Israel's Bitter Vengeance
By Robert Fisk,
Foreign Reporter of the Year, in Beirut on the day the Israelis struck
back.
The Independent, 12 April 1996
It was a muggy, grey spring day
on the Beirut seafront and the
first rumble sounded like the
last of the winter storms; a
bleak coughing sound high
above us. It was only when the
strollers on the Corniche began
staring skywards that I noticed
the black and white puffs of anti-
aircraft fire speckling the clouds
and the tiny, mosquito-sized
helicopters racing far out along
the wave-line. After almost 14
years, the Israelis had returned
to Beirut with a vengeance.
Almost before we had seen
them, two of the helicopters --
American-made Apaches --
turned over the seafront and
there was a sullen pop-popping
sound like a toy gun and two
small puffs of white smoke rising from the southern suburbs
of Beirut -- the canyons of high-rise apartment blocks and narrow streets
in which many of the Hizbollah leadership live. Their
target, the Israelis would claim
later, was the "operational
nerve-centre" of the Hizbollah
-- although the organisation's
headquarters later emerged apparently untouched.
There were few Lebanese
who did not believe that Shimon
Peres' battle to convince Israeli
electors on 29 May that he can
strike at what he calls "Islamic
terror" lay behind the appearance of those helicopters over
Beirut. Israel's long-expected
blitz left at least four dead and
six wounded across Lebanon.
Mounting casualties among Is-
rael's occupation troops in
southern Lebanon and repeated Hizbollah missile retaliation on Galilee for the Israeli
shelling of civilians inside
Lebanon meant that the "red
line" which had for so long restrained the Israelis from attacking Beirut would almost
certainly be crossed.
Yet when it was crossed, it
took less than a minute for
Beirut to melt back into the
wartime nightmare that so
many Lebanese thought had
ended. Panic-stricken motorists,
their headlights blazing, their
hands clamped on the horn,
blasted their way through the
traffic jams. An ambulance, careering from side to side and up
on to the pavement, siren
screaming, swept past us with a
carload of armed men behind
it. In the Sahel hospital, a young
man with his face bathed in
blood was surrounded by television crews. "I was walking in
the street and all I remember
is a flash and then I found myself covered in blood," he said.
And the gunmen were back
in the southern suburbs,
bearded Hizbollah men with
American M-16 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, kitted
out in webbing and camouflage jackets and captured
Israeli helmets. Even the
Lebanese radios reverted to
their wartime role of endless
news bulletins interspersed with
the haunting laments of Fairuz,
that most famous of Lebanese
singers, whose voice is forever
linked to the horror of the 16-
year conflict that was supposed
to have ended.
The news was all bad: a 27-
year old woman killed in her car
by a missile-firing helicopter
near the Jiye power station,
south of Beirut; a civilian killed
in an air raid in the inland town
of Nabatea; a 60-year-old man
cut down by the Beirut rockets.
The raids were in retaliation,
said the bulletins, for the
Katyusha attacks on Israel,
which were retaliation for
the killing of a 14-year-old
Lebanese boy, which might
have been retaliation for a suicide bombing against Israeli
troops, which was retaliation for... it was like listening to The
House that Jack Built.
When I called an old friend on his mobile telephone in the
southern city of Tyre, he just had time to tell me that Israeli Apache
and Huey helicopters were hovering over the city.
"They're mounting mobile
checkpoints," he said.
"They're watching everything that moves." Then the
line went dead. The lines went dead all over Lebanon, just like the
peace of Beirut that expired yesterday morning. By early afternoon, it was turning into a
ghost city, its streets largely
deserted, its restaurants empty.
When I drove into the southern suburbs at dusk, the only
men standing on the street corners were armed. The Hizbollah's green-painted central offices -- supposedly the "nerve-
centre" which the Israelis said
they had attacked -- stood apparently unharmed. But in a
dingy office where a Donald
Duck cartoon was playing on a
miniature television on the sideboard, a bearded man close to
the Hizbollah announced quietly to me that the Israelis had crossed a red line. When the Israelis
killed civilians, the
Hizbollah fired back into Israel,
he said. He blamed the Israelis
for the death of a boy in Bradchit village at the weekend.
"But there is a balance of terror now," he went on. "The Is-
raelis used to hold the balance. Now it is shifting to the resistance. Hitting civilians is crossing a
red line for our resistance
forces. This has nothing to do
with targeting military headquarters.
"I tell you this: the hand of
the resistance is long and is capable of hurting the enemy. We
have an expression here -- that
we and the Israelis are biting
each other's fingers. The biting
of fingers has begun and we
shall see who screams first."
