coffins are prepared for mass burial in the Lebanese city of Tyre. Photograph: Nasser Nasser/AP
The ambulance headlamps were on, the blue light overhead was flashing, and another light illuminated the Red Cross flag when the first Israeli missile hit, shearing off the right leg of the man on the stretcher inside. As he lay screaming beneath fire and smoke, patients and ambulance workers scrambled for safety, crawling over glass in the dark. Then another missile hit the second ambulance.
Even in a war which has turned the roads of south Lebanon into killing zones, Israel's rocket strike on two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances on Sunday night set a deadly new milestone.
Six ambulance workers were wounded and three generations of the Fawaz family, being transported to hospital from Tibnin with what were originally minor injuries, were left fighting for their lives. Two ambulances were entirely destroyed, their roofs pierced by missiles.
The Lebanese Red Cross, whose ambulance service for south Lebanon is run entirely by volunteers, immediately announced it would cease all rescue missions unless Israel guaranteed their safety through the United Nations or the International Red Cross.
For the villages below the Litani river, the ambulances were their last link to the outside world. Yesterday, that too was gone, leaving the 100,000 people of Tyre district with no way of reaching hospital other than to take to the roads themselves, under the roar of Israeli war planes.
The fateful call to the Red Cross operations room came through at about 10pm - well after dark, a time when almost no Lebanese now dare venture out.
At the Red Cross office in Tyre, three volunteer medics dressed in their orange overalls, and got into their ambulance. The plan was to drive halfway, meet the local ambulance, and transfer the three patients to their vehicle to return to Tyre.
By Nader Joudi's reckoning, the ambulances had been stopped for barely two minutes. Two patients had been loaded: Ahmed Mustafa Fawaz, who had been hit by shrapnel in the stomach, and his son, Mohammed, 14. The volunteer attendant was just easing Jamila Fawaz, 80, inside and setting up a drip when the missile struck. He managed to get the old woman and the child outside, but there was no way to reach Mr Fawaz. "It was horrible," Mr Joudi said. "He was screaming, and we couldn't do anything."
One of the members of the three-man crew from Tibnin radioed for help when another missile plunged through the roof. Ambulance crew and patients retreated to the cellar of a nearby building, then waited to be rescued, trying as best as they could to help the injured. "Each of us treated ourselves. There was no light," said Kassem Shaalan, a medic from Tyre.
By the time patients and ambulance crew reached Tyre, Mr Fawaz was unconscious after losing one leg, and suffering severe fractures to the other. His son had lost part of a foot, and his mother's body was riddled with shrapnel. Mr Joudi had shrapnel wounds in his left arm, and Mr Shaalan cuts to the face and leg.
He was adamant that the ambulances, with their Red Cross insignia on the roof, were clearly visible from the air. "I don't think there can be a mistake in two bombings of two ambulances," he said.
Although the air strike marked the first time ambulances have been hit by Israel in this war, for Mr Shaalan and the other Red Cross volunteers it was only a matter of time. After two weeks of strikes designed to choke off possible supply lines to Hizbullah guerrillas, travel to many villages was just too dangerous. Coastal villages even within a few kilometers of Tyre are cut off. In some, corpses remain trapped in the rubble for days.
But nothing is more perilous than travelling by night, and no more so than just before midnight that Sunday when another Red Cross crew set off from Tyre to pick up their injured colleagues.
"I was trembling," said Ali Deeb, one of the volunteers on the mission. "It was too dangerous, and helicopters buzzing, and all through this, I am thinking one thing: the ambulance that left half an hour before you has already been injured, and you could be next." Later yesterday afternoon, two missiles landed in the building across the road from the Red Cross office.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1828142,00.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 7:52 am Post subject: Why Is Israel Destroying Lebanon? |
| http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14191.htm
Why Is Israel Destroying Lebanon?
By Patrick Seale
07/25/06 "Al-Hayat" 07/21/07 --- - Israel is waging a war of extermination in Lebanon. Without regard to the civilian population, it is seeking to destroy Hizballah, much as it has attempted over the past six months to destroy Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories. It wants to root out these movements altogether.
Its strategy in Lebanon seems to be to empty the south of its population, driving the Shi'ites out of their traditional homeland, where they have lived for centuries, in much the same way as it continues its pitiless onslaught on Gaza. In Lebanon, some 600,000 people have already been displaced, while the entire country is being brutalized and strangled.
Why this Israeli savagery? By their cross-border raids and the capture of three Israeli soldiers, Hizballah and Hamas humiliated the Israeli army and dented its deterrent capability. In Israeli eyes, this cannot go unpunished. It is determined to bring home to the Arabs the tremendous cost of daring to attack Israel.
The Israeli army has a score to settle with Hizballah which, by guerrilla harassment, drove it out of Lebanon in 2000, ending its 22-year occupation of the south. With this success, Hizballah demonstrated to the whole Arab world - and to the Palestinians in particular -- that Israel was not invincible. Now Israel is trying to set the record straight.
No doubt some Israeli hawks, like chief of staff Dan Halutz, regret the 'unfinished business' of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon when, having killed 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, it failed to secure the political reward of bringing a submissive Lebanon into its orbit.
This time, too, Israel may find that its war aim of destroying Hizballah and Hamas is unattainable. These are popular movements enjoying mass support. If crushed in the short-term, they will eventually spring back to life and seek revenge. To 'win', Israel would have to kill, not just hundreds, but hundreds of thousands, of people.
Hizballah's leader, Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah -- Israel's 'Enemy Number One' -- has repeatedly warned Israel to expect 'surprises'. The missile attacks on Haifa, Israel's third largest city, and the disabling of one of Israel's most advanced warships, were certainly painful surprises. They carried the war into Israel's home territory, posing a severe challenge to Israel's strategic doctrine, which has always been to fight its wars on Arab territory.
The greatest 'surprise' Hizballah's might still have up its sleeve would be to survive the present crisis, bloody but unbowed. The longer Hizballah holds out, the greater Israel's problems with the international community, and the greater the pressure of Arab opinion on those Arab regimes that have so far stood shiftily on the sidelines.
Israel has always relied on brute force to ensure its security. Since its creation in 1948, it has sought to dominate the region by military means. This doctrine rests on the belief that the Arabs will never be strong enough, or capable enough, to challenge it. This is a fundamentally racist attitude.
But beneath the bluster and the muscle-flexing lies a deep-seated paranoia and insecurity, reflected in the conviction, shared by many of Israel's citizens, that the Arabs want to kill them and that they face a permanent existential threat. The choice, they seem to believe, is between killing or being killed. This dark view of their environment - something of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- goes some way to explaining the extravagantly disproportionate nature of Israel's attacks and its blatant disregard for international legality and any semblance of morality.
Israel is able to behave in this way because it has been given extraordinary immunity by the United States. A striking aspect of the crisis is, indeed, America's total political, diplomatic and strategic support for Israel -- even to the point of rushing to give it $300 million of aviation fuel with which to continue smashing Lebanon!
America's gross bias has paralysed the Security Council, the G8 and the European Union. So great is American pressure that none of these bodies has been able to insist on an immediate end to the Israeli onslaught. Britain dutifully followed its American Big Brother in repeating the mantra that 'Israel has the right to defend itself', while even France, Lebanon's traditional protector, has tended to put the blame on Hizballah, rather than Israel, for the massive destruction and loss of life.
Terrorism is usually defined as the indiscriminate killing of civilians in pursuit of political goals. Is this not what Israel is doing in both Lebanon and Gaza? It is killing large numbers of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in pursuit of its political aim of annihilating Hizballah and Hamas. By any objective standard, Israel is guilty of state terrorism.
But killing Arabs in this wanton manner and smashing their countries must inevitably have negative consequences for Israel's own security. Israel's terrorist behaviour legitimizes the terrorism of its enemies. And America's uncritical support for Israel legitimises terrorism against the United States itself. That is what 9/11 was all about, although to this day the United States has not faced up to why it was attacked. The United States and Israel are sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind.
Washington's unconditional backing for Israel highlights the fact that this is not simply a war between Israel and Hizballah. By seeking to bomb Lebanon into submission, Israel intends to strike a blow at the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, which has challenged US-Israeli dominance in the region. The key issue is whose will is to prevail in this vital part of the world.
If the conflict had been a purely local one, Israel might have agreed to an exchange of prisoners, as both Hizballah and Hamas demanded, and as has taken place a number of times in the past. Some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners still languish in Israeli jails. To secure their release is a major Palestinian objective.
But the war has a wider dimension. The United States has given Israel a free rein because it is confronted with the probability of two highly disagreeable developments: a nuclear-armed Iran and a humiliating defeat in Iraq. It urgently needs to regain the initiative in the wider Middle East and has persuaded itself - or been persuaded by Israel's friends inside and outside the Administration -- that Israel can help it do so. The pro-Israeli neocons in the U.S have been trumpeting that a victory for Israel in Lebanon will be a victory for the United States, and a defeat for Israel will be a defeat for the United States.
This is the essential background to Israel's war, which had clearly been long planned in concert with the United States, and with the encouragement of some Christian Lebanese extremists, not unhappy to see Israel 'do the dirty work' for them in 'breaking' Hizballah.
The situation is complicated by a further layer of conflict. The Arab oil producers in the Gulf dread an upset in the regional power balance. They want to continue enjoying their great wealth under the umbrella of American protection. These Gulf regimes fear a dominant Iran and an assertive Shi'ism. This may explain their astonishing passivity in the face of Israel's aggression. But by failing forcefully to condemn Israel's brutality or spring to the defence of beleaguered Lebanon and Gaza, they expose themselves to the anger of the Arab public.
The explosive impact on Arab opinion of the war in Lebanon and the martyrdom of the Palestinians should not be under-estimated, particularly in view of the graphic media coverage of Israeli atrocities, provided by Al-Jazeera and Hizballah's satellite channel, Al-Manar,
Israel's indifference to Arab life risks convincing many young Arabs that long-term coexistence with Israel is not possible. Arab intellectuals are increasingly expressing the view that Israel is a colonial state, which must eventually disappear, as Europe's colonial empires did in their time.
At their summit meeting in Beirut in March 2002, all the Arab states declared their readiness to establish normal peaceful relations with Israel within its 1967 borders. But Israel, intent on expanding its borders, rejected the offer. It must surely be time for Israel to think again. The offer may still be on the table.
Only by withdrawing from Palestinian territories, respecting Lebanon's sovereignty and returning the Golan to Syria will Israel live in peace. End
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:30 am Post subject: |
| July 25, 2006
Kidnapped in Israel or Captured in Lebanon?
Official justification for Israel's invasion on thin ice
by Joshua Frank
As Lebanon continues to be pounded by Israeli bombs and munitions, the justification for Israel's invasion is treading on very thin ice. It has become general knowledge that it was Hezbollah guerillas that first kidnapped two IDF soldiers inside Israel on July 12, prompting an immediate and violent response from the Israeli government, which insists it is acting in the interest of national defense. Israeli forces have gone on to kill over 370 innocent Lebanese civilians (compared to 34 killed on Israel's side) while displacing hundreds of thousands more. But numerous reports from international and independent media, as well as the Associated Press, raise questions about Israel's official version of the events that sparked the conflict two weeks ago.
The original story, as most media tell it, goes something like this: Hezbollah attacked an Israeli border patrol station, killing six and taking two soldiers hostage. The incident happened on the Lebanese/Israel border in Israeli territory. The alternate version, as explained by several news outlets, tells a bit of a different tale: These sources contend that Israel sent a commando force into southern Lebanon and was subsequently attacked by Hezbollah near the village of Aitaa al-Chaab, well inside Lebanon's southern territory. It was at this point that an Israel tank was struck by Hezbollah fighters, which resulted in the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the death of six.
As the AFP reported, "According to the Lebanese police force, the two Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanese territory, in the area of Aitaa al-Chaab, near to the border with Israel, where an Israeli unit had penetrated in middle of morning." And the French news site www.VoltaireNet.org reiterated the same account on June 18, "In a deliberated way, [Israel] sent a commando in the Lebanese back-country to Aitaa al-Chaab. It was attacked by Hezbollah, taking two prisoners."
