"Supporters
Of Hezbollah"
By Dahr Jamail
01 August, 2006
t
r u t h o u t
Today,
Sunday, I write this from Beirut, which is being circled by Israeli
unmanned military surveillance drones, the same kind I saw so often
in Fallujah. I suppose they were spying on the raging demonstrators
who clogged the streets in Beirut and assaulted the UN building in a
rage of vengeance after the fresh massacre of civilians by Israeli warplanes
in the small town of Qana in the south.
Hundreds of the protesters
ran through the building's corridors smashing offices, walls and glass
while rescue teams extracted the bodies of at least 34 children and
scores of other civilians from the bowels of the refugee shelter they
were hiding in.
"Fuck the UN! Fuck those
bastards for not stopping this Israeli slaughtering of the innocents,"
screamed a young protestor waving a Lebanese flag outside the UN building,
which by now had smoke billowing out of portions of it. "What good
are they if they cannot do what they were designed to do - to stop the
killing of innocents?"
This man, 22 years old, was
but a baby when the first Israeli military massacre at Qana took place.
Yet the parallels of this sordid history repeating itself were not missed
by most in the seething crowd.
On April 11, 1996, Israeli
Prime Minister Shimon Peres, under pressure to respond to a wave of
suicide bombings in Israel, launched Operation Grapes of Wrath. One
week later, on April 18, while 800 civilians sought shelter from the
fighting at a UN peacekeeping base in Qana, the base was shelled heavily
- killing 102 and wounding 120.
After the first Qana massacre,
the Israeli military rejected responsibility for the deaths, instead
blaming Hezbollah because they thought fighters had entered the UN base.
A similar Israeli justification, albeit the very definition of collective
punishment, was given today - that they suspected Hezbollah militants
had fired rockets from Qana. After the 1996 massacre, a UN investigation
found no evidence to support the claim made by the Israeli military,
and I suspect a similar investigation will find a similar verdict this
time - that the Israeli military had no reason to bomb innocent civilians.
Astounding as this level
of blood thirst is, it really cannot come as much of a surprise. Why
not? Because just last Thursday, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon
announced on Israeli army radio, "All those in south Lebanon are
terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah."
Using rhetoric that set the
stage for justifying the collective punishment of the Lebanese people
in southern Lebanon, Ramon added, "In order to prevent casualties
among Israeli soldiers battling Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon,
villages should be flattened by the Israeli air force before ground
troops move in."
He rationalized his statements
by saying that Israel had given the civilians of southern Lebanon ample
time to leave the area; thus, anyone who remained could be considered
a supporter of Hezbollah.
So of course by his definition,
everyone in southern Lebanon supports Hezbollah.
I met some of these "supporters
of Hezbollah" yesterday in the hospitals of Sidon.
I met five-year-old Hussein
Jawad as his stiff little body lay
prone on a hospital bed, one of his tiny legs in a cast.
His eight-year-old sister Zayneb, also a "supporter of Hezbollah,"
lay next to him in the same bed. See, there were so many Hezbollah supporters
in the southern hospitals that the small ones had to share beds.
They, along with their mother
Yusah in a nearby bed, covered in the kind of shrapnel wounds received
from cluster bombs, had stayed in their tiny village near the border
during the first three days of the bombing because they were too scared
to leave. The bombing got so close; they took their chances and managed
to move to another village, where they stayed for another eight days.
They ran out of food, so
Yusah and the two little "supporters of Hezbollah," compelled
by fear and hunger, along with another car containing Yusah's two sisters,
followed an ambulance to Kafra village. When they arrived there, the
car carrying the two sisters was bombed by an American-made F-16.
Then there was Khuder Gazali,
an ambulance driver, whose left arm
was blown off by a rocket fired by an American-made Apache
war helicopter while he was rescuing civilians whose home had been bombed.
The ambulance then sent to rescue the rescuer was bombed, everyone in
it killed. Miraculously, the third ambulance was able to retrieve him,
only because the Apache had left.
16-year-old Ibrahim Al-Hama
was surely supporting Hezbollah as he played in a river with a dozen
of his friends before they were bombed by a warplane. He lay in the
hospital bed, his lacerated chest oozing blood, his left ankle shattered
and held together by gauze and medical tape. Two of his friends are
dead, along with a woman who was near the bomb's impact zone. Perhaps
she too was plotting a rocket attack against Israel?
