Eyewitness
Reports From Israel's Assault On Lebanon
17 July, 2006
Socialist
Worker
Latest situation in Lebanon
Around 60,000 refugees from the south of Lebanon and the southern suburbs
of Beirut have arrived in the capital. Schools have been opened for
them to shelter in and activists are organising relief. Many schools
are now full and refugees are gathering in Sanayeh Park and other open-air
sites around Beirut. There are reports that schools in the Christian
areas of Keserwan and Metn are opening for the refugees.
Many of these refugees have
said that the villages in the south of Lebanon are full of people who
are unable to leave as roads are being bombed and bus convoys attacked.
Terror in Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps
17 July, 2006
Alaa, a
Palestinian refugee living in the Sabra and Chatilla
“The camps are almost completely empty. There is a fear that the
Israelis will return and finish what they did during the massacre in
1982. Some have gone to Syria, others have taken to the shelters.”
“There is not enough
food. We fear the worst, we have nowhere to hide. We are preparing for
an Israeli attack on our camp.”
Refugees in the schools
16 July 2006
Rafael Greenblatt, a US socialist living in Beirut
“The bombs have been
getting closer. There are a lot of refugees coming into central Beirut
from the southern part of the country and also from the southern suburbs
of Beirut. We went to a park were people are coming in and being directed
to places they can stay longer. People are mostly sleeping in schools.
Some were opened on the initiative of their staff immediately, but it
took the government until today to open them all.
“On top of that, people
don't necessarily want to go to the schools which are pretty spartan
and where they are stuck in a pretty small space with their kids. We
then
went to one of the schools
where there are about 20 families staying and spoke to some people.
The government emergency department hadn't delivered food since yesterday.
The only medical help is coming from volunteers, and that's minimal.
“In the areas we've
been the volunteers are being coordinated by the Leftist Assembly for
Change, NGOs including Helem (a gay and lesbian rights group), and other
parties. We hear the groups around the Lebanese Communist Party are
handling things further east, and Hezbollah further south. The main
government parties are mainly posing for the cameras - it seems like
as far as they are concerned it's not really their people who are suffering.”
'Our neighbours called
out to each other, detailing which buildings were still standing'
16 July 2006
Sonya Knox, UN worker, Beirut
My neighbourhood, near the
American University of Beirut in west Beirut and therefore traditionally
a safe place during times of crisis, is filling up with refugees. First
they came from the Dahieh, Beirut’s Shia Muslim southern suburbs
and one of Israel’s main targets. They came with their TVs and
spare mattresses, moving in with friends or family, and into the spare
apartments lent out by absent owners.
The parking situation here,
typically a source of much drama, has luckily eased because so many
residents here have left for their villages. “It’s always
like this,” a neighbour tells me, a suitcase in each hand. “Israel
bombs. We move out, they move in…” When Israel’s initial
barrage began on the Dahieh, our new neighbours called out to each other
from the balconies, detailing which streets were hit, which buildings
were still standing. Not all of their old neighbours got out in time.
A second wave of refugees
recently arrived, from the South. They came with cars filled to bursting,
with large, extended families. I tried to buy small-sized bread from
the local bakery, but they’ve stopped baking it. “No one’s
going to buy it,” I was told. A friend recently told me about
his family in South Lebanon. Before the bombing had intensified, five
households nominally related had gathered together. “There’s
easily 50 children under one roof,” he said, “all under
10 years old.” “Don’t worry,” another friend
said, “this is how the next generation of resistance fighters
gets trained.”
Lebanon has experienced
its most intense night of bombardment so far
15 July 2006
Christian Henderson,
a Scottish journalist based in Beirut
Since midnight on Saturday
there have been scores of powerful explosions in the southern suburbs.
Hizbollah’s Al-Manar TV station building has been seriously damaged,
but the station has continued to broadcast. In the southern Beirut suburb
of Haret Hreik area a number of civilian buildings have been hit. Many
refugees from the southern suburbs and the south Lebanon have moved
to schools in Beirut. Many of them are short of food and blankets.
Infrastructure across the
country has been hit. The Jiyeh power station has been hit. Masnaa border
crossing to Syria has been hit. A Lebanese army base in the northern
city of Batroun was attacked last night. The port in the Christian area
of Jounieh was attacked. The grain silos at Beirut port were reportedly
attacked. The Beirut lighthouse has been destroyed.
There are some roads open
to Syria the cost of a taxi to Damascus from Beirut is reportedly $1000.
The journey back is $500.
Israel has dropped various
propaganda leaflets on Beirut.
The Israeli attacks on Lebanon
are now extending to all parts of the country. As well as the continuous
attacks on the south and the southern suburbs of Beirut the strikes
have now spread to central Beirut, north and east Lebanon. Over 100
Lebanese have been killed and the country is almost completely cut of
from the outside world as Israeli bombing has cut main roads. The siege
on Lebanon looks set to continue.
Israel re-enters Lebanese politics
15 July 2006
Jim Quilty, a Canadian journalist based in Beirut
Over the last couple of days
Israel has particularly punished the people of south Lebanon and Beirut's
southern suburbs, including the airport. Today it's broadened the focus
of its attacks to include Beirut port, Jounieh port (in the Christian
area north of Beirut), the summer resort of Broummana, the port in the
northern city of Tripoli, and various other infrastructure and Lebanese
military targets.
So far we reckon they've
hit the Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik more than ten times. The Israelis
say Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah secretary-general, is hidden in
a tunnel beneath the base that they have so incessantly bombed. Absurd
as this claim is, the invocation of Saddam Hussein - America's previous
public enemy number one, who was also said to have been found hiding
in a tunnel - is all too transparent.
On Friday night Hizbollah
severely damaged an Israeli warship - sending four sailors into the
abyss. It seems they did this with an unmanned drone usually used for
surveillance but in this case packed with high explosives. Early Saturday,
the Israeli military command offered a corrective, claiming that the
weapon had been an Iranian-made missile. invoking Washington's current
public enemy number - Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - one is
equally transparent.
Such transparency is admirable,
since it underlines the fact that what Lebanon is suffering at present
is not so much an act of war as an effort to enforce US foreign policy
by proxy.
For all the destruction that
has been rained down on the major infrastructure, the strikes - at least
the strikes that haven't targeted Hizbollah supporters - are remarkable
for their relative reserve.
A case in point is the sparkling
new bridge just east of Beirut - former prime minister Rafiq Hariri's
contribution to expediting the drive from Beirut to the Syrian capital
Damascus - which has been disabled [a couple of holes got punched in
it] but it hasn't been brought down the way that it might have been.
The Israelis are reining
themselves in because they don't want to destroy this country, they
just want to help Washington and Lebanon's 14 March government disarm
Hizbollah. UN Security Council resolution 1559 was the appropriate means
to send Syria's occupying army packing, but it's too blunt an instrument
to disarm a homegrown force like Hizbollah. The Hiwar al-Watani - the
14 March government's efforts to tame Hizbollah through negotiation
- simply verifies how ineffectual the instrument is.
The prevailing discourse
amongst approximately half of Lebanon's population is that Hizbollah
is responsible for this attack, so it's pretty clear that the object
of this siege is to further alienate Lebanese from Hizbollah.
The slow strangulation of
Beirut - as the power plants run out of fuel and houses go dark, as
the shops shut for want of goods - is Israel's way of arousing domestic
hostility against Hizbollah, in embedding Israeli-US policy interests
within the Lebanese public.
“The resistance”,
as Hizbollah terms itself, has done a grave disservice to the well being
of the people of this country by launching this attack at this time.
The resistance, however, is a legitimate expression of the frustrations
of the most marginalised segment of Lebanese society - which happens
to be Shia Muslim.
Hizbollah may instrumentalise
the alienation of their constituency, but it speaks to their frustrated
hopes and prevailing fears more utterly than the neo-liberal vision
proposed by this government.
The plaintive cries from
the hoteliers of Beirut that Hizbollah has destroyed what was shaping
up to be a bumper tourism season has utterly no resonance among the
poor of Beirut's southern suburbs.
Washington, that self-proclaimed
doyen of democratic change in the Middle East, has allowed - perhaps
requested - that Israel punish Hizbollah's supporters for choosing to
support the resistance. It precisely replicates the manner in which
Washington and Tel Aviv are punishing the Palestinians for voting for
Hamas in the last Palestinian elections.
It is punishing the rest
of Lebanon to expedite efforts to neuter the resistance. This business
has nothing to do with two Israeli prisoners of war held by Hizbollah.