The Associated Press departed from the official version as well. "The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them," reported Joseph Panossian for AP on July 12. "The forces were trying to keep the soldiers' captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon, Israeli government officials said on condition of anonymity."
And the Hindustan Times on July 12 conveyed a similar account:
"The Lebanese Shi'ite Hezbollah movement announced on Wednesday that its guerrillas have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. 'Implementing our promise to free Arab prisoners in Israeli jails, our strugglers have captured two Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon,' a statement by Hezbollah said. 'The two soldiers have already been moved to a safe place,' it added. The Lebanese police said that the two soldiers were captured as they 'infiltrated' into the town of Aitaa al-Chaab inside the Lebanese border."
Whether factual or not, these alternative accounts should at the very least raise serious questions as to Israel's motives and rationale for bombarding Lebanon.
MSNBC online first reported that Hezbollah had captured Israeli soldiers "inside" Lebanon, only to change their story hours later after the Israeli government gave an official statement to the contrary.
A report from The National Council of Arab Americans, based in Lebanon, also raised suspicion that Israel's official story did not hold water and noted that Israel had yet to recover the tank that was demolished during the initial attack in question.
"The Israelis so far have not been able to enter Aitaa al-Chaab to recover the tank that was exploded by Hezbollah and the bodies of the soldiers that were killed in the original operation (this is a main indication that the operation did take place on Lebanese soil, not that in my opinion it would ever be an illegitimate operation, but still the media has been saying that it was inside 'Israel' thus an aggression first started by Hezbollah)."
Before independent observers could organize an investigation of the incident, Israel had already mounted a grisly offensive against Lebanese infrastructure and civilians, bombing Beirut's international airport, along with numerous highways and communication portals. Israel didn't need the truth of the matter to play out before it invaded Lebanon. As with the United States' illegitimate invasion of Iraq, Israel just needed the proper media cover to wage a war with no genuine moral impetus.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/frank/?articleid=9401
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Israeli invasion of Lebanon planned by neocons in June
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/24/israeli-invasion-of-lebanon-planned-by-neocons-in-june.php
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July 24, 2006
Danger! Legacy Ahead!
There's a reason the Middle East is heating up
by Justin Raimondo
The Israelis are conducting not only a shooting war but also a propaganda war: if there is a way to "spin" the deaths of Lebanese civilians, the smashing of the infrastructure, and even the bombing of an anti-Hezbollah Christian-owned television station, then surely Israel's skillful propagandists – here and in Israel proper – are bound to find it. The idea is to shape the narrative of the conflict so that Israel is portrayed as a reluctant warrior.
In America, this is easy: the "mainstream" media, always attentive to the powerful Israel lobby, refrains from showing pictures that might upset the carefully nurtured image of the Jewish state as a heroic David up against an Arab-Muslim giant. Whenever there is an "expert" to be consulted, half the time it's an Israeli, or someone from Israel's amen corner, who explains to the TV audience that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization along the lines of al-Qaeda – without mentioning that this is no guerrilla group, but a highly organized political party, which, as President Lahoud of Lebanon reminded us the other day, is "part of the government of Lebanon." The other day on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, I had to laugh when Joe Scarborough announced the guests on an upcoming segment about the Lebanon crisis: Bibi Netanyahu, Mort Zuckerman, and Pat Buchanan.
If anyone else but Buchanan had been involved it would have been the onscreen equivalent of a mugging, but Pat acquitted himself quite well. The point, however, is that there is no question of "balance" when it comes to media portrayals of the July war, or of any topics having to do with Israel. It's all pro-Israel, all the time, and it is nothing short of miraculous that a trenchant critic like Buchanan is allowed to give his opinion at all.
The U.S. government, therefore, has a lot of leeway when it comes to its relationship with Israel. It can get away with pursuing Israel's interests, to the detriment of our own, simply on account of the blindness of most people to the nature of the "special relationship" – and its geopolitical and financial repercussions. Very few know, for example, that Israel gets over $3 billion a year from the U.S. in "foreign aid," and that we subsidize the Israeli military budget to the tune of some 20 percent. Any news that puts Israel in a bad light is downplayed, or else completely ignored. For example, the shocking charges against two lobbyists for Israel, AIPAC honcho Steve Rosen and the group's Iran analyst, Keith Weissman – spying for Israel – should have generated front-page headlines; instead, the case has puttered along pretty much beneath the media radar.
In Europe, it is quite different: the pictures of the slaughter are getting through via the mass media, and people are less naïve about the true nature of the Israeli state. Even the British government broke with the Yanks on this one, as Foreign Office official Kim Howells looked askance at the rape of Lebanon:
"The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people: these have not been surgical strikes. If they are chasing Hezbollah, then go for Hezbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation…. I very much hope that the Americans understand what's happening to Lebanon."
The sheer brazenness of this operation, and the American complicity, is shocking – and here I thought nothing could shock me anymore. After all, Israel has invaded a sovereign nation, attacked communities that are hostile to Hezbollah (such as the Christian Maronites), bombed Lebanese army barracks, and tried to shut down the Lebanese media – all of which are roughly comparable to, say, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Not that any of this is surprising, coming from the Israelis – but the Americans have not caviled in the slightest. If anything, George W. Bush is more pro-Israel than many Israelis, and his support for the invasion has been unequivocal, even enthusiastic.
This enthusiasm is partly explained by the president's fulsome support for the Jewish state: no American administration has been quite as pro-Israel as this one. Yet one could imagine that, behind the scenes, there would be tensions between the U.S. and Israel, at least over the timetable of the Lebanese incursion. The longer Israel stays in and keeps up the merciless bombardment, the morepressure Washington faces from its Arab allies in the region, who fear their populations' outrage at the continuing carnage. U.S. support for the invasion is also having repercussions in Iraq, where the ruling Shi'ite coalition is not exactly friendly to Tel Aviv, Shi'ite radicals are up in arms, and the speaker of the Parliament is now calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
The U.S. is provoking all sorts of negative reactions to its endorsement of Israeli brutality, and so why, one has to ask, are they doing it?
Aside from the usual reasons – this administration's pro-Israel orientation, the hijacking of American foreign policy by the neoconservatives, and the support for Israel coming from important Republican constituencies, such as the evangelical Christians – the decisive factor is George W. Bush's growing fixation on his legacy as president.
Every occupant of the White House who approaches the end of his second term has similar concerns, naturally enough: they all want to ensure that they not go down in the history books as a failure. But this president, who has had to endure a merciless mocking from the chattering classes over his relative lack of sophistication and general state of unpreparedness for the role of chief executive, has a lot more invested in this than most. He has prided himself on not taking the easy road, swimming against the tide in the hope that history will prove him right – and now, as the end of his reign approaches, he must take history by the throat or else forever lose the opportunity.
The Israeli invasion is one such opportunity. What was surprising about the American response to Tel Aviv's untrammeled aggression was not that they wholeheartedly endorsed it, but how quickly and pointedly they used the occasion to turn up the heat on Damascus and score points against Tehran. Can they really be thinking about taking on Syria and Iran – even as the Iraqi "model" explodes in a maelstrom of sectarian strife?
Yes, they can, and it's due, in large degree, to one man's vanity. In George W. Bush's case, this is one of his most striking characteristics, which, entwined with his arrogance and stubbornness, seems to define his personality. He doesn't want to go down in history as George the Clueless: he dreams of being George the Conqueror, the man who had the vision to defy the experts, the media, and the American public, and "liberate" not only Iraq but the entire Middle East.
George W. Bush bears all the ominous hallmarks of a True Believer. Here is a president who, in his last inaugural address, proclaimed "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Grandiosity doesn't even begin to describe the presidential mindset – it is more like megalomania – and the abundant danger of such ambition on the part of such a man is all too apparent.
"By our efforts we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress."
The neocons thrilled to those words as the president uttered them in his second inaugural address, but lately, it seemed, the fire had gone out of George. Before the Israelis unleashed their fury on the hapless civilians of Beirut, the War Party, you'll remember, was in full retreat. Chastened by the failure of the Iraqi misadventure, beleaguered by legal and political problems on the home front – a fewindictments, the growing unpopularity of the war – and weakened by defections from their own ranks, the neoconservatives were on the run. In the administration, they were getting out of government – Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith – and in the public square they were keeping a low profile.
Not anymore. A week or so before the invasion, Richard Perle attacked Condi Rice in the Washington Post, signaling neocon disaffection with an administration that seemed to have fallen prey to a paralyzing realism. Iran was being allowed to get away with thumbing its nose at U.S. demands that the mullahs dismantle their nascent nuclear industry. The regime-change campaign aimed at Syria seemed to have fizzled out. In short: the Revolution had been betrayed.
The Israelis changed all that when they started bombing Beirut. The regime-changers once again had their agenda front and center, and the prospect of a conflict with Syria and/or Iran gained instant momentum.
The Revolution, once badly stalled, is revving up its motors, and the War Party is back in its full fighting stance. What is appalling and frightening is that the Democrats are in many cases worse than the Republicans on the Lebanon invasion question: this means there will be no brake on the administration in taking this road to further "regime change" in the Middle East.
Iran is their ultimate goal, but the road to Tehran runs through Damascus, and the preparations for the Syrian campaign have been extensive and very well thought out. They succeeded in pinning the blame for the assassination of Rafik Hariri on the Syrians, even though the evidence seems to contradict this conclusion. The U.S.-Israeli campaign to get the Syrian army kicked out of Lebanon achieved its goal just over a year before the Israelis marched in. This could be serendipity, but here's another "coincidence" – a week or so before the invasion, the Lebanese announced they had busted a cell of Israeli agents who had been carrying out assassinations in the country. One wonders what a full investigation of their activities would have revealed – if the war hadn't delayed or obscured it. After all, someone killed Hariri…
The Israelis, in any case, are now destroying Hariri's legacy – the Beirut he rebuilt after the ravages of the last Israeli assault – and they won't stop until their masters in Washington start to get antsy. And maybe not even then. In the case of the "special relationship" between Washington and Tel Aviv, it is hard to tell, very often, who is the master and who is the slave. As Professor Paul W. Schroeder put it in The American Conservative, the Iraq war represented "something unique in history":
"It is common for great powers to try to fight wars by proxy, getting smaller powers to fight for their interests. This would be the first instance I know where a great power (in fact, a superpower) would do the fighting as the proxy of a small client state."
Israel is doing its own fighting – for once – but don't worry, relief is on the way. The American secretary of state has a plan for a "robust" international force that will take on the job of cleaning out Hezbollah and administering the occupation of a "buffer zone" within Lebanon. We are assured there will be no Americans in this force, but that seems highly improbable. If ever such a force comes into existence and is sent to police the mean streets of south Lebanon, then you can bet your bottom dollar the Yanks are coming, too.
In the meantime, it will take months to organize an international "peacekeeping" mission: this will give the Israelis plenty of time to continue their terror campaign, and perhaps come right to the gates of Beirut. The drama has yet to play itself out, but whatever the outcome, we can be sure that the script was written well in advance.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9397
Scenes Of Israeli Massacre At UN Compound in Lebanon - 1996
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14194.htm
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With regard to what Israel is currently doing in Lebanon, take a look at the following (pages 141-144 from Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book):
...About the same time, beginning on April 11, 1996, a series of shock waves rumbled through the Muslim world as a result of Israel's massive bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon, which Israel had by then been occupying for fourteen years. Known as "Operation of Grapes of Wrath," it was the first time Israel had attacked Beirut since Ariel Sharon's ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. According to Israeli writer Israel Shahak, the real purpose of the attack was to capture as much Lebanese territory as possible.
"It is quite obvious," wrote Shahak, "that the first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes of Wrath' is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon -- to be exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip."
