4/19/96

Qana-South Lebanon: the place where the Israeli shells
killed 102 people, mostly women and children, taking refuge in a United
Nations
headquarters on April 18, 1996.

By Robert Fisk
The Independent 4/19/96, page 1

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.
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
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