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Robert Fisk Reports From
Lebanon on the Israeli Bombing of Qana
This is not the first time that Qana has been devastated by
Israeli fire. In 1996, more than 106 villagers died after Israel
bombed the UN compound where they were seeking refuge. In the
aftermath of the strike 10 years ago, reporting by Robert Fisk
led to the United Nations condemnation of the attack. Robert
Fisk had just returned from Tyre, where the victims from
Sunday's Israeli air strike in Qana were taken following the
attack.
Lecture date: 07/31/06
Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: Following Israel’s bombing of the town of
Qana, that killed nearly 57 people, we turn to veteran war
correspondent, Robert Fisk. I reached Robert Fisk early this
morning at his home in Beirut. Robert Fisk's reporting in
Lebanon led to the United Nations condemnation of the Israeli
attack on Qana ten years ago, in 1996. Early this morning, when
we reached Robert Fisk, he had just returned from Tyre, where
victims from Sunday’s Israeli air strike in Qana were taken,
following the attack.
ROBERT FISK: I went to Tyre, Amy. By the time this
has happened -- to get from Beirut now to the south takes 46
hours, because of the broken bridges and the bombed roads,
and I realized that by the time I got down there, the
wounded would have been in the hospitals in Tyre, and the
dead would be already brought from Qana to the villages. So
when I got there, I went straight to the government hospital
in Tyre, where many of the wounded -- and there weren't
many, because most of them died -- had been taken and where
they were counting the number of children.
When I arrived there, there were a number of, maybe 20,
30 children, the corpses of children, lined up outside the
government hospital, hair matted, still in their night
clothes. The bomb that killed them was dropped at 1:00 in
the morning. And they ran out of plastic bags. They were
trying to put the children in plastic bags, their corpses,
and they would put on it, you know, “Abbas Mehdi, aged
seven,” and so and so, aged one, and use a kind of sticking
tape on it. But then they ran out of plastic bags, so they
had to put the children's corpses in a kind of cheap carpet
that you can buy in the supermarkets, and they roll them up
in that and then put their names on again. I was having to
go around very carefully and write down, from the Arabic,
their names and their ages. It would just say “Abbas Mehdi,
aged seven, Qana.”
And, of course, every time I saw the “Qana,” I remember
that I was actually in Qana ten years ago when the massacre
occurred there then. This is the second massacre in the town
whose inhabitants believe that this is the place where Jesus
turned water into wine in the Bible, most of whom, 95% of
whom, are Christians -- I’m sorry, are Muslims. I think all
who died were Muslims. The 5% is Christians who have been
there for hundreds of years, their families, because they do
believe it is the Biblical Qana. There is a claimant to the
rival of Qana in Galilee in northern Israel actually.
The Lebanese soldiers were trying take down the names of
all who had died, but I found a man with a clipboard who had
taken down 40 names, and he said that they weren't accurate,
because some of the children were blown into bits and they
couldn't fit them together accurately and there might be --
they couldn't put the right head on the right body, and
therefore they might not be able to have an accurate list of
the dead. But he was doing his best in the circumstances of
war to maintain the bureaucracy of government.
One by one the children's bodies were taken away from the
courtyard of the government hospital on the shoulders of
soldiers and hospital workers and were put in a big
refrigerated truck, very dirty, dusty truck, which had been
parked just outside the hospital. The grownups, the adult
dead, including twelve women, were taken out later. The
children were put in the truck first. Pretty grim. As I
said, the children's hair, when you could see the bodies,
were matted with dust and mud. And most of them appear to
have been bleeding from the nose. I assume that’s because
their lungs were crushed by the bomb, and therefore they
naturally hemorrhaged as they died.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk reporting from Beirut. After
the attack Sunday, Israel released what appeared to be video
footage of Hezbollah rockets being launched from Qana toward
towns in northern Israel. I asked Robert Fisk about the footage.
ROBERT FISK: I’ve seen the video footage. It’s
impossible to tell from the footage if indeed this is from
Qana. You know, you have to realize that last time the
massacre occurred at Qana in 1996, when they killed 106
refugees who were sheltering in the then-UN base that was
there -- it doesn't exist anymore, but it did then -- more
than half of them children, again. They said that missiles
had been fired from within the UN base. It turns out that
they were fired from half a mile away. They then said that
they didn't have a live time pilot-less aircraft over the UN
base at the time. And, in fact, on the Independent, I
found a UN soldier who did have a videotape, showing clearly
at the time of the bombardment -- this is in 1996 -- a live
time photo reconnaissance unmanned aircraft over the base.