Two days after it began, on April 13, ambulance driver Abbas Jiha from the village of Mansouri was busy rushing patients wounded in the fighting to a hospital in the town of Sidon. On his return to Mansouri, panic had broken out and explosions were taking place. People began pleading for him to take them to Sidon. Jiha quickly squeezed four of his children into his ambulance along with ten other people, including a family, and began driving toward Sidon.
Suddenly, an Israeli helicopter began chasing his ambulance. Minutes later, two missiles were fired, one of which exploded through the rear door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it sixty feet through the air. Thrown clear, Abbas Jiha began running toward the flaming heap of twisted metal. "My God, my God," he screamed, shaking his fist at the sky, "my family has gone." In all, six people were killed, including Jiha's nine year-old daughter and his wife.
Israeli officials later admitted the ambulance had been targeted but claimed, falsely, that the vehicle was owned by Hezbollah and was transporting one of the group's fighters. Jiha had no connection with terrorist groups, and the thought that Israel could target an ambulance packed with innocent people, including many children, outraged Muslims throughout the Middle East.
On April 18, one week into Operation Grapes of Wrath, a reporter for London's newspaper The Independent was traveling in southern Lebanon with a United Nations convoy. Robert Fisk, Britain's most highly decorated foreign correspondent, spent a quarter of a century covering the Middle East and was the recipient of the British International Journalist of the Year Award seven times, including for 1996. As the vehicles were approaching the small village of Qana, Fisk could hear the sound of artillery, he recalled.
The convoy had stopped at Qana that morning and noticed it was crowded with about eight hundred refugees. They had been transported there for their safety by armored UN vehicles from nearby villages that had come under Israeli bombardment. When the convoy finally arrived in Qana shortly after two in the afternoon, fire was everywhere and proximity shells were bursting in the air. Antipersonnel weapons designed to explode about two dozen feet above ground, they would shower down razor-sharp shrapnel, butchering anyone beneath.
"It was a massacre," wrote Fisk in a front-page story. "Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive -- 206 by last night --- has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 -- the youngest was a four-day-old baby -- when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home."
The Israeli government later claimed the attack on the UN refugee camp at Qana was a mistake. But a formal, top-level United Nations investigation came to a different conclusion. "It is unlikely" that Israeli gunners simply erred, said the report, and demanded that Israel pay $1.7 million in damages. "Contrary to repeated denials," said the report, "two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling." Amnesty International also conducted an investigation of the massacre, and they concluded "that the IDF [Israeli Defense Force} intentionally attacked the UN compound."
Arieh Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, noted: "How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We did not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification, because this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on." And the international edition of Time magazine noted, "Around the Middle East... Qana is already a byword for martydom. The southern Lebanese village figures as a shrine drawing up to 1,000 pilgrims a day: busloads of schoolchildren, Cabinet ministers from Beirut, even a daughter of Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Black banners overlooking rows of graves decry the 'barbarity' of Israel."
While largely ignored by the American press, the massacre at Qana was front-page news in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle East, where the story continued for days. Already burning with hatred for America and Israel, the pictures of headless Arab babies and other grisly photographs that appeared throughout the media were likely the final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli - United States alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning five years later....
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article14191.htm
Why Is Israel Destroying Lebanon?
By Patrick Seale
07/25/06 "Al-Hayat" 07/21/07 --- - Israel is waging a war of extermination in Lebanon. Without regard to the civilian population, it is seeking to destroy Hizballah, much as it has attempted over the past six months to destroy Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories. It wants to root out these movements altogether.
Its strategy in Lebanon seems to be to empty the south of its population, driving the Shi'ites out of their traditional homeland, where they have lived for centuries, in much the same way as it continues its pitiless onslaught on Gaza. In Lebanon, some 600,000 people have already been displaced, while the entire country is being brutalized and strangled.
Why this Israeli savagery? By their cross-border raids and the capture of three Israeli soldiers, Hizballah and Hamas humiliated the Israeli army and dented its deterrent capability. In Israeli eyes, this cannot go unpunished. It is determined to bring home to the Arabs the tremendous cost of daring to attack Israel.
The Israeli army has a score to settle with Hizballah which, by guerrilla harassment, drove it out of Lebanon in 2000, ending its 22-year occupation of the south. With this success, Hizballah demonstrated to the whole Arab world - and to the Palestinians in particular -- that Israel was not invincible. Now Israel is trying to set the record straight.
No doubt some Israeli hawks, like chief of staff Dan Halutz, regret the 'unfinished business' of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon when, having killed 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, it failed to secure the political reward of bringing a submissive Lebanon into its orbit.
This time, too, Israel may find that its war aim of destroying Hizballah and Hamas is unattainable. These are popular movements enjoying mass support. If crushed in the short-term, they will eventually spring back to life and seek revenge. To 'win', Israel would have to kill, not just hundreds, but hundreds of thousands, of people.
Hizballah's leader, Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah -- Israel's 'Enemy Number One' -- has repeatedly warned Israel to expect 'surprises'. The missile attacks on Haifa, Israel's third largest city, and the disabling of one of Israel's most advanced warships, were certainly painful surprises. They carried the war into Israel's home territory, posing a severe challenge to Israel's strategic doctrine, which has always been to fight its wars on Arab territory.
The greatest 'surprise' Hizballah's might still have up its sleeve would be to survive the present crisis, bloody but unbowed. The longer Hizballah holds out, the greater Israel's problems with the international community, and the greater the pressure of Arab opinion on those Arab regimes that have so far stood shiftily on the sidelines.
Israel has always relied on brute force to ensure its security. Since its creation in 1948, it has sought to dominate the region by military means. This doctrine rests on the belief that the Arabs will never be strong enough, or capable enough, to challenge it. This is a fundamentally racist attitude.
But beneath the bluster and the muscle-flexing lies a deep-seated paranoia and insecurity, reflected in the conviction, shared by many of Israel's citizens, that the Arabs want to kill them and that they face a permanent existential threat. The choice, they seem to believe, is between killing or being killed. This dark view of their environment - something of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- goes some way to explaining the extravagantly disproportionate nature of Israel's attacks and its blatant disregard for international legality and any semblance of morality.
Israel is able to behave in this way because it has been given extraordinary immunity by the United States. A striking aspect of the crisis is, indeed, America's total political, diplomatic and strategic support for Israel -- even to the point of rushing to give it $300 million of aviation fuel with which to continue smashing Lebanon!
America's gross bias has paralysed the Security Council, the G8 and the European Union. So great is American pressure that none of these bodies has been able to insist on an immediate end to the Israeli onslaught. Britain dutifully followed its American Big Brother in repeating the mantra that 'Israel has the right to defend itself', while even France, Lebanon's traditional protector, has tended to put the blame on Hizballah, rather than Israel, for the massive destruction and loss of life.
Terrorism is usually defined as the indiscriminate killing of civilians in pursuit of political goals. Is this not what Israel is doing in both Lebanon and Gaza? It is killing large numbers of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in pursuit of its political aim of annihilating Hizballah and Hamas. By any objective standard, Israel is guilty of state terrorism.
But killing Arabs in this wanton manner and smashing their countries must inevitably have negative consequences for Israel's own security. Israel's terrorist behaviour legitimizes the terrorism of its enemies. And America's uncritical support for Israel legitimises terrorism against the United States itself. That is what 9/11 was all about, although to this day the United States has not faced up to why it was attacked. The United States and Israel are sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind.
Washington's unconditional backing for Israel highlights the fact that this is not simply a war between Israel and Hizballah. By seeking to bomb Lebanon into submission, Israel intends to strike a blow at the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, which has challenged US-Israeli dominance in the region. The key issue is whose will is to prevail in this vital part of the world.
If the conflict had been a purely local one, Israel might have agreed to an exchange of prisoners, as both Hizballah and Hamas demanded, and as has taken place a number of times in the past. Some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners still languish in Israeli jails. To secure their release is a major Palestinian objective.
But the war has a wider dimension. The United States has given Israel a free rein because it is confronted with the probability of two highly disagreeable developments: a nuclear-armed Iran and a humiliating defeat in Iraq. It urgently needs to regain the initiative in the wider Middle East and has persuaded itself - or been persuaded by Israel's friends inside and outside the Administration -- that Israel can help it do so. The pro-Israeli neocons in the U.S have been trumpeting that a victory for Israel in Lebanon will be a victory for the United States, and a defeat for Israel will be a defeat for the United States.
This is the essential background to Israel's war, which had clearly been long planned in concert with the United States, and with the encouragement of some Christian Lebanese extremists, not unhappy to see Israel 'do the dirty work' for them in 'breaking' Hizballah.
The situation is complicated by a further layer of conflict. The Arab oil producers in the Gulf dread an upset in the regional power balance. They want to continue enjoying their great wealth under the umbrella of American protection. These Gulf regimes fear a dominant Iran and an assertive Shi'ism. This may explain their astonishing passivity in the face of Israel's aggression. But by failing forcefully to condemn Israel's brutality or spring to the defence of beleaguered Lebanon and Gaza, they expose themselves to the anger of the Arab public.
The explosive impact on Arab opinion of the war in Lebanon and the martyrdom of the Palestinians should not be under-estimated, particularly in view of the graphic media coverage of Israeli atrocities, provided by Al-Jazeera and Hizballah's satellite channel, Al-Manar,
Israel's indifference to Arab life risks convincing many young Arabs that long-term coexistence with Israel is not possible. Arab intellectuals are increasingly expressing the view that Israel is a colonial state, which must eventually disappear, as Europe's colonial empires did in their time.
At their summit meeting in Beirut in March 2002, all the Arab states declared their readiness to establish normal peaceful relations with Israel within its 1967 borders. But Israel, intent on expanding its borders, rejected the offer. It must surely be time for Israel to think again. The offer may still be on the table.
Only by withdrawing from Palestinian territories, respecting Lebanon's sovereignty and returning the Golan to Syria will Israel live in peace. End
http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com
UN's Annan accuses Israel of deliberate attack
Israeli bomb kills UN observers
Four United Nations peacekeepers have been killed in an Israeli air strike on an observation post in southern Lebanon, the UN has said.
A bomb struck the post occupied by the peacekeepers of the Unifil force in the Khiam area, it said.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said he was "shocked" at the "apparently deliberate targeting" of the post.
The attack came as Israel said it would control an area in southern Lebanon until international forces deployed.
The force will be discussed at crisis talks to be held in Rome on Wednesday.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be at the talks after ending her tour of the Middle East on Tuesday.
More than 380 Lebanese and 42 Israelis have died in nearly two weeks of conflict in Lebanon, which began after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on 12 July.
Protest
The UN in Lebanon says the Israeli air force destroyed the observer post, in which four military observers were sheltering.
It said the four, from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, had taken shelter in a bunker under the post after it was earlier shelled 14 times by Israeli artillery.
A rescue team was also shelled as it tried to clear the rubble.
"I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN Observer post in southern Lebanon," Mr Annan said in a statement from Rome.
Unifil has been operational in the border area since 1978 and is currently 2,000 strong.
In other military action:
The Israeli army said it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Abu Jaafar, in fighting in southern Lebanon
Earlier the UN had said Israeli forces were now in control of the town of Bint Jbeil after fierce fighting and were moving on the village of Yaroun to the south
Israel resumed air raids on Beirut, with explosions heard in southern suburbs - a Hezbollah stronghold
Hezbollah maintained fire of Katyusha rockets into Israel, killing a 15-year-old Arab-Israeli girl in the northern Israeli village of Maghar and striking Haifa with a large salvo
Hezbollah said 27 of its fighters had been killed as of Monday, but the Israeli military said it had killed "some dozens".
Truce call
Earlier, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz had said a "security zone" in southern Lebanon would be maintained "under the control of our forces if there is not a multinational force".
He said: "We have no other option. We have to build a new security strip that will be a cover for our forces."
He did not specify whether Israeli troops would remain there but insisted they would "continue to control [Hezbollah]" in their operations.
Israeli government sources have estimated the width of the zone at anything from three to 10km (1.9-6.2 miles).
An unnamed Israeli official quoted by Reuters news agency said between 10,000 and 20,000 international peacekeepers would be needed.
BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says Israeli details on the zone - and how it will be secured - are far from clear.
Israel is acting with tremendous restraint, were they targeting civilian populations there would be thousands upon thousands dead
Steve Gross, US
He says it is possible Mr Peretz is trying to put pressure on the international community to deliver the peacekeeping force.
The idea of the multinational force will be high on the agenda of foreign ministers who meet in Rome on Wednesday.
Earlier, Ms Rice had expressed concern for the suffering of "innocent people" in the fighting during her tour of the Middle East.
She met Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and later Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Abbas called for an immediate end to "aggression against the Gaza Strip and the West Bank" and for an "immediate ceasefire" in Lebanon.
Ms Rice said the only solution was a sustainable and enduring peace.
Her words were reinforced later by US President George W Bush who said: "I support a sustainable ceasefire that will bring about an end to violence... Our mission and our goal is to have a lasting peace, not a temporary peace."
In his meeting with Ms Rice, Mr Olmert said he was "very conscious" of the humanitarian needs of Lebanon's civilians, but insisted Israel was defending itself against terrorism.
Ms Rice highlighted the need for Israel to consider the humanitarian needs of both Lebanon and the Palestinian people and the need for a durable peace.
She said: "It is time for a new Middle East, it is time to say to those who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail; they will not."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5215366.stm...
Forwarded:
The UN's Kofi Annan has just mentioned in a press conference (which I am sure you already aware of unless you have already gone to bed) that Israel deliberately attacked the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon (this has the making of a major international incident with the dead UN peacekeepers being from Europe and China as Annan has mentioned that Israel deliberately sought out to kill these UN peacekeepers).
I am not being critical of you in this as I know that the execs at CBS won't have this addressed to the extent that it should be with regard to Israel having a track record of deliberate attacks such as with the USS Liberty and Qana as well.. CNN's Christiane Amanpour mentioned Qana this now but said that it was a 'mistake' which is pure BS... Did you see the following write-up about Qana from my prior email send?:
With regard to what Israel is currently doing in Lebanon, take a look at the following (pages 141-144 from Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book):
...About the same time, beginning on April 11, 1996, a series of shock waves rumbled through the Muslim world as a result of Israel's massive bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon, which Israel had by then been occupying for fourteen years. Known as "Operation of Grapes of Wrath," it was the first time Israel had attacked Beirut since Ariel Sharon's ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. According to Israeli writer Israel Shahak, the real purpose of the attack was to capture as much Lebanese territory as possible.
"It is quite obvious," wrote Shahak, "that the first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes of Wrath' is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon -- to be exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip."
Two days after it began, on April 13, ambulance driver Abbas Jiha from the village of Mansouri was busy rushing patients wounded in the fighting to a hospital in the town of Sidon. On his return to Mansouri, panic had broken out and explosions were taking place. People began pleading for him to take them to Sidon. Jiha quickly squeezed four of his children into his ambulance along with ten other people, including a family, and began driving toward Sidon.
Suddenly, an Israeli helicopter began chasing his ambulance. Minutes later, two missiles were fired, one of which exploded through the rear door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it sixty feet through the air. Thrown clear, Abbas Jiha began running toward the flaming heap of twisted metal. "My God, my God," he screamed, shaking his fist at the sky, "my family has gone." In all, six people were killed, including Jiha's nine year-old daughter and his wife.
Israeli officials later admitted the ambulance had been targeted but claimed, falsely, that the vehicle was owned by Hezbollah and was transporting one of the group's fighters. Jiha had no connection with terrorist groups, and the thought that Israel could target an ambulance packed with innocent people, including many children, outraged Muslims throughout the Middle East.
On April 18, one week into Operation Grapes of Wrath, a reporter for London's newspaper The Independent was traveling in southern Lebanon with a United Nations convoy. Robert Fisk, Britain's most highly decorated foreign correspondent, spent a quarter of a century covering the Middle East and was the recipient of the British International Journalist of the Year Award seven times, including for 1996. As the vehicles were approaching the small village of Qana, Fisk could hear the sound of artillery, he recalled.
The convoy had stopped at Qana that morning and noticed it was crowded with about eight hundred refugees. They had been transported there for their safety by armored UN vehicles from nearby villages that had come under Israeli bombardment. When the convoy finally arrived in Qana shortly after two in the afternoon, fire was everywhere and proximity shells were bursting in the air. Antipersonnel weapons designed to explode about two dozen feet above ground, they would shower down razor-sharp shrapnel, butchering anyone beneath.
"It was a massacre," wrote Fisk in a front-page story. "Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive -- 206 by last night --- has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 -- the youngest was a four-day-old baby -- when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home."
The Israeli government later claimed the attack on the UN refugee camp at Qana was a mistake. But a formal, top-level United Nations investigation came to a different conclusion. "It is unlikely" that Israeli gunners simply erred, said the report, and demanded that Israel pay $1.7 million in damages. "Contrary to repeated denials," said the report, "two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling." Amnesty International also conducted an investigation of the massacre, and they concluded "that the IDF [Israeli Defense Force} intentionally attacked the UN compound."
Arieh Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, noted: "How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We did not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification, because this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on." And the international edition of Time magazine noted, "Around the Middle East... Qana is already a byword for martydom. The southern Lebanese village figures as a shrine drawing up to 1,000 pilgrims a day: busloads of schoolchildren, Cabinet ministers from Beirut, even a daughter of Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Black banners overlooking rows of graves decry the 'barbarity' of Israel."
While largely ignored by the American press, the massacre at Qana was front-page news in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle East, where the story continued for days. Already burning with hatred for America and Israel, the pictures of headless Arab babies and other grisly photographs that appeared throughout the media were likely the final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli - United States alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning five years later....
James Morris <justicequest2000@yahoo.com> wrote: The Hezbolllah-Israel fight is in the third week as Olmert has mentioned that the "most severe measures' were going to be taken according a BBC report that came out (it is included after the following). Seems like the plan (as conveyed via the following article from the San Francisco Chronicle is on track):
Israel set war plan more than a year ago
Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining military strength in Lebanon
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/21/MNG2QK396D1.DTL
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Friday, July 21, 2006
Printable Version
Email This Article
(07-21) 04:00 PDT Jerusalem -- Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago.
In the six years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly.
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.
Israeli officials say their pinpoint commando raids should not be confused with a ground invasion. Nor, they say, do they herald another occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israel maintained from 1982 to 2000 -- in order, it said, to thwart Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Planners anticipated the likelihood of civilian deaths on both sides. Israel says Hezbollah intentionally bases some of its operations in residential areas. And Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has bragged publicly that the group's arsenal included rockets capable of bombing Haifa, as occurred last week.
Like all plans, the one now unfolding also has been shaped by changing circumstances, said Eran Lerman, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence who is now director of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Committee.
"There are two radical views of how to deal with this challenge, a serious professional debate within the military community over which way to go," said Lerman. "One is the air power school of thought, the other is the land-borne option. They create different dynamics and different timetables. The crucial factor is that the air force concept is very methodical and almost by definition is slower to get results. A ground invasion that sweeps Hezbollah in front of you is quicker, but at a much higher cost in human life and requiring the creation of a presence on the ground."
The advance scenario is now in its second week, and its success or failure is still unfolding. Whether Israel's aerial strikes will be enough to achieve the threefold aim of the campaign -- to remove the Hezbollah military threat; to evict Hezbollah from the border area, allowing the deployment of Lebanese government troops; and to ensure the safe return of the two Israeli soldiers abducted last week -- remains an open question. Israelis are opposed to the thought of reoccupying Lebanon.
"I have the feeling that the end is not clear here. I have no idea how this movie is going to end," said Daniel Ben-Simon, a military analyst for the daily Haaretz newspaper.
Thursday's clashes in southern Lebanon occurred near an outpost abandoned more than six years ago by the retreating Israeli army. The place was identified using satellite photographs of a Hezbollah bunker, but only from the ground was Israel able to discover that it served as the entrance to a previously unknown underground network of caves and bunkers stuffed with missiles aimed at northern Israel, said Israeli army spokesman Miri Regev.
"We knew about the network, but it was fully revealed (Wednesday) by the ground operation of our forces," said Regev. "This is one of the purposes of the pinpoint ground operations -- to locate and try to destroy the terrorist infrastructure from where they can fire at Israeli citizens."
Israeli military officials say as much as 50 percent of Hezbollah's missile capability has been destroyed, mainly by aerial attacks on targets identified from intelligence reports. But missiles continue to be fired at towns and cities across northern Israel.
"We were not surprised that the firing has continued," said Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "Hezbollah separated its leadership command-and-control system from its field organization. It created a network of tiny cells in each village that had no operational mission except to wait for the moment when they should activate the Katyusha rocket launchers hidden in local houses, using coordinates programmed long ago to hit Nahariya or Kiryat Shemona, or the kibbutzim and villages."
"From the start of this operation, we have also been active on the ground across the width of Lebanon," said Brig. Gen. Ron Friedman, head of Northern Command headquarters. "These missions are designed to support our current actions. Unfortunately, one of the many missions which we have carried out in recent days met with slightly fiercer resistance."
Israel didn't need sophisticated intelligence to discover the huge buildup of Iranian weapons supplies to Hezbollah by way of Syria, because Hezbollah's patrons boasted about it openly in the pages of the Arabic press. As recently as June 16, less than four weeks before the Hezbollah border raid that sparked the current crisis, the Syrian defense minister publicly announced the extension of existing agreements allowing the passage of trucks shipping Iranian weapons into Lebanon.
But to destroy them, Israel needed to map the location of each missile.
"We need a lot of patience," said Hanegbi. "The (Israeli Defense Forces) action at the moment is incapable of finding the very last Katyusha, or the last rocket launcher primed for use hidden inside a house in some village."
Moshe Marzuk, a former head of the Lebanon desk for Israeli Military Intelligence who now is a researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, said Israel had learned from past conflicts in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza -- as well as the recent U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq -- that a traditional military campaign would be counter-effective.
"A big invasion is not suitable here," said Marzuk. "We are not fighting an army, but guerrillas. It would be a mistake to enter and expose ourselves to fighters who will hide, fire off a missile and run away. If we are to be on the ground at all, we need to use commandos and special forces."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Since fighting started
-- Israeli air strikes on Lebanon have hit more than 1,255 targets, including 200 rocket-launching sites.
-- Hezbollah launched more than 900 rockets and missiles into northern Israel.
-- At least 330 Lebanese have been killed, including 20 soldiers and three Hezbollah guerrillas. Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora says 1,100 have been wounded; the police put the number at 657.
-- 32 Israelis have been killed, among them 17 soldiers, according to Israeli authorities. At least 12 soldiers and 344 civilians have been wounded.
-- Foreign deaths include eight Canadians, two Kuwaiti nationals, one Iraqi, one Sri Lankan and one Jordanian.
Page A - 1
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Here is the BBC piece:
Rice regrets Mid-East 'suffering'
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed concern for the suffering of "innocent people" in the current fighting in the Middle East.
She was speaking after talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and following an earlier meeting with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert.
Mr Abbas called for an immediate truce but Mr Olmert told her there would be no let-up in army operations.
Ms Rice did not back Mr Abbas' call - but urged peace across the region.
Ms Rice's diplomatic tour comes as Israeli forces continue operations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.
They have resumed bombing targets in Beirut - after a lull during Ms Rice's visit on Tuesday.
Some 380 Lebanese and up to 40 Israelis have died in nearly two weeks of conflict in Lebanon, which began after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on 12 July.
Another soldier was seized by Palestinian militants earlier.
Root causes
After meeting Mr Abbas in Ramallah on the West Bank, Ms Rice said: "I assured the president that we have great concerns about the suffering of innocent peoples throughout the region."
Mr Abbas called for an immediate end to "aggression against the Gaza Strip and the West Bank" and for an "immediate ceasefire" in Lebanon.
Ms Rice said the only solution was a sustainable peace - "one that can deal with the causes of extremism and lead to the establishment of sovereignty for the Lebanese government throughout its territory".
