Originally posted at Liberal Street Fighter
Robert Fisk reporting from Lebanon
I went to Tyre, Amy. By the time this has happened — to get from Beirut now to the south takes four to six 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.”
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.
A pox on Israel, and a pox on us for supporting them so blindly. Somehow “sorry” just doesn’t cut it.
There is nothing left to say. Any justification for this kind of wanton violence and civilian collective punishment becomes little more than vile, reprehensible propaganda. To get an idea of what is happening, imagine that a few gangs drove through downtown LA and tossed some molotov cocktails into businesses or restaurants. Imagine the LAPD and CA National Guard responding by bombing blocks of citizen housing in South Central LA.
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?
The children and grandchildren of the victims have become the victimizers. The people once stalked by monsters have become the monsters. As we’ve slaughtered and shredded the people of Iraq, now our 51st state visits the same bloody crimes on Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Again. That so many Americans, both in the media and those going about their daily lives, buy into and support the Israelis’ self-justification speaks ill of many of us.
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.
Israel is sowing anew the seeds of it’s own destruction, and sympathy and understanding for them will continue to whither. While anyone can understand the need to lash out in response to rockets being fired into civilian areas, striking with deadly force into large concentrations of civilians while refusing any and all diplomatic discussion only strengthens your enemies. This behavior only drives home the idea that the Israelis are criminals with no sense of proportion, no sense of justice, no sense of decency, and their use of weapons and bombs with Made in USA stamped all over them suggests that WE are monsters too … not that Iraq hasn’t already made that manifestly clear.
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?”
What is there left to say?