Warriors of God (28 page)

“Without violating this understanding, nothing herein shall preclude
any party from exercising their right to self-defense,” the memorandum said.

The understanding came into effect at 4:00
A.M.
on April 27.

The “April Understanding,” as it came to be known, additionally established a monitoring group consisting of delegates from Lebanon, Syria, France, Israel, and the United States to watch for any breaches. The group agreed that the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura would serve as the venue for their meetings. The American and French delegates would alternately chair the group, rotating every six months.

Peres had launched the Grapes of Wrath campaign in part to add muscle to his security credentials, always his weak point, in order to help maintain his slim lead in the polls during the closely fought electoral battle with Netanyahu. But it was to no avail. Four weeks after the operation ended, Peres narrowly lost the election to his Likud opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the peace process between Israel and Syria went into deep freeze for the next three years.

The Grapes of Wrath operation was a military, political, and diplomatic failure for Israel. The disproportionate use of military firepower, culminating in the Qana slaughter, further blackened Israel's reputation internationally and embarrassed the United States, which had to intervene diplomatically to extricate its ally from a mess of Israel's own making. Despite Israel's wielding some of the most powerful and sophisticated weapons of war then available, only fourteen Hezbollah fighters were killed during the sixteen-day offensive, and the damage inflicted upon Hezbollah's military infrastructure—mainly the bombing of offices in the south and in southern Beirut—was negligible. Nawaf Mussawi, a member of Hezbollah's political council, said that the Israeli campaign had inflicted not “a scratch” on the group's capabilities.
⁸

Israel was also unable to halt Hezbollah's daily barrage of Katyusha rockets. Fighter-bombers, UAVs, precision-guided missiles, and radar-directed artillery had shown their limitations against the mobile Hezbollah teams firing simple 122 mm Katyusha rockets from the hilly terrain of south Lebanon.

Grapes of Wrath was the last major military operation waged by Israel
during the occupation of south Lebanon to try to alter the status quo on the ground in its favor. After sixteen days, it was evident that there was no realistic military solution for defeating Hezbollah, especially while Israel remained, in the eyes of the world, an illegal occupier of Lebanese territory. Neither Operation Grapes of Wrath nor Operation Accountability three years earlier had dented Hezbollah's resistance campaign nor turned the Lebanese population against the antioccupation struggle. On the contrary, Hezbollah emerged from the Grapes of Wrath campaign at the peak of its popularity, having won the consensus of the Lebanese to continue its resistance against the Israeli occupation. Syria had no intention of reining in Hezbollah, and the Lebanese government was in no position to object.

The April Understanding itself changed little on the ground. Indeed, far from curbing Hezbollah's resistance attacks and disarming the party, as the Americans and Israelis had originally intended, the Understanding enshrined for the first time Hezbollah's status as a resistance organization. How could anyone continue to describe Hezbollah's military operations against the Israelis in south Lebanon as acts of “terrorism” when the United States and Israel had tacitly recognized, in writing, Hezbollah's right to resist the occupation?

Yet Grapes of Wrath was fundamentally a terrible human tragedy. More than 160 Lebanese civilians perished during those two dreadful weeks. And for those survivors of the Qana massacre who lost entire families to Israel's artillery shells, their experiences had scarred them physically and mentally for the rest of their lives.

Fatmeh Balhas's husband, brother, and three children, including baby Mohammed, were cut to pieces as they sat around her on the floor of the Fijian officers' mess. Shortly before the first anniversary of the massacre, she recounted her ordeal to me while flicking through a photo album containing dog-eared pictures of her dead family. Some of the pictures showed her baby sons, Hussein and Hassan, playing in the
courtyard of her home. But there were no photographs of seventeen-day-old Mohammed.

Mounira Taqi, whose husband was almost decapitated by shrapnel as he stood beside her in the officers' mess, devoted most of her time caring for her daughter, Lina, who was six years old in 1996. Mounira had initially believed Lina died in the shelling. It was only five days later that the little girl was discovered by family friends in a hospital. Although alive, she had suffered brain damage from her head wounds and was partially paralyzed and unable to talk. It took several years of therapy before Lina was able to speak clearly again.