As Ms Rice continued her diplomatic shuffle, Israel maintained its operations in Lebanon, sealing off Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah stronghold which has been the scene of a fierce battle since the Israelis took the nearby village of Maroun al-Ras on Saturday.
A number of Hezbollah militants are believed to be holding out in the town.
Israel has been carrying out heavily shelling, but Hezbollah guerrillas are still managing to fire their Katyusha rockets.
A 15-year-old Arab-Israeli girl was killed when a rocket hit her house in the northern Israeli village of Maghar.
Haifa, Israel's third largest city, has been hit by at least a dozen rockets fired from inside Lebanon. An elderly man died of a heart attack as he tried to take shelter.
The Lebanese coastal city of Tyre is seeing heavy Israeli bombardment of the hills south of the city both from Israel and from the sea.
Further north, seven members of one family, including two children, were killed in an overnight air strike in the town of Nabatiyeh.
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has appealed to the world to stop the Israeli offensive saying that if not it could engulf the entire Middle East in war.
'New' Middle East
In his meeting with Ms Rice, Mr Olmert said he was "very conscious" of the humanitarian needs of Lebanon's civilians, but insisted Israel was defending itself against terrorism.
Israel is acting with tremendous restraint, were they targeting civilian populations there would be thousands upon thousands dead
Steve Gross, US
He said Israel was not at war with the Lebanese people, but with Hezbollah, which he described as a terrorist organisation, insisting that Israel would take the "most severe measures" against it.
Correspondents say that Ms Rice was unlikely to have called for an end to Israel's military offensive during her talks with the Israeli leader.
The BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson, in Jerusalem, says it was understood that Ms Rice would tell Israel that the US will allow it more time to continue its military operations.
Ms Rice has, however, also been highlighting the need for Israel to consider the humanitarian needs of both Lebanon and the Palestinian people and the need for a durable peace.
She said: "It is time for a new Middle East, it is time to say to those who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail; they will not."
Ms Rice arrived in Israel from Beirut, where she met Lebanon's Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.
Correspondents say there is disappointment in Lebanon that the talks did not result in more concrete action and calls for an immediate ceasefire.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5212158.stm
James Morris <justicequest2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
Robert Fisk: A war crime?
This mother and son were in a convoy fleeing danger yesterday when the Israeli air force bombed the rear minibus, causing carnage.
By Robert Fisk
06/24/07 "The Independent" -- - They are in the schools, in empty hospitals, in halls and mosques and in the streets. The Shia Muslim refugees of southern Lebanon, driven from their homes by the Israelis, are arriving in Sidon by the thousand, cared for by Sunni Muslims and then sent north to join the 600,000 displaced Lebanese in Beirut. More than 34,000 have passed through here in the past four days alone, a tide of misery and anger. It will take years to heal their wounds, and billions of dollars to repair their damaged property.
And who can blame them for their flight? For the second time in eight days, the Israelis committed a war crime yesterday. They ordered the villagers of Taire, near the border, to leave their homes and then - as their convoy of cars and minibuses obediently trailed northwards - the Israeli air force fired a missile into the rear minibus, killing three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other civilians. The rocket that killed them is believed to have been a Hellfire missile made by Lockheed Martin in Florida.
Nine days ago, the Israeli army ordered the inhabitants of a neighbouring village, Marwaheen, to leave their homes and then fired rockets into one of their evacuation trucks, blasting the women and children inside to their deaths. And this is the same Israeli air force which was praised last week by one of Israel's greatest defenders - Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz - because it "takes extraordinary steps to minimise civilian casualties".
Nor have the Israelis spared Sidon. A heap of rubble and pancaked walls is all that is left of the Fatima Zahra mosque, a Hizbollah institution in the centre of the city, its minaret crumbled and its dome now sitting on the concrete, a black flag still flying from its top. When Israeli warplanes came early yesterday morning, the 75-year-old caretaker had no time to run from the building; he died of his wounds hours later. His overturned white plastic chair still lies by the gate. The mosque is unlikely to have been used for military purposes; a school belonging to the Hariris, Sidon's all-powerful Sunni family, stands next door; they would never have allowed weapons into the building.
Not that Hizbollah - which killed two more Israeli civilians with their rockets in Haifa yesterday - have respected Sidon, whose population is 95 per cent Sunni. They tried to fire Iranian-made missiles at Israel from the seafront Corniche and from beside the city slaughterhouse last week. On both occasions, residents physically prevented them from opening fire.
The multimillion-dollar Hariri Foundation - created by the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated last year - has helped 24,000 Shia refugees out of the south and on to Beirut but its generosity has not always been happily received. One group of refugees sheltering in a technical school in Meheniyeh punched and taunted Hariri workers. Elsewhere, the foundation's staff have been cursed by fleeing families. "They are telling us that we are working for the Americans and that this is why we are taking them out," said Ghena Hariri - Rafik's niece and a Georgetown graduate. "It is something that drains our energy. We are working 24 hours a day and at the end of the day they curse us. But I feel so sorry for them. Now they are being told by the Israelis to leave their villages on foot and they have to walk dozens of kilometres in this heat."
It's not difficult to see how this war can damage the delicate sectarian framework that exists in Lebanon. One group of Shia families - housed in a school in the Druze mountains of the Chouf - tried to put Hizbollah's yellow banners on the roof and members of Walid Jumblatt's Druze Popular Socialist Party had to tear them down. Their act may have saved the refugees' lives.
Yet many of the Shia in this beautiful Crusader port have learnt how kind their Sunni neighbours can be. "We are here - where else can we go?" Nazek Kadnah asked as she sat in the corner of a mosque which Rafik Hariri built and dedicated to his father, Haj Baha'udin Hariri. "But they look after us here as their brothers and sisters and now we are safe."
These sentiments provoke some dark questions. Why, for example, can't these poor people be shown the same compassion from Tony Blair as he supposedly felt for the Muslims of Kosovo when they were being driven from their homes by the Serbs? These thousands are as terrified and homeless as the Kosovo Albanians who fled to Macedonia in 1998 and for whom Mr Blair claimed he was waging a moral war. But for the Shia Muslims sleeping homeless in Sidon there is to be no such moral posturing - and no ceasefire suggestions from Mr Blair, who has aligned himself with the Israelis and the Americans.
And what exactly is the purpose of driving more than half a million people from their homes? Many of these poor people sit clutching their front-door keys, just as the Palestinians of Galilee did when they arrived in Lebanon 58 years ago to spend the rest of their lives as refugees. Yes, the Shia Muslims of Lebanon probably will go home. But to what? A war between the Hizbollah and a Western intervention force? Or further bombardment by the Israelis?
The Sidon refugees now have 36 schools in which they can shelter - but they are the lucky ones. Across southern Lebanon, the innocent continued to die. One was an eight-year-old boy who was killed in an Israeli air raid on a village close to Tyre. Eight more civilians were wounded when an Israeli missile hit a vehicle outside the Najem hospital in Tyre. And during the morning, one of Lebanon's journalists, Layal Nejib, a photographer for the magazine Al-Jaras whose pictures were also transmitted by Agence France Press, was killed in her taxi by an Israeli air strike near Qana, the same village in which 106 civilians were massacred in a UN base by Israeli artillery shells in 1996. She was only 23.
In her marble-walled home above Sidon, Bahia Hariri - Ghena's mother, the sister of the murdered former prime minister and a local member of parliament - sat grim-faced, scarcely controlling her fury. "We are in this terrible situation but we haven't any window to resolve this situation," she said. "Rafik Hariri is no longer with us. The international community is not with us. Who is with us? God. And the old Lebanese. And the Arab world, we hope, will help us. The only resistance we can show is to be a united Lebanon. But we have only a small margin in which to dream."
They are in the schools, in empty hospitals, in halls and mosques and in the streets. The Shia Muslim refugees of southern Lebanon, driven from their homes by the Israelis, are arriving in Sidon by the thousand, cared for by Sunni Muslims and then sent north to join the 600,000 displaced Lebanese in Beirut. More than 34,000 have passed through here in the past four days alone, a tide of misery and anger. It will take years to heal their wounds, and billions of dollars to repair their damaged property.
And who can blame them for their flight? For the second time in eight days, the Israelis committed a war crime yesterday. They ordered the villagers of Taire, near the border, to leave their homes and then - as their convoy of cars and minibuses obediently trailed northwards - the Israeli air force fired a missile into the rear minibus, killing three refugees and seriously wounding 13 other civilians. The rocket that killed them is believed to have been a Hellfire missile made by Lockheed Martin in Florida.
Nine days ago, the Israeli army ordered the inhabitants of a neighbouring village, Marwaheen, to leave their homes and then fired rockets into on | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 11:41 pm Post subject: Israelis Slaughter U.N. Observers |
| http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=480
Israelis Slaughter U.N. Observers
Tuesday July 25th 2006, 5:31 pm
After Israel bombed a U.N. shelter near Khiam, Lebanon, killing four observers, Daniel Ayalon, Israeli ambassador to the United States, had the audacity to tell Wolf Blizter of CNN he expects an apology from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for complaining.
Of course, this is nothing new, as the Israelis routinely attack the United Nations and little if anything comes of such murderous crimes against humanity.
For instance, on April 18, 1996, in the Lebanese village of Qana, during Israel’s “Operation Grapes of Wrath” invasion, the IOF killed 106 Lebanese refugees seeking protection at a Fijian UNIFIL compound. As usual, the Israeli government expressed regret, but words are cheap, especially considering the fact the IOF consistently issues such meaningless apologies after slaughtering innocents. The Zionist state added insult to injury, or rather mass murder, by not paying compensation to the victims.
A few days earlier, on April 12, an IOF attack helicopter fired a missile at an ambulance in the village of al-Mansuri, killing two women and four young girls. On the same day the Israelis killed refugees at Qana, a “helicopter gunship attack on a house in the village of Upper Nabatiyeh on April 18, 1996 … killed nine civilians, including a newborn baby, six children under thirteen years old, and their mother,” according to Human Rights Watch.
No word if Daniel Ayalon or his counterpart at the time expected an apology from the families of the victims.
Israel’s IOF has engaged in numerous massacres in Bint Jbeil, Khan Yunis, Maaraka, Jibaa, Qibya, Saida, Trqumia, Homeen al-Tahta, Seer al-Garbiah, Yohmor, Sabra and Shatila, on and on, ad nauseam, killing thousands of Arabs, massacres so common we rarely hear about them here in America, what with our “fair and balanced” corporate media.
The numbers of United Nations personnel killed by the IOF pales in comparison. However, on 3 December 2002, sixty-four U.N. workers issued a petition demanding the Israeli military stop “beating and killing” them, according to the Memory Hole, an appropriate venue, as the corporate media ignored the petition.
“You might think that such a strongly-worded statement sent by more than five-dozen United Nations workers to the ‘Middle East’s only democracy’ would be highly newsworthy. Apparently not. Among the very few media outlets to cover it were Reuters, the BBC, the Independent (London), Ha’aretz (Jerusalem), and the Jerusalem Post. Notice that all these sources are British or Israeli. Not one American media outlet has covered the story.”
“[F]or two years United Nations staff have been subject to escalating harassment and violence by Israel’s military, so that the protection supposed to be afforded by the blue letters of the UN is being steadily eroded,” the petition explains. “UN staff—international and Palestinian alike—have been verbally abused, stripped, beaten, shot at, and killed by Israeli soldiers.”
Tragically Iain Hook was not the first person working with the UN to die at the hands of the IDF this year. In March, Kamal Hamdan was shot and killed while travelling in a clearly marked UNRWA ambulance in the West Bank. In April, Husni Amer died in Israeli military custody in Jenin after, according to witnesses, receiving a brutal beating by the soldiers at the time of his arrest. From its silence, we presume the Israeli authorities have ignored UN requests for an investigation and report of these two incidents, and have not seen fit to take any disciplinary action against the soldiers involved. To us, this seems to confirm a pattern of utter contempt on the part of the Israeli army for the lost lives of these men, the safety of UN staff or the minimum standards imposed by international law which should protect UN staff and other humanitarian workers.