The Israelis were later forced to admit that they had not
told the truth: indeed there was a machine over the base at
the time. You know, you can do what you want with photo
reconnaissance pictures and with photographs after the
event. It’s interesting that we weren't shown these pictures
before the massacre. We were only shown them after the
massacre.
But they may be correct. The Hezbollah are firing
missiles from villages in southern Lebanon, just as, for
example, when the Israelis entered southern Lebanon and go
into places like Bent Jabail, they're using civilian houses
as cover for their tanks, so the Hezbollah use houses as
cover for their missile launching. But the odd thing is the
idea that for the Israeli military that somehow it’s okay to
kill all these children; if a missile is launched 30, 90
feet from their house, that's okay then. We’ve got some film
to show the missiles were launched; that's okay then. I
mean, did the aircraft which dropped this bomb, a guided
weapon, by the way -- they knew what they were hitting. It’s
a guided weapon. We know that because the computer codes
have been found on the bomb fragments. Did they say, “Oh,
well, then, the man who launched the missile is hiding with
the children in the basement of the house we're going to
hit”? Is it the case now that if you happen to live in a
house next to where someone launches a missile, you are to
be sentenced to death? Is that what Israel thinks the war is
about?
I’m sitting here, for example, in my house tonight in
darkness -- there’s no electricity -- next to a car park.
What if someone launches a missile from the car park? Am I
supposed to die for that? Is that a death sentence for me?
Is that how Israel wages war? If I have children in the
basement, are they to die for that? And then I’m told it’s
my fault or it’s Hezbollah's fault? You know, these are
serious moral questions.
It’s quite clear from listening to the IDF statement
today that they believe that family deserved to die, because
90 feet away, they claim, a missile was fired. So they
sentenced all those people to death. Is that what we're
supposed to believe? I mean, presumably it is. I can't think
of any other reason why they should say, “Well, 30 meters
away a missile was fired.” Well, thanks very much. So those
little children’s corpses in their plastic packages, all
stuck together like giant candies today, this is supposed to
be quite normal, this is how war is to be waged by the IDF.
The fact that when they made these comments, they went
unchallenged on television, was one of the most
extraordinary scenes I’ve seen. I got back from Tyre on a
very dangerous overland journey on an open road, which was
under air attack, and I got back, and just before the
electricity was cut, I saw the BBC reporting what the
Israelis had said, but without questioning the morality that
if someone fires a missile near your home, therefore it is
perfectly okay for you to die.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ll return to our interview with Robert
Fisk of the Independent newspaper in Britain, reporting
from Beirut.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with Robert
Fisk of the Independent. He has been based in Lebanon for
the last 30 years. I spoke to him early this morning, after he
had just returned from Tyre. I asked him to respond to Israel's
announcement it would suspend air strikes over southern Lebanon
for 48 hours.
ROBERT FISK: That would certainly give the United
Nations and particularly the International Red Cross the
opportunity of getting thousands of people out of the
region. But whether you can arrange convoys for thousands of
people to leave in that period of time, I don't know. The
people who the haven't left are either too frightened to
leave, or they’re too poor, or they have no cars, or they’re
too elderly or too young. Can the International Committee of
the Red Cross with whom I have been traveling for some of
the last few days -- does that give them enough time to get
people out? Does that mean there will be no shells on the
road, or is it just air attacks that are stopping?
You know, it’s very interesting that the Israelis should
say now, now after all these days, they're going to give 48
hours. Why didn't they give an extra 48 hours at the
beginning to get the people out? Why now? Is this a bonus, a
plus point, something you -- a supermarket extra card that
you win because you’ve killed so many people? Is it a
monopoly board that you're going to gamble? Okay, you get 48
hours free of air attack, because you killed so many people
yesterday. Is that what this is supposed to mean?
AMY GOODMAN: In an emergency meeting of the UN
Security Council, it voted Sunday not for a cessation of
hostilities -- the U.S. was opposed to that -- but to deplore
what happened in Qana and an end to the violence. I asked Robert
Fisk to respond.