It's wonderful to see the
thoroughness of the Israeli military, their effectiveness at eradicating
"supporters of Hezbollah." Like 51-year-old
Sumi Marden Ruwiri. On July 14th his home in Bint Jbail
was bombed while most of his family members were inside, killing his
mother and sister while they surely were strategizing the next rocket
launches for Hezbollah. When he and several others began to sift through
the rubble for their loved ones, the warplanes returned to bomb the
rescuers. He lay in bed, his
back shredded by shrapnel, countless patches of gauze stuck
to his wounds. His sheets were stained red by blood and yellow by pus
that oozed from the wounds.
Alia Abbas, a 52-year-old,
fled her village with five other family members after Israeli warplanes
dropped leaflets instructing them to leave their village. She lay in
bed shredded by shrapnel wounds, one of her eyes missing. 10 days ago
when they tried to flee, hanging white flags out the windows of their
car, they were bombed by warplanes. She's the only survivor. "Why
did they bomb as after we did what they told us to do," she asked
me. All I could do was clench my jaw to stave off the tears.
Apparently Alia didn't know
she was a "supporter of Hezbollah," since her family was wiped
out after Haim Ramon's preposterous remarks about half a million inhabitants
of southern Lebanon.
I met dozens of other Hezbollah
supporters, most of them women, children and elderly - the kind most
ill-equipped to flee their homes on a moment's notice. They lay in their
beds, many of them moaning, some crying, and others comatose and kept
alive only by machines. The man comatose in this picture
was fleeing his village on a motorcycle after receiving the leaflets
of instruction to do so, according to his mother - the only one left
alive from their family of 10.
Then I met Durish Zhair,
a 43-year-old man whose home near the southern border was bombed by
warplanes. Half
of his face was burned his back horribly burned, and the
rest of his body pocked by shrapnel. He sat with a stern look on his
face, distraught and confused by what happened. I asked him where his
11 family members were and he told me, "They are all wounded, scattered
in hospitals in the south, or in Beirut."
I thanked him for his time,
and we walked out of his room. The nurse who accompanied me softly closed
the door. She then said to me quietly, "All of his family is dead.
We cannot tell him yet because he is so injured. He thinks they are
still alive."
Surely, they too, along with
his wife and young children were "supporters of Hezbollah."
My head spun. My head still
spins and I feel sick inside. I wonder how much is enough? How many
more will die? Over 600 Lebanese, mostly civilians, are dead. At least
51 Israelis, the majority civilians, are dead from this.
If we look back a few years,
we find the answer. Speaking before the Conference on America's Challenges
in a Changed World at the US Institute of Peace (yes, "Institute
of Peace") in Washington DC on September 5, 2002, the Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage had the following exchange during a Q&A
session:
Q: In this war on terrorism,
a group that isn't mentioned very often is one that you're very familiar
with, Hezbollah. It has killed more Americans than any other terrorist
group before September 11th. I just would like to hear whether they
are on the agenda sometime in the future.
Mr. Armitage: Well, let
me, for those who don't know you, Buck, "Buck" Revell, formerly
of the FBI, was one of the leading voices for anti-terrorism activities
during the second Reagan administration and was absolutely key in some
of the takedowns we had at the time. And I appreciate the question.
Hezbollah may be the
"A team" of terrorists, and maybe al Qaeda is actually the
"B team." And they're on the list and their time will come,
there is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, which you
spoke to, and we're not going to forget it. And it's all in good time.
And we're going to go after these problems just like a high school wrestler
goes after a match. We're going to take 'em down one at a time.
And taking 'em down one at
a time, or in the case of Qana today, scores at a time, is what they
are doing in southern Lebanon. While Israel and their stalwart US backers
continue to refuse pleas for a cease-fire, bombs and rockets rain down
on women, children and other innocents as they huddle in their homes,
in refugee shelters, or while they flee in their cars while holding
white surrender flags.
Meanwhile, Israeli defense
sources told Israel's Haaretz newspaper Sunday that the Israeli army's
general staff had received orders to accelerate its offensive on Hezbollah
before the declaration of any cease-fire.
Yet as War Criminal Rice
and her cronies back in DC drag their feet, postponing any real cease-fire,
Israel's military needn't hasten itself too much as they go about their
daily slaughtering of the "supporters of Hezbollah."
Originally posted on Truthout
website