Lebanon:
'Peace’ Plan
A 'Green Light’ For War
By Doug Lorimer
16 August, 2006
Green Left Weekly
During
the night of August 7, an Israeli warplane fired a missile into an apartment
block on Haijaj Street, in the densely populated southern Beirut suburb
of Shiyyah. “We thought it was safe here as there are no Hezbollah
people or offices here, but we were wrong”, Haijaj Street resident
Fatima Ismail told Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon. The
attack killed at least 31 people; 60 were wounded.
“As she sat on the
floor of a hospital room surrounded by bleeding relatives”, MacKinnon
wrote, “the 21-year-old secretary spat at the idea that Israel
was seeking only to destroy the Hezbollah militia and its ability to
launch Katyusha rockets across the border. 'Look! There’s no Katyusha
in here!’ she yelled, unzipping a pocket on her jeans to reveal
there was nothing inside. 'Is my heart a Katyusha? Is my sister a Katyusha?
Where is Hezbollah here? Where?’”
In response to Israeli air
and artillery attacks on Lebanon, Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance
fighters have fired several thousand unguided Katyusha rockets into
northern Israel. By August 7, these rocket attacks had killed 36 Israeli
civilians and 12 soldiers. Another 48 Israeli soldiers had been killed
in battles in south Lebanon.
The Haijaj Street massacre,
MacKinnon wrote, “was the closest the Israeli military had struck
to the centre of the Lebanese capital during its four-week-old campaign”.
Many of the victims were Shia Muslims who had fled southern Lebanon.
Diaa el-Husseini, a 34-year-old
market trader who lived in the adjoining tower block, told the London
Times: “We thought we were safe here so we stayed. We are not
fighters. We are families who only want a peaceful life, but Israel
wants to terrorise us all into leaving the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Today we all feel part of the Hezbollah resistance.”
The missile attack on the
Haijaj Street apartment block was only one of eight carried out that
night by Israeli warplanes on Beirut’s largely Shiite-inhabited
southern suburbs, most of which have suffered repeated Israeli air attacks
over the previous four weeks.
Reporting on the massacre,
the London Times commented: “If Israel thought that by slowly
strangling the life out of the Lebanese capital, by blockading it from
land, sea and air, it would turn Christians against their Muslim neighbours
it appears to have miscalculated. The tragedy on Hajjaj Street ... was
Beirut’s single biggest loss of life since the war began, bringing
the total to more than 1000.”
The attack “hardened
the public mood. Even those in the Christian half of the capital, who
were beginning to call for a ceasefire at any price, spoke yesterday
of their disgust at what Israeli warplanes were doing to their city
...”
Israeli war crimes
The August 6 London Observer
reported: “As international outrage over civilian deaths [in Lebanon]
grows, the spotlight is increasingly turning on Israeli air operations.
The Observer has learnt that one senior commander who has been involved
in the air attacks in Lebanon has already raised concerns that some
of the air force’s actions might be considered ‘war crimes’.”
Indeed, Israel’s US-endorsed
naval blockade and its air strikes stand in stark violation of the Geneva
Conventions’ prohibitions against collective punishment, targeting
of civilians and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure.
The Israeli rulers have claimed
that their war on Lebanon is targetted against “Hezbollah’s
infrastructure” and is an act of “self-defence” in
response to Hezbollah’s July 12 raid across the “Blue Line”
— the border resulting from the 1949 armistice agreement between
Lebanon and the newly created Israeli state.
However, the Hezbollah raid
was limited to military targets. The only Israelis killed or captured
were soldiers. Israel’s response, on the other hand, has been
a full-scale war against Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure
— starting with the bombing of Beirut’s international airport,
followed by the bombing of ports, roads, bridges, power stations, food
warehouses, fuel depots, water plants, factories, residential buildings,
ambulances, cars with fleeing civilians and farm workers loading trucks
with fruit.
“The Israeli enemy’s
bombing of bridges and roads is aimed at tightening the blockade on
the Lebanese, cutting communications between them and starving them”,
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said in an August 4 statement.
Threat to attack
UN forces
The August 7 British Guardian
reported that Israel had declared a “curfew” in Lebanon’s
south, “warning that all vehicles apart from humanitarian traffic
would be at risk [of Israeli air attack] ... Israel also threatened
to attack UN peacekeepers if they attempted to repair bomb-damaged bridges
in southern Lebanon. UN officials contacted the Israeli army to inform
them that a team of Chinese military engineers attached to the UN force
in Lebanon intended to repair the bridge on the Beirut to Tyre road
to enable the transport of humanitarian supplies.
“According to the UN,
Israeli officials said the engineers would become a target if they attempted
to repair the bridge.”
One million Lebanese —
a quarter of the country’s population — have fled southern
Lebanon, which has been subjected to around 100 Israeli air attacks
and up to 4000 artillery strikes a day since July 13. Aid agencies estimate
that about 100,000 civilians remain trapped in the area’s bombed-out
towns and villages.
“The most vulnerable
areas are in southern Lebanon, mostly in border villages where people
have been staying in basements for over 15 days”, UNICEF sanitation
adviser Paul Sherlock told Agence France-Presse on August 4. “There
is no water, no power, no fuel, no sewage. Our biggest fear is hygiene.
It is very hot and people are reduced to the point where they are not
being able to wash themselves, or their hands. We fear bloody diarrhea,
cholera and other epidemics.”
The August 9 Australian reported
that Israel was planning to “ramp up its offensive” by attacking
Lebanon’s “strategic civilian infrastructure” to try
to make Beirut capitulate to ceasefire terms that were favourable to
Israel.
An Israeli “senior
general defence staff officer” said: “We are now in a process
of renewed escalation. We will continue hitting everything that moves
in Hezbollah, but we will also hit strategic civilian infrastructure.”
The Israeli military of course has been doing that since it began its
current war on Lebanon — its third in three decades.
But, contrary to the Murdoch
media’s claim, the Israeli rulers do not want a ceasefire. They,
and their allies in Washington, want Beirut to agree to the deployment
of an international military force of tens of thousands of foreign troops
in Lebanon that would attack the Hezbollah-led resistance fighters in
south Lebanon from the north while the invading Israeli forces continued
their attacks from the south.
Due to fierce Lebanese resistance,
at the end of the fourth week of Israel’s war, 10,000 invading
Israeli troops had only managed to penetrate some six kilometres into
Lebanon. By contrast, during its 1982 invasion, the Israeli army took
only three hours to reach the Litani River, 30km north of the border,
and only 48 hours to reach the outskirts of Beirut.
UN 'green light’
for war
In pursuit of this plan and
in consultation with Israeli officials, the US and France, the former
colonial power in Lebanon, have drafted a UN resolution that calls for
a “cessation of hostilities”. The resolution demands that
Hezbollah halt its “attacks”, while Israel is required to
cease its “offensive military operations”. The draft does
not require Israel to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.
Lebanese foreign minister
Tarek Mitri told the UN Security Council on August 7: “We all
know that Israel has never conceded that its actions in Lebanon have
been anything but defensive. All their wars in our country are claimed
to be defensive ... So when you say the Israelis have to cease their
offensive military operations, you’re giving them a green light
to go on.”
The Lebanese government,
in which Hezbollah has two ministers, unanimously rejected the draft,
calling on the UN to demand an immediate ceasefire and an immediate
Israeli withdrawal from all Lebanese territory, including the Shebaa
Farms area that Israel has occupied since its 1982 invasion. Associated
Press reported on August 12 that the Lebanese cabinet had accepted the
UN plan, but Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said there were “some
reservations” about the decision.
While Paris indicated it
was willing to rework the draft to accommodate some of Lebanon’s
“concerns”, Washington has opposed this and on August 8
began pushing for quick adoption of the original draft by the Security
Council. On August 11, the Security Council unanimously adopted a modified
version of the US-French draft, calling for the 1900-member UN observer
force — UNIFIL, which has been in Lebanon since 1978 — to
be expanded to 15,000 troops and for it to gradually replace the current
Israeli invasion force in southern Lebanon.
There is no timetable set
out for this to happen — leaving the way open for Israel to continue
its war on Lebanon under the guise of “defensive” military
operations.