ROBERT FISK: John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, has consistently opposed any kind of
ceasefire, because he believes, as Mr. Bush does and as our
own dear prime minister, Lord Blair, as I call him, does,
that the Israelis can accomplish these hopeless political
military aims. Well, the Israelis believe that they can
actually destroy one of the most disciplined and most
ruthless guerrilla armies in the world. They can't, anymore
than the Americans could destroy the Vietcong or the North
Vietnamese or British could destroy the IRA. And, believe
me, the Hezbollah are not as weak and cowardly as the IRA
was. But they can't. These are hopeless political aims. All
the United Nations is doing by postponing a ceasefire is
condemning more Lebanese to death. I wrote in Saturday’s
paper, before Qana, that the actions of Blair and Bush, and
Bolton by extension, and Condoleezza Rice, were going to
condemn more innocents to death.
You know, I went into a hospital in Marjayoun last week,
and I saw this very beautiful young woman lying in bed, and
her skin had been pitted with very familiar wounds, the
little tiny round crimson holes of cluster bomblets. We used
cluster bombs in Iraq in 2003. I know exactly what the
wounds look like. I identified them at once. Indeed, she
described the cluster bombs falling like grapes, as she put
it, out of the sky, oddly enough an expression used by an
Iraqi woman in 2003 to me. This young woman had been wounded
48 hours before I saw her. Had Bush and Blair insisted on a
ceasefire at the beginning, this woman, her skin would not
be destroyed in the way it has been.
On the ground, when you're here, when you see the
wounded, see the dead, you realize the immorality, the
obscenity, the atrocity of statesmen, as they think they
are, claiming that, you know, it isn't yet time for a
ceasefire. A hasty ceasefire would not be a good thing, as
Condoleezza Rice said. 24 hours before, I saw a picture of
her on a beach in Malaysia. And people remember this. People
remember this. In the hospital it was a young man who said
-- turned to me, he said, “Why have you done this to us? Why
have you done this to us?” And the woman I was talking to
said the same: “Why does the West want to do this to us?”
You know, this has been going on for more than two weeks
now. I’m traveling around the south, increasingly outraged
at what I see, as a human being. And I’m not a Muslim. I’m
not a Muslim. And I keep saying to myself, “If I was a
Muslim, how much more outraged might I be?” I turned to an
American friend of mine tonight back in Beirut before I came
home, and I said, “You know, I’ve been watching this now for
more than two weeks, and there's going to be another 9/11.”
There’s going to be another 9/11, and then we’re going to
hear all the usual claptrap about how it’s good versus evil,
and they hate us because we’re good and democratic, and they
hate our values, and all the other material that comes out
of the rear end of a bull that your president and my prime
minister talk.
What’s going on in southern Lebanon is an outrage. It’s
an atrocity. The idea that more than 600 civilians must die
because three Israeli soldiers were killed and two were
captured on the border by the Hezbollah on July 12, my 60th
birthday -- I’ve spent 30 years of my life watching this,
this filth now, you know -- is outrageous. It’s against all
morality to suggest that 600 innocent civilians must die for
this. There is no other country in the world that could get
away with this.
You know, when -- I wrote in my paper last week, there
were times when the IRA would cross from the Irish Republic
into northern Ireland to kill British soldiers. And they did
murder and kill British soldiers. But we, the British,
didn’t hold the Irish government responsible. We didn't send
the Royal Air Force to bomb Dublin power stations and Galway
and Cork. We didn't send our tanks across the border to
shell the hill villages of Cavan or Monaghan or Louth or
Donegal. Blair wouldn't dream of doing that, because he
believes he's a moral man, he’s a civilized man. He wouldn't
treat another nation like that.
But when the Israelis treat Lebanon like that, it's okay,
and Blair doesn't want a ceasefire. You can’t have a real
ceasefire. In other words, we've got to have the Lebanese on
their knees to sign the dotted line, before we give them a
ceasefire. And that dotted line means the disarmament of
Hezbollah, which will be impossible for the Lebanese to do
without restarting the civil war, because to disarm
Hezbollah, you must use the army, and most of the Hezbollah
are, of course, Shiite Muslims, and most of the army are
Shiite Muslims. So you’re going to have brothers assaulting
brothers to take their weapons away. It will not happen.
However much you may wish it and however much I may wish it,
it won't happen. And, again, this double morality: Blair
wouldn't dream of attacking the Irish Republic because the
IRA crossed the border from Ireland, but it’s quite in order
for Israel to attack the Lebanese Republic because the
Hezbollah crossed the border from Lebanon.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, speaking to us from Beirut,
Lebanon. He had just returned from Tyre, where victims of the
Qana bombing had been taken. We'll play part two of this
interview tomorrow on Democracy Now!
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