Massacre in Sanctuary; Eyewitness
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 19 April 1996, page 1
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 UN'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...
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.
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 in front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut
to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last
night, I found two Israeli 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 Israel's militia allies in 1982
doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. 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'a
terrible scenes.
The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams
from the shell-smashed UN compound restaurant in which the Shiite
Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon - who had heeded
Israel'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 in their wounds. "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow
myself up amid the Israelis," one old man said.
As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that
Israelis will pay for their killing of Lebanese civilians, its
revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then
turn out then to be all too aptly named.