Again, no word if Daniel Ayalon demanded an apology.
Addendum
It appears the IOF targeted UNIFIL for a very specific reason, namely to send the message the Zionist state doesn’t need no stinkin’ peacekeepers, especially peacekeepers who mostly evacuate citizens from Israel’s killing fields. More specifically, it was a message sent in regard to the prospect of yet another multinational peacekeeping force sent to Lebanon. As Bush, or rather the neocons, tell us, Israel must be left alone to go after Hezbollah, that is to say Lebanese resisting invasion and occupation.
It didn’t take long for the corporate media to shellack the murder of the UN observers with sickening excuses. In addition to excuses, the Chicago Tribune felt compelled, as a standard lickspittle for Israeli crimes, to powder puff the invasion:
“The experience for the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, has not been a good one. In place since 1978 and comprising soldiers from France, Poland, India, Italy and a few other countries, UNIFIL was unable to stop the July 12 Hezbollah border raid that resulted in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. It was also unable to block retaliating Israeli troops from entering Lebanon a few days later.”
As we know, the Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon, as reported by Forbes, the Associated Press, ABC News, the Boston Herald, the Hindustan Times, the Bahrain News Agency, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, AFP, Asia Times, and others. For more on the ever-morphing story, see this blog entry.
But then, naturally, the Chicago Tribune would be bucking the pro-Israel corporate media stampede if it told the truth. Imagine Winston Smith rewriting historical documents so that they match the current party line, which changes on a daily basis, over at the Ministry of Truth, and you’ll get a good idea of what’s going on here.
One wonders what the response would be if the Palestinians and Lebanese “retaliated” against Israel for kidnapping their citizens, numbering in the hundreds.
Finally, according to the Washington Post, the IOF continued firing on the targeted shelter, even as rescue workers attempted to clear the rubble. But then this should not be surprising, as the surviving members of the USS Liberty, the intelligence ship attacked by Israel on June 8, 1967, will likely tell you. In that instance, our “friends” attacked lifeboats with torpedoes and machine gun fire, a war crime.
It seems the Israelis are mighty fond of war crimes.
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Israeli Missiles Rip Into Medics' Esprit de Corps
By Megan K. Stack
Times Staff Writer
07/25/06 "Los Angeles Times" -- -- TYRE, Lebanon — In the burning haze of the missile strike, Qasim Chaalan thought he had died. But piece by piece, he noticed that he was still there, inside the ambulance. He could still feel his body. He opened his eyes, and discovered he could see.
He and the other medics were lucky: They had survived the blow of an Israeli missile. Dazed and slow, one of the men fumbled for the radio and began, "We have an accident…. " He didn't finish the sentence. A second missile smashed with a roar into the ambulance behind them.
Six Red Cross volunteers were wounded in the Sunday attack, and the injured family they were ferrying to safety suffered fresh agonies. A middle-age man lost his leg from the knee down. His mother was partially paralyzed. A little boy's head was hammered by shrapnel.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, the attack blunted the zeal of the band of gonzo ambulance drivers who have doggedly plugged away as Red Cross volunteers. Young men and women with easy grins and a breezy disregard for their own safety, they have remained as the last visible strand of social structure intact after days of Israeli bombardment.
When the fighting erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, many of the volunteers sent their families north and stayed behind to help their countrymen. Clad in helmets and flak jackets, they brave a rain of Israeli bombs, a crazy maze of cratered roads and perpetual uncertainty over how bad the fighting might become. Fiercely proud of their work at the Red Cross, they had clung desperately to the hope that, as lifesavers, they would be spared.
Many times over nearly two weeks of bombing, medics say, missiles struck the roads nearby; they felt harassed. But somehow, they managed to convince themselves that they were invulnerable to attack.
"We used to kid ourselves, think we couldn't be hit," 38-year-old volunteer Imad Hillal said. "Even in this war, even when bombs fell around us, we never thought we'd be hit. But what happened has changed everything."
Sitting in the radio room at Red Cross headquarters here Monday, Hillal rested his head wearily on one hand. When asked whether the ambulances would continue running, tears clouded his eyes.
The Red Cross team had been sent out into a night that thundered with falling bombs. They'd been assigned to ferry three wounded civilians out of the heaviest battle zone of the southern borderlands on Sunday. One team of medics had headed north from the town of Tibnin, the wounded family stretched flat on gurneys in the back. The other team had rushed south from Tyre to meet them halfway.
From the time the call came in, Chaalan hadn't been able to shake his dread. He didn't understand why. He had made the trip plenty of times before.
As he made his way out to the ambulance, he turned to the other medics loitering around and, surprising even himself, used a traditional Arabic farewell that implies death may be near.
"I'll see you, forgive me," he told them. He'd never said that before. One of his colleagues followed him out the door. "Please take care," she said. She'd never done that before; it made him even more nervous. He brushed her off and climbed into the ambulance.
The three young men drove out to the town of Qana. Looking up, they could see red lights in the sky overhead. Israeli planes, Chaalan thought.
They came to a stop on a stretch of battle-pocked roadway in Qana.
The medics favor that spot because the ambulances, with their trademark red crosses emblazoned on the roofs, can be seen clearly from above. They thought it was safe.
They climbed down, removed the patients from the other ambulance and slid them into place. They moved fast; everybody was nervous.
Then the roar and smash of the missiles shattered the summer night. Both ambulances were hit, directly and systematically, by Israeli bombs, the medics said.
Everybody else must be dead, Chaalan remembered thinking as he slowly came to his senses. He called out his first medic's name, and got an answer. He called out the second man's name. Silence. "We lost one man," he thought.
The grandmother had crawled out of the ambulance after the first missile strike, but the medics didn't realize that. There was no way the adults could have survived, the medics decided.
So they grabbed the little boy and took shelter in a nearby basement.
Most of the houses on the street stood empty, abandoned by families who'd heeded Israeli evacuation orders and fled north. More bombings continued to puncture the night.
Huddled in the darkness of the basement, they ran their hands over their own bodies, checking for injuries. The boy's head, full of shrapnel, was bleeding badly. They used T-shirts to bandage his wounds.
Then they waited in the darkness. They managed to get through to the Red Cross station from their cellphones. An hour and a half dragged past.
Finally, Hillal and the other medics made it to the scene. "It was a disaster," he said.
"The cars had exploded all over the place. There was one man so badly injured we didn't know what to do for him."
At first, the Red Cross had considered whether to stop making ambulance runs altogether, he said. Then the organization thought better of it and recommended that the teams only stop driving south. Hillal didn't know what would happen. He only knew that the ground rules had been blasted away — the medics had been stripped of their sense of safety.
"When we were driving in the ambulance before, we did not feel we are safe 100%," Chaalan said. "But now it's direct on us."
On Monday, medics and the wounded family were all in the hospital. The grandmother lay on her side in a hospital bed, face turned to the sky outside her window.
"Give me something for the pain," she groaned. "I'm going to vomit." A son and grandson were unconscious in the intensive care unit. Her son, whose leg had been struck by the missile, lay under a tangle of tubes. The sheet reached just below the knee. His calf wasn't there anymore.
Chaalan was bleeding from the ear, and stitches bound his chin and a leg. He needed a few more days to recover, but he insisted on going home.
He peeled off his bandages before stopping by to kiss his mother.
And then he was back at the Red Cross station, padding around in a Las Vegas T-shirt, insisting that he was ready to get back to work.
"I prefer to die when I'm helping people," he said. "Not when I'm hiding." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 8:22 am Post subject: Fisk: On a Red Cross mission of mercy when Israeli air force |
| On a Red Cross mission of mercy when Israeli air force came calling
By Robert Fisk
07/28/06 "The Independent" -- -- It was supposed to be a routine trip across the Lebanese killing fields for the brave men and women of the International Red Cross. Sylvie Thoral was the "team leader" of our two vehicles, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman with dark brown hair and eyes like steel. The Israelis had been informed and had given what the ICRC likes to call its "green light" to the route. And, of course, we almost died.
Trusting the Israeli army and air force, which are breaking the Geneva Conventions almost every day, is a dodgy business.
Their planes have already attacked - against all the conventions - the civil defence headquarters in Tyre, killing 20 refugees. They have twice attacked truckloads of refugees whom they themselves had ordered from their villages.
They have already attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances in Qana, killing two of the three wounded patients inside and injuring all the crew - a clear and apparently deliberate breach of Chapter IV, Article 24 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
But the ICRC must put its trust in the Israeli military and so off we sped from southern Lebanon for Jezzine to the sound of gunfire, under the crumbling battlements of the crusader castle at Beaufort, through the ghostly, shattered streets of Nabatiyeh, bomb craters and crushed buildings on each side of us.
To cross the Litani river, we had to drive through the water, listening for the howl of airplane engines, one eye on the road, one on the sky. Sylvie and her comrades - Christophe Grange from France, Claire Gasser from Switzerland, Saidi Hachemi from Algeria and two Lebanese colleagues, Beshara Hanna and Edmund Khoury - drove in silence.
There were fresh bomb craters on the highway north of Nabatiyeh - the attacks had come only a few hours earlier, a fact we should have thought more about. Pieces of ordnance littered the roads, shards of wicked shrapnel, huge chunks of concrete. But we had had that all-important "green light" from Tel Aviv.
The ICRC teams may be the only saviours on the highways of southern Lebanon - their reticence in criticising anyone, including the Israelis and Hizbollah is a silence worthy of angels - although their work can attack their emotions as surely as an air strike. Only a day earlier, they had driven to the village of Aiteroun scarcely a mile from the Israeli army's disastrous assault on Bint Jbeil. In each "abandoned" village on the way, a woman would appear, then a child and then more women and the elderly, all desperate to leave.
There were perhaps 3,000 of them and, last night, Sylvie Thoral was trying to arrange permission for an evacuation convoy. The Israelis are promising the Lebanese much worse than the punishment they have already received - well over 400 Lebanese civilians dead - for Hizbollah's killing of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two others. But still the Israelis have suggested no "green light" for Aiteroun.
"They were begging us to take them with us and we had no ability to do that," Saidi says with deep emotion. "Their eyes were filled with tears."
ICRC workers in Lebanon travel without flak jackets or helmets - their un-militarised status is something they are proud of - and driving with them in the same condition was an oddly moving experience.
They live - unlike the Israelis and their Hizbollah antagonists - by the Geneva Conventions. They believe in them when all others break the rules. But yesterday, when we reached the town of Jarjooaa, the ICRC in Beirut told us to turn back. The Israelis were bombing the road to the north and so we gingerly reversed our cars and started back down the hills to Arab Selim. The highway was empty and we had almost reached the bottom of a small valley.
I was reflecting on a conversation I had just had on my mobile phone with Patrick Cockburn, The Independent's correspondent who has just left Baghdad. Our guardian angels were working so hard, he said, that he was fearful they would form a trade union and go on strike.
That's when five vast, brown, dead fingers of smoke shot into the sky in front of us, an Israeli air-dropped bomb that exploded on the road scarcely 80 metres away with the kind of "c-crack" that comic books express so accurately, followed by the scream of a jet. If we had driven just 25 seconds faster down that road, we would all be dead.
So we retreated once more to Jarjooaa and parked under the balcony of a house where two women and three children were watching us, waving and smiling.
Sylvie was silent but I could see the rage on her face. The Israelis, it seemed, had made an "error". They had misread the route - or the number - of our little convoy. "How can we work like this? How on earth can we do our work?" Sylvie asked with a mixture of anger and frustration. On all the roads yesterday, I saw only three men whom I suspect were Hizbollah - no respecters of the Geneva Conventions they - driving at high speed in a battered Volvo. They can cross the rivers of Lebanon at will - just as we did - by circling the bomb craters and crossing the rivers. So what was the point in blowing up 46 of Lebanon's road bridges?