Hameeda Deeb lost a leg and an arm when shrapnel slashed through the conference room of the Fijian battalion headquarters. She lost nine members of her family. A year later, she was still struggling to learn to use crutches and artificial limbs. A bleak future lay ahead of her. Unmarried and childless, she had resigned herself to living the rest of her days with relatives and admitted that life held little value for her. “I look outside and see the spring flowers and remember that the last time I saw them my family were all here and alive,” she says. “It feels horrible to still be alive now. But it is God's will.”

Saadallah Balhas, a stocky man with a ruddy weather-beaten face framed by a shock of thick white hair and a white beard, lost his wife and nine children at Qana, from thirty-year-old Ghaleb to four-month-old Hassan. In all, thirty-two members of his extended family perished. The blast that killed his children also claimed his right eye. He plugged the empty socket with a glass substitute that gave him a permanent countenance of forlorn melancholy. Saadallah wore a pendant around his neck containing tiny photographs of his dead family. Hassan was represented by a bird, as there were no portrait photographs of the baby.

The first anniversary of the massacre in 1997 was marked with speeches, martial processions, brass bands, and the usual pomp and ceremony, ending, perhaps inevitably, in a fistfight between rival Hezbollah and Amal partisans outside the entrance to the cemetery.

Yet with each passing year, the massacre was slowly forgotten, the tributes and commemorations dwindling in size, until just a few survivors made the annual pilgrimage to the cemetery beside the abandoned
buildings of the former Fijian battalion headquarters to pay their respects to their loved ones.

The cemetery itself fell into a pitiful, shameful state of disrepair. The long rows of marble-topped tombs were chipped and cracked, weeds grew between the tiles on the ground, cinder blocks and building materials lay scattered untidily around the site. The officers' mess, where more than half the victims died, lies a few yards from the cemetery. It was left untouched, probably more from indifference than design, and it is still possible to see the rusting tin cans from which some of the victims would have eaten their last meal minutes before the bombardment began.

I last saw Saadallah in April 2006, shortly before the tenth anniversary of the massacre. He was planting tobacco seedlings in the stony soil of a hilltop field. The noon sun was merciless, and Saadallah wiped his wrinkled brow with a thick, calloused hand. He looked frail and tired, his stockiness had gone, and he appeared a decade older than his sixty-six years. “My sons tried to marry me off again, but I refused,” he says. “No one can replace my wife, my partner in life.”

Saadallah lived through the July 2006 war—and yet another massacre in Qana—only to die in June 2008. A black banner was slung across the road outside his home in Siddiqine, paying tribute to the “living martyr.” In accordance with his dying wishes, Saadallah was interred alongside his family in the Qana cemetery.

Today, beside the cemetery is a building that was supposed to be a museum, built with Syrian funds and opened in 2000. It is locked most of the time, not that there was much to see inside. The few exhibits consist of a handful of posters and gruesome photographs of the carnage wrought by the Israeli artillery shells.

But more haunting than all the images of butchered and burned corpses is one particular snapshot taken a few minutes before Israel unleashed its seventeen-minute bombardment. Men, women, and children were caught by the photographer chatting and laughing together, sitting on the floor of the Fijian officers' mess, unaware that they had but a few minutes left to live. And there, to one side of the picture, is Saadallah Balhas, a smile playing on his grizzled face as he hugs his infant son, Hassan, for what must have been the last time.

After a brief lull following the end of Grapes of Wrath, Hezbollah resumed military operations with an evident determination to demonstrate that it had not been cowed by Israel's offensive nor by the April Understanding. On May 9, two SLA militiamen were wounded by a roadside bomb explosion, the first attack since the understanding took effect. On May 30, as Israel was absorbing Netanyahu's electoral victory, Hezbollah detonated two roadside bombs against a convoy of Israeli jeeps in Marjayoun, killing four soldiers and wounding another three.

