An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth -- Israel and
Hizbollah trapped in conflict again
Robert Fisk in Beirut asks why Shimon Peres launched a blitz on
Lebanon on the eve of a vital election
The Independent, 14 April 1996
ONLY a few hours after Israeli
helicopters had staged their
first raid over the southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday,
Hizbollah's local Manar (Lighthouse) television station showed an intriguing film, an interview
with a Lebanese man, his face pixillated to avoid recognition
but his voice all too audible as
he recounted his life as an Israeli
agent in southern Lebanon.
He had, he said, married a
woman who lived in the Israeli occupation zone in the far south of
the country -- the strip of territory
held by Israeli troops since 1978 -- and had been recruited by Israel on a
visit to his wife's village.
It was unclear whether the man was a prisoner or a defector, but
his information was specific.
For months he had lived in the area north of Israel's occupation zone, amassing details of
Hizbollah's movements and
equipment. On a set of photographic maps provided by the Israelis, he had carefully marked
the home of each Hizbollah
member. He had communicated
this information, he said, through
an E-mail system that operated
on Israeli-provided equipment
which he kept hidden in the cabinet of his television set.
Amid the blood and rhetoric
of this latest, wearingly familiar,
war in Lebanon, Hizbollah was
sending two messages over its
TV station: that the historical
background to the conflict is being ignored -- in some cases deliberately
-- and that the Israelis had been planning this operation
for months, just as Hizbollah itself had been working out its
own methods of confronting
the coming Israeli assault.
This is the trap into which the
Israelis have walked. Unable to
damage Hizbollah from the air,
they can only fight the guerrillas on the ground, where they
will take casualties. And the Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon
Peres, whose 29 May election
lies like a foundation stone to
the whole Lebanese assault,
cannot afford Israeli casualties;
only Lebanese ones. So how
come the Israelis launched their
blitz in the first place?
Officially, they attacked because Hizbollah was firing missiles at
Galilee and because five Israelis were wounded on
Wednesday; a woman among
them was critically injured. Israel,
however, is not anxious to remind
anyone why those Katyushas
were fired -- because, yet again,
a Lebanese civilian had been
killed, in contravention of the
1993 Israeli-Hizbollah agreement that was intended to spare
civilians from being targeted in
the south Lebanon war. Indeed,
the list of civilian casualties in southern Lebanon is infinitely higher
than the Israeli casualties of
Hizbollah Katyushas in Galilee, a fact which the Israelis are again not
eager to publicise.
Research shows that over the past 36 months, an Israeli tank
at Nabatea al-Faqar has killed
seven civilians, including three
women, with flechette shells,
that an Israeli mortar battery has
killed a five-year-old girl and a
young woman in the village of
Shaqra, that a helicopter gunship
has killed two young men building a water tower in Yater and
that an Israeli jet has killed two
families of 10 people in a house
between Zahrani and Nabatea. Flechette shells are particularly deadly
-- hundreds of tiny steel
arrows sprayed from a proximity shell that explodes just above head height and is designed to
cause maximum casualties. The
five-year-old bled to death in the
street outside her home after the
shell cut her legs off.
There was no talk of "terrorism" after these deaths. The
Israelis said they would hold a
military inquiry into the first
Nabatea killings but it never
took place. There was talk of the
killings being a "mistake." The
Shaqra deaths went unexplained. The Israelis said that
the bombing at Nabatea and the
Yater killings were also an "accident" -- the same word they
used to describe the killing of a
Syrian army major in Beirut on
Friday (though not, oddly, of
their killing of a young woman
on the coast road). At least 12
other civilians have been killed
by the Israelis in southern
Lebanon in the same period.
After most of these incidents,
Hizbollah unleashed Katyusha
rockets onto northern Israel in
retaliation -- adopting the very
same policy of an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth which the
Israelis had been using for more
than 20 years. If the Israelis did
not kill or wound civilians in
southern Lebanon, Hizbollah
confined its attacks to Israeli soldiers and their militia allies
within the south Lebanese occupation zone, offensives which
were, in effect, permitted under the 1993 agreement brokered by
the US, Syria and Iran.
Last weekend a young boy was
killed by a bomb in the village
of Bradchit, and Hizbollah
blamed the Israelis. Mr. Peres denied Israeli responsibility, but Hizbollah did not believe him and
fired 24 Katyushas at Kiryat Shmona. Only after an Israeli soldier was killed in the occupied zone
the next day -- a death that would later be lumped together with the
Katyusha casualties and
condemned by the Israelis as an act of "terrorism" -- did the Israelis
launch their military offensive against Lebanon.
Now both sides are trapped in combat yet again. Hizbollah has
expressed its enthusiasm for
just such a battle, while the Israelis have attacked in a more gingerly fashion. Perhaps Mr. Peres
will call for a resumption of the 1993 agreement. If not, he will be forced to keep his army in
action into the election campaign, and that's not how you win elections.