An old man approached us carrying a silver tray of glasses and a pot of scalding tea. Generous to the end, under constant air attack, these fearful Lebanese were offering us their traditional hospitality even now, as the jets wheeled in the sky above us. They asked us in to the house they had refused to leave and I realised then that these kind Lebanese people - unarmed, unconnected to Hizbollah - were the real resistance here. The men and women who will ultimately save Lebanon.
But before we abandoned our journey and before Sylvie and her team and I set off back to their base in the far and dangerous south of Lebanon, a man carrying a bag of vegetables walked up to Beshara Hanna. "Please move your cars away from my home," he said. "You make it dangerous for us all."
And the shame of this shook me at once. The Israeli attack on the Qana ambulances - their missiles plunging through the red crosses on the roofs - had contaminated even our own vehicles. He was just one man. But for him, the Israelis had turned the Red Cross - the symbol of hope on our roofs and the sides of our vehicles - into a symbol of danger and fear.
The laws of war
The laws of war, as the Geneva Conventions are sometimes known, often may seem like a lesson in absurdity. But for centuries countries have adhered to central principles of combat.
At the start of this conflict, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said: "Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians."
The rules of war state:
* Wars should be limited to achieving the political goals that started the war (and should not include unnecessary destruction).
* Wars should be ended as quickly as possible.
* People and property should be protected against unnecessary destruction and hardship.
The laws are meant to :
* Protect both combatants and non-combatants from unnecessary suffering.
* Safeguard human rights of those who fall into the hands of the enemy: prisoners of war, the wounded, the sick and civilians.
* Prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians. But no war crime is committed if a bomb mistakenly hits a residential area.
* Combatants that use civilians or property as shields are guilty of violations of laws of war.
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Tide of Arab Opinion Turns to Support for Hezbollah
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
07/28/06 "New York Times" -- -- DAMASCUS, Syria, July 27 — At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.
Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for 15 days, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.
The Saudi royal family and King Abdullah II of Jordan, who were initially more worried about the rising power of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor, are scrambling to distance themselves from Washington.
An outpouring of newspaper columns, cartoons, blogs and public poetry readings have showered praise on Hezbollah while attacking the United States and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for trumpeting American plans for a “new Middle East” that they say has led only to violence and repression.
Even Al Qaeda, run by violent Sunni Muslim extremists normally hostile to all Shiites, has gotten into the act, with its deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, releasing a taped message saying that through its fighting in Iraq, his organization was also trying to liberate Palestine.
Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst in Amman, Jordan, with the International Crisis Group, said, “The Arab-Israeli conflict remains the most potent issue in this part of the world.”
Distinctive changes in tone are audible throughout the Sunni world. This week, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt emphasized his attempts to arrange a cease-fire to protect all sects in Lebanon, while the Jordanian king announced that his country was dispatching medical teams “for the victims of Israeli aggression.” Both countries have peace treaties with Israel.
The Saudi royal court has issued a dire warning that its 2002 peace plan — offering Israel full recognition by all Arab states in exchange for returning to the borders that predated the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — could well perish.
“If the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance,” it said, “then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire.”
The Saudis were putting the West on notice that they would not exert pressure on anyone in the Arab world until Washington did something to halt the destruction of Lebanon, Saudi commentators said.
American officials say that while the Arab leaders need to take a harder line publicly for domestic political reasons, what matters more is what they tell the United States in private, which the Americans still see as a wink and a nod.
There are evident concerns among Arab governments that a victory for Hezbollah — and it has already achieved something of a victory by holding out this long — would further nourish the Islamist tide engulfing the region and challenge their authority. Hence their first priority is to cool simmering public opinion.
But perhaps not since President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt made his emotional outpourings about Arab unity in the 1960’s, before the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, has the public been so electrified by a confrontation with Israel, played out repeatedly on satellite television stations with horrific images from Lebanon of wounded children and distraught women fleeing their homes.
Egypt’s opposition press has had a field day comparing Sheik Nasrallah to Nasser, while demonstrators waved pictures of both.
An editorial in the weekly Al Dustur by Ibrahim Issa, who faces a lengthy jail sentence for his previous criticism of President Mubarak, compared current Arab leaders to the medieval princes who let the Crusaders chip away at Muslim lands until they controlled them all.
After attending an intellectual rally in Cairo for Lebanon, the Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm wrote a column describing how he had watched a companion buy 20 posters of Sheik Nasrallah.
“People are praying for him as they walk in the street, because we were made to feel oppressed, weak and handicapped,” Mr. Negm said in an interview. “I asked the man who sweeps the street under my building what he thought, and he said: ‘Uncle Ahmed, he has awakened the dead man inside me! May God make him triumphant!’ ”
In Lebanon, Rasha Salti, a freelance writer, summarized the sense that Sheik Nasrallah differed from other Arab leaders.
“Since the war broke out, Hassan Nasrallah has displayed a persona, and public behavior also, to the exact opposite of Arab heads of states,” she wrote in an e-mail message posted on many blogs.
In comparison, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s brief visit to the region sparked widespread criticism of her cold demeanor and her choice of words, particularly a statement that the bloodshed represented the birth pangs of a “new Middle East.” That catchphrase was much used by Shimon Peres, the veteran Israeli leader who was a principal negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which ultimately failed to lead to the Palestinian state they envisaged.
A cartoon by Emad Hajjaj in Jordan labeled “The New Middle East” showed an Israeli tank sitting on a broken apartment house in the shape of the Arab world.
Fawaz al-Trabalsi, a columnist in the Lebanese daily As Safir, suggested that the real new thing in the Middle East was the ability of one group to challenge Israeli militarily.
Perhaps nothing underscored Hezbollah’s rising stock more than the sudden appearance of a tape from the Qaeda leadership attempting to grab some of the limelight.
Al Jazeera satellite television broadcast a tape from Mr. Zawahri (za-WAH-ri). Large panels behind him showed a picture of the exploding World Trade Center as well as portraits of two Egyptian Qaeda members, Muhammad Atef, a Qaeda commander who was killed by an American airstrike in Afghanistan, and Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on Sept. 11, 2001. He described the two as fighters for the Palestinians.
Mr. Zawahri tried to argue that the fight against American forces in Iraq paralleled what Hezbollah was doing, though he did not mention the organization by name.
“It is an advantage that Iraq is near Palestine,” he said. “Muslims should support its holy warriors until an Islamic emirate dedicated to jihad is established there, which could then transfer the jihad to the borders of Palestine.”
Mr. Zawahri also adopted some of the language of Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims in general. That was rather ironic, since previously in Iraq, Al Qaeda has labeled Shiites Muslim as infidels and claimed responsibility for some of the bloodier assaults on Shiite neighborhoods there.
But by taking on Israel, Hezbollah had instantly eclipsed Al Qaeda, analysts said. “Everyone will be asking, ‘Where is Al Qaeda now?’ ” said Adel al-Toraifi, a Saudi columnist and expert on Sunni extremists.
Mr. Rabbani of the International Crisis Group said Hezbollah’s ability to withstand the Israeli assault and to continue to lob missiles well into Israel exposed the weaknesses of Arab governments with far greater resources than Hezbollah.
“Public opinion says that if they are getting more on the battlefield than you are at the negotiating table, and you have so many more means at your disposal, then what the hell are you doing?” Mr. Rabbani said. “In comparison with the small embattled guerrilla movement, the Arab states seem to be standing idly by twiddling their thumbs.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo for this article, and Suha Maayeh from Amman, Jordan.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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'Everything In My Life Is Destroyed, So I Will Fight Them'
By Dahr Jamail
07/28/06 "Information Clearing House" - -- "I am in Hezbollah because I care," the fighter, who agreed to the interview on condition of anonymity, told me. "I care about my people, my country, and defending them from the Zionist aggression." I jotted furiously in my note pad while sitting in the back seat of his car. We were parked not far from Dahaya, the district in southern Beirut which is being bombed by Israeli warplanes as we talk.
The sounds of bombs echoed off the buildings of the capital city of Lebanon yesterday afternoon. Out the window, I watched several people run into the entrance of a business center, as if that would provide them any safety.
The member of Hezbollah I was interviewing-let's call him Ahmed-has been shot three times during previous battles against Israeli forces on the southern Lebanese border. His brother was killed in one of these battles. It's been several years since his father was killed by an air strike in a refugee camp.
"My home now in Dahaya is pulverized, so Hezbollah gave me a place to stay while this war is happening," he said, "When this war ends, where am I to go? What am I to do? Everything in my life is destroyed now, so I will fight them."
That explains why earlier in the day, when driving me around, he'd stopped at an apartment to change into black clothing-a black t-shirt and black combat pants, along with black combat boots.
A tall, stocky man, Ahmed seemed always exhausted and angry.
"I didn't have a future," he continued while the concussions of bombs continued, "But now, Hassan Nasrallah is the leader of this country and her people. My family has lived in Lebanon for 1,500 years, and now we are all with him. He has given us belief and hope that we can push the Zionists out of Lebanon, and keep them out forever. He has given me purpose."
"Do you think this is why so many people now, probably over two million here in Lebanon alone, follow Nasrallah?" I asked.
"Hezbollah gives you dignity, it returns your dignity to you," he replied, "Israel has put all of the Arab so-called leaders under her foot, but Nasrallah says 'No more.'"
He paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The summer heat in Beirut drips with humidity. During the afternoon, my primary impulse is to find a fan and curl up for a nap under its gracious movement of the thick air here.
Earlier he'd driven me to one of the larger hospitals in Beirut where I photographed civilian casualties. All of them were tragic cases but one really grabbed me-that of a little 8 year-old girl, lying in a large bed. She was on her side, with a huge gash down the right side of her face and her right arm wrapped in gauze. She was hiding in the basement of her home with 12 family members when they were bombed by an Israeli fighter jet.
Her father was in a room downstairs with both of his legs blown off. Her other family members were all seriously wounded. She lay there whimpering, with tears streaming down her face.
I think I won Ahmed's trust after that. I walked out the car, got in and sat down. He asked me where I wanted to go now.
Ahmed put his hand on my shoulder and said, "This is what I've been seeing for my entire life. Nothing but pain and suffering."
A photographer from Holland who was working with me was able to respond to Ahmed that maybe we could go have a look at Dahaya.
Ahmed had told me that it was currently extremely dangerous for a journalist to try to go into Dahaya. Before, Hezbollah had run tours for people to come see the wreckage generated by Israeli air strikes. All you had to do was meet under a particular bridge at 11 a.m., and you had a guided tour from "party guys" (members of Hezbollah) into what has become a post-apocalyptic ghost town.
A couple of days ago I went there, without the "party guy" tour. A friend and I were driven in by a man we hired for the day to take us around. I was shocked at the level of destruction-in some places entire city blocks lay in rubble. At one point we came upon the touring journalists, all scurrying to their vehicles. Everyone was in a panic.
"What's going on?," I asked our driver. "A party guy who is a spotter said he saw Israeli jets coming," he responded, while spinning the van around and punching the gas as we sped past the journalists lugging their cameras while running back to their drivers.
While driving we were passed by several Hezbollah fighters riding scooters. Each had his M-16 assault rifle slung across his back and wore green ammunition pouches across his chest.
Ahmed told me he'd captured two Israeli spies himself. "One of them is a Lebanese Jewish woman, and she had a ring she could talk into," he explained as new sweat beads began to form on his forehead, "Others are posing as journalists and using this type of paint to mark buildings to be bombed."
I doubt the ring part, and also wonder about the feasibility of paint used for targeting, but there are no doubt spies crawling all over Beirut. In Iraq, mercenaries often pose as journalists, making it even more dangerous than it already was for us to work there.
Nevertheless, war always fosters paranoia. Whom can you trust? What if they are a spy? What are their motives? Why do they want to ask me this question at this time? These types of questions become constant I my mind, and so many others in this situation where normal life is now a thing of the past. I think they are some sort of twisted survival mechanism.
We drove back near my hotel and parked again. People strolled by on the sidewalks. Ahmed said, "I will never be a slave to the United States or Israel."
(c)2006 Dahr Jamail.