Just ten days later, Hezbollah fighters ambushed a squad of Israeli soldiers returning from a night patrol. Five soldiers were killed and another six were wounded.

In the weeks after Grapes of Wrath, planeloads of fresh arms were flown into Damascus airport from Tehran and then trucked across the border into Lebanon to replenish Hezbollah's arsenal. In August, Israeli officials claimed that Hezbollah had amassed a stockpile of a thousand Katyusha rockets, including about thirty of the larger 240 mm variety, capable of reaching Haifa, Israel's third-largest city.

Trying to ascertain exactly what weapons Hezbollah possessed was a permanent preoccupation of observers and journalists watching the war in south Lebanon. Hezbollah characteristically—if frustratingly—adopted a noncommittal policy, preferring to keep their Israeli foe guessing.

I had many interviews over the years with Sheikh Nabil Qawq, Hezbollah's southern commander, a tall, soft-spoken cleric whose amiability and strong sense of humor were at odds with his public image as a hard-liner. Qawq grew to tolerate my repeated questioning of Hezbollah's military assets, giving me a sympathetic smile every time I asked him to confirm whether the party had acquired this or that missile before declining to discuss the issue.

“It is true that if the enemy knows the size or effectiveness of your armaments it can create fear,” he once explained to me. “But ignorance creates more fear. The enemy is always living with this uncertainty as to the strength of Hezbollah and we do not mind at all that they are uneasy about this.”

The annual Israeli casualty toll continued to climb. In 1996, twenty-seven soldiers were killed, the highest toll in a single year since 1985, when the border zone was created.

On February 4, 1997, seventy-three Israeli soldiers died when two CH-53 troop transport helicopters collided over northern Galilee while en route to south Lebanon. It was Israel's worst aerial disaster and provoked more anguish about what to do with Israel's “little Vietnam” in south Lebanon.

“Lebanon pursues us like a curse,” wrote Israeli commentator Yoel Marcus in
Haaretz
. “Lebanon has become Moloch [the Canaanite idol to whom children were sacrificed as burnt offerings], claiming casualties systematically and cruelly.”

Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah leaders were attending a Ramadan fast-breaking
iftar
meal in Nabatiyah in south Lebanon, raising speculation that the helicopters were carrying special forces troops to kill or capture the Hezbollah leader. Hezbollah said that “divine intervention” had spared the Lebanese many casualties.

Despite the huge loss of lives, Israeli military officials said that ferrying soldiers to south Lebanon by helicopter still remained the safest means of transport. “There is no other way,” an Israeli officer said bleakly. “The alternative [by ground] is worse and more dangerous.”
⁹

The helicopter disaster spurred the mothers of four soldiers who died in the accident to create a new movement calling for a withdrawal from south Lebanon. The “Four Mothers” group would play an increasingly vocal role in the months ahead as the domestic debate about Israel's involvement in Lebanon deepened.

Aggressive use of the special forces suited the temperament of the Israeli commanders then overseeing Lebanon operations as well as of Prime Minister Netanyahu, himself a former member of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit. Before 1996, Israeli commando raids north of the zone were relatively rare. One exception occurred on May 21, 1994, when helicopter-borne commandos stormed the Bekaa Valley home of Mustafa Dirani, the leader of the Believers' Resistance and former top security chief of Amal. Dirani was kidnapped by the Israeli troops and flown to Israel for questioning over the fate of Ron Arad, the missing Israeli
aviator who at one time was in his care. Along with Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid, who had been languishing in an Israeli jail since 1989, Dirani became the most celebrated Lebanese detainee held by Israel.

The presence of highly trained and motivated Egoz commandos and other Israeli special forces units staking out infiltration trails on the edges of the border strip hampered Hezbollah's ability to penetrate the zone and plant roadside bombs. In the first half of 1997, Hezbollