Clinton responds to Grapes of Wrath
Clinton calls for ceasefire after 101 refugees die
Eyewitness
Robert Fisk, Foreign Reporter of the Year
The Independent, 19 April 1996
The Middle East yesterday experienced its blackest day since the launch
of the Arab-Israeli peace process, threatening to plunge the region into a
sickening new cycle of violence.
Israeli shells hit a UN base which had become a sanctuary for civilian
refugees, killing 101 people
according to hospital officials. Israeli warplanes rocketed an apartment in
Nabatiyeh Fawqah,
killing nine people, including a mother and her four-day-old daughter. President Bill Clinton called
last night for a ceasefire, and dispatched Secretary of State Warren Christopher to the region.
Israel described the UN base bombardment as "an unfortunate mistake." In Cairo, Muslim
militants fired at tourists outside a hotel, killing 18 people, apparently in retaliation for the Israeli
assault.
Qana, southern Lebanon -- It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and
Chatila had I seen the
innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children
and men lay in heaps,
their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred
of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed
through them as they lay in the
United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's
protection. Like the
Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
In front of a burning building of the United Nation's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a
corpse in her arms, the body of a grey-haired man whose eyes were staring
at her, and she rocked
the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and
over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of
bodies and, without saying
a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.
"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area," a UN soldier said, shaking with
anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning
building -- the conference room of the Fijian UN
headquarters -- a pile of corpses
was burning. The roof had
crashed in flames onto their
bodies, cremating them in front
of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand.
So why did the Israelis kill all
these refugee civilians -- more
than 101 at the latest count -- and
go on sending 25 shells into the
survivors and the bodies around
them for up to 10 minutes after
the first round had landed? A
Fijian soldier, looking at a dead
woman lying at his feet, said simply: "The guerrillas fired six Katyushas from near our position.
The shells came in two minutes later. But the Israelis know
we're here. This has been a UN
battalion headquarters for 18
years. They knew we had 600
refugees here."
Indeed they did. The Israelis
know that 5,200 penniless civilians -- too poor to flee to Beirut
-- are crowded into the compounds of the 4,500-strong UN force. The
Fijian battalion headquarters
is clearly marked on Israel's military maps. The UN
buildings were plastered with
white and black UN signs. They are lit up at night. Not a soul in
southern Lebanon is ignorant of
their location. Nor is the Hizbollah. It is not the first time the
guerrillas have fired their missiles at Israel from beside a UN
building; when a Fijian officer
tried to prevent the HizboIlah
from firing rockets close to his
position on the coast road two
days ago, a Hizbollah man shot
him in the chest.
But Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive
-- 206 by last night -- has been 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 when Israeli
helicopter pilots fired missiles
into their home.
Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only
250 metres from a UN convoy
on which I was travelling, blasting a house 30 feet into the air.
Travelling back to Beirut to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last
night, I found two lsraeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on the river bridge north of
Sidon.
Every foreign army comes to
grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and
Chatila massacre of Palestinians
by Israeli militia allies in 1982
doomed Israel's invasion that
year. Now the Israelis are
stained again by the bloodbath
at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where the
Lebanese believe Jesus turned
water into wine.
The Israeli Prime Minister
Shimon Peres may now wish to
end this war. But the Hizbollah
are not likely to let him. Israel
is back in the Lebanese quagmire. Nor will the Arab world
forget yesterday's terrible
scenes.
The blood of all the refugees
ran literally in streams from the
shell-smashed UN compound
restaurant in which the Shia
Muslims from the hill villages
of southern Lebanon -- who had
heeded lsrael's order to leave
their homes -- had pathetically
sought shelter. Fijian and
French soldiers heaved another group of dead -- they lay with
their arms tightly wrapped
around each other -- into
blankets.
A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he
opened a bag in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms.
And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst into the compound.
They had driven in wild convoys
down from Tyre and began to
pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their mothers
and sons and daughters and
to shriek "Allahu Akbar" ("God
is Great") and to threaten the
UN troops.
We had suddenly become
not UN troops and journalists
but Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom.
One bearded man with fierce
eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury. "You are Americans," he screamed at us. "Americans
are dogs. You did this. Americans are dogs."
President Bill Clinton has allied himself with Israel in its war against "terrorism" and the
Lebanese, in their grief, had not forgotten this. Israel's official expression of sorrow was rubbing
salt on their wounds. "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow myself up amid Israelis," one
old man said.
As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that Israelis will pay for their killing of
Lebaneses civilians, its revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then
turn out then to be all too aptly named.