Lebanon's Children and Israeli Phosphorous Bombs
By Randa Takieddin
07/27/06 "Al-Hayat" -- -- Did the American people see on CNN the child whose face was burnt by Israeli phosphorous bombs in Lebanon? Did they hear him screaming in pain at Sidon Hospital, with his mother falling to pieces in agony beside him because of the injury he sustained from the terrible bombs? How can the American people accept their elected President George W. Bush's rejection of a ceasefire?
The insanity of the Jewish State that is brutally attacking families and children in South Lebanon and in Beirut's southern suburb has almost become an everyday feature in the Palestinian territories.
Can the disaster that has befallen Lebanon, in which fathers, mothers and children have lost their homes and relatives, be a solution for the US administration and the Jewish State?
Lebanon is grateful for the millions-of-dollars worth of humanitarian aid from the US, but it will never forget that the US administration gave Israel the green light to continue with the shelling and destruction in this dirty war.
The US administration claims that it had asked Israel not to hit Lebanon's infrastructure. But Israel has indiscriminately destroyed everything: airports, bridges, seaports, roads and houses. Israel's aim is to devastate and kill.
In Lebanon, as in the Palestinian territories, Israel's soldiers, the grandsons of the victims of the Holocaust, have demonstrated their inclination to use terrifying weapons, such as phosphorus bombs. This is disgraceful for a people who had suffered from torture and brutality.
Whatever the outcome of Israel's war on Lebanon, the Jewish State has shown that it knows no solution except the use of force. This solution leads to more violence, war and hatred.
Nobody in the world knows what the outcome of the balance of power in the world will be. Nobody knows whether Israel has weakened Hezbollah's military capabilities or defeated it. Either way, the major victim is the Lebanese people, who are now certain that they are paying for the war of others on their soil. The US and its ally, Israel, are fighting Iran and Syria on Lebanese soil, and are imposing a blockade on Lebanon, while the world's superpower claims that it will ask Israel to lift it.
Israel caused the closure Rafik Hariri Airport in Beirut under the pretext that Hezbollah uses it for bringing in arms. Many Lebanese people therefore went to Damascus, the only outlet to the outside world. Israel shelled all the Lebanese seaports. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's rockets continuously fall on several Israeli cities. The US administration claims it wants to help Prime Minister Fouad Seniora's government. But how? By maintaining the blockade on Lebanon, or by continuing with the dirty war?
Hezbollah, on the other hand, is held responsible for what it has dragged Lebanon into. Israel is a well-known enemy, and its tactics in Palestine are obvious. Does Hezbollah have the right to bring destruction, misery, displacement and disaster to Lebanon and its people? Does it have the right to turn Lebanese soil into a battlefield for others? Can this be called resistance? However, the answers to these questions have been put back until the end of the war.
The best solution is that Resolution 1559 be implemented of Lebanon's free will and that the State regain its role and spread its control over all its territory. Lebanon needs a national army that will not drag it into a venture that may end its existence.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2006 7:35 pm Post subject: What this Catastrophe is all about... |
| What this Catastrophe is all about...
http://counterpunch.com/reinhart07272006.html
From Bush's perspective, he only has two years to consolidate his vision of complete U.S. control of the Middle East, and to do that, all seeds of resistance should be crushed in a devastating blow that will make it clear to every single Arab that obeying the master is the only way to stay alive. If Israel is willing to do the job, and crush not only the Palestinians, but also Lebanon and Hezbollah, then the U.S., torn from the inside by growing resentment over Bush's wars, and perhaps unable to send new soldiers to be killed for this cause right now, will give Israel all the backing it can. As Rice announced in her visit in Jerusalem on July 25, what is at stakes is "a new Middle East". "We will prevail" - she promised Olmert.
But Israel is not sacrificing its soldiers and citizens only to please t! he Bush administration. The "new Middle East" has been a dream of the Israeli ruling military circles since at least 1982, when Sharon led the country to the first Lebanon war with precisely this declared goal. Hezbollah's leaders have argued for years that its real long-term role is to protect Lebanon, whose army is too weak to do this. They have said that Israel has never given up its aspirations for Lebanon and that the only reason it pulled out of Southern Lebanon in 2000 is because Hezbollah's resistance has made maintaining the occupation too costly. Lebanon's people know what every Israeli old enough to remember knows - that in the vision of Ben Gurion, Israel's founding leader, Israel's border should be "natural", that is - the Jordan river in the East, and the Litani river of Lebanon in the north. In 1967, Israel gained control over the Jordan river, in the occupied Palestinian land, but all its attempts to establish the Litani border have failed so far.
As I argued in Israel/Palestine, already when the Isra! eli army left Southern Lebanon in 2000, the plans to return were ready.[12] But in Israel's military vision, in the next round, the land should be first "cleaned" of its residents, as Israel did when it occupied the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967, and as it is doing now in southern Lebanon. To enable Israel's eventual realization of Ben Gurion's vision, it is necessary to establish a "friendly regime" in Lebanon, one that will collaborate in crushing any resistance. To do this, it is necessary first to destroy the country, as in the U.S. model of Iraq. These were precisely Sharon's declared aims in the first Lebanon war. Israel and the U.S. believe that now conditions have ripened enough that these aims can finally be realized.
Tanya Reinhart is a Professor of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University and the author of Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 and The Roadmap to Nowhere. She can be reached through her website: http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 9:44 pm Post subject: |
| August 1, 2006
The Moral Culpability for Qana
by Patrick J. Buchanan
"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27.
"Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday.
Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas had been fired from Qana, near the destroyed building.
"One who goes to sleep with rockets shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wake up in the morning," said Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.
Today, we hear unctuous statements about how Israel takes pains to avoid civilian casualties, drops leaflets to warn civilians to flee target areas, and conforms to all the rules of civilized warfare.
But Israel's words and deeds contradict her propaganda. As the war began, Ehud Olmert accused Lebanon, which had condemned Hezbollah for the killing and capture of the Israeli soldiers, of an "act of war." Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz publicly threatened "to turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."
Gillerman, at a pro-Israel rally in New York, thundered, "[T]o those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are."
"His comments drew wild applause," said the Jerusalem Post.
Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war – on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks, and buses were all hit with air strikes.
Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon – i.e., the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing, and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.
If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.
Thousands of Lebanese civilians are injured. Perhaps 800,000 are homeless.
Yet, whatever one thinks of the morality of what Israel is doing, the stupidity is paralyzing. Instead of maintaining the moral and political high ground it had – when even Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan were condemning Hezbollah, and privately hoping Israel would inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah – Israel launched an air war on an innocent people. Now, 87 percent of Lebanese back Hezbollah, and the entire Arab and Islamic world, Shia and Sunni alike, is rallying behind Nasrallah.
And how does one defend the behavior of the United States?
When Gillerman was exulting in the disproportionality of Israel's attack on Lebanon, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling smugly beside him. When the UN Security Council tabled a resolution condemning Hezbollah's igniting of the war and Katyusha attacks, but also the excesses of Israel's reprisals, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton vetoed it. When a few congressmen sought to moderate a pro-Israeli resolution by adding words urging "all sides to protect innocent life and infrastructure," GOP leader John Boehner ordered the words taken down.
Why? Because, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, had prepared the resolution and wanted it passed the way they wrote it. Our Knesset complied. It sailed through the House 410-8.
For two weeks, Bush seemed unable to find a word of criticism for what our friends in Israel were doing to our friends in Lebanon. He publicly sent more bombs to Israel. He and Condi emphasized that America did not want a cease-fire – yet.
And because America provides Israel with the bombs it uses on Lebanon, and we refused to restrain the Israelis, and we opposed every effort for a cease-fire before Sunday, America shares full moral and political responsibility for the massacre at Qana.
Rubbing our noses in our own cravenness, "Bibi" Netanyahu took time out, a week ago, from his daily appearances on American television, denouncing terrorism, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the terror attack on the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin's Irgun, an attack that killed 92 people, among them British nurses.
This was not a terrorist act, Bibi explained, because Irgun telephoned a 15-minute warning to the hotel before the bombs went off. Right. And those children in that basement in Qana should not have ignored the Israeli leaflets warning them to clear out of southern Lebanon.
Our Israeli friends appear to be playing us for fools.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=9453 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 9:45 pm Post subject: IN WAKE OF QANA, ISRAEL AND U.S. SEEN AS TERRORISTS |
| IN WAKE OF QANA, ISRAEL AND U.S. SEEN AS TERRORISTS
by Paul Findley
The ghastly human carnage at Qana, Lebanon, should awaken everyone to the grim reality that our nation’s attachment to Israel is bad news. It entangles America in one awful mess after another: first 9/11, then Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Lebanon. None would have occurred if our government had refused to support Israel’s long subjugation of the Palestinians.
Instead of continuing to ignore this entanglement with near-total silence, our citizens should now seek a way out through civilized open debate and discussion. If so, Qana will be a silver lining--although a bloody one--in this otherwise engulfing cloud.
Striving as usual to live by the sword, Israelis seem unwilling to face the stark fact that they will never be truly secure until Palestinians feel secure in an independent state of their own. Hezbollah’s recent border skirmish was motivated partly by leader Hassan Nasrallah’s desire to show solidarity with the Palestinians in their lonely, desperate struggle for survival in Gaza.
Using the skirmish as a pretext for war, Israel is now trying to wipe out northern resistance to their colonialism. The initial goal is the destruction of the Hezbollah, a popular Lebanese Shi’ite organization that has long provided social services for local citizens along with armed resistance to Israeli occupation policies. Six years ago, Hezbollah handed Israel its only battlefield defeat in history by forcing it to withdraw its forces from South Lebanon. Perhaps Israelis believe that bombing Hezbollah and much of Lebanon back to the Stone Ages will ease the memory of defeat. Israel’s major objective in its latest war-making is the installation of a compliant new regime in Beirut.
The U.S. government is not a bystander in this gruesome enterprise. President Bush strongly supports Israel’s invasion and publicly opposes an immediate ceasefire until Israel finishes its long-planned schedule of killings and destruction. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleessa Rice smilingly calls these horrors the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
If past is prologue, with the help of Congress, Bush will provide further evidence of U.S. complicity by sending Israel a U.S. Treasury check big enough to cover Israel’s expenses in this latest of seven invasions of Lebanon. Our government has already expedited a new supply of laser-guided missiles to Israel and donated $150 million worth of aviation fuel, a gift that will help finance, among other ugly missions, the deliberate recurrent terrifying sonic booms that deny sleep for hapless Palestinians in Gaza.
The Bush team may seriously view Hezbollah as a bunch of evil terrorists, but the organization rides high as heroes in the Arab/Muslim world and far beyond. Polls show close to 90 percent support throughout Lebanon, even in government circles and among Christians, and strong majority “street” support in other Arab/Muslim countries. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, a similar group recently elected to leadership in Palestine, are broadly admired for standing tall against Israel, the United States and other Western powers.
In the wake of the ghastly tide of blood at Qana, the people of the Middle East--except in Israel--view Israel and Washington as the real terrorists. In recent years, anti-American passions have focused mainly against President Bush and his team, but the recent near-unanimous approval of congressional resolutions endorsing Israel’s war in Lebanon now put Americans generally on the hate list. Only eight of the 435 members in the U.S. House of Representatives—self-styled as “the people’s” branch of government—had the courage and decency to vote no. No wonder Americans are hated as never before.
Surely, the American people are wise and resolute enough to elect a government that will suspend all government aid until Israel sheathes its sword, lives by the rule of law, and vacates all Arab territory it has illegally held since the June 1967 Israeli-Arab war.
America’s dangerous attachment to Israel must end. We should have made a clean break from this warrior state years ago, but better late than never. -0-
[Published Aug 3, 2006 on op-ed page State Journal-Register, Springfield, Illinois, the state’s largest newspaper outside Chicago.]
_______________
Paul Findley, Member of Congress 1961-93, lectures widely and is author of three books on Middle East Affairs. “They Dare to Speak Out People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby,” is a seven-week Washington Post bestseller. He resides in Jacksonville, Illinois. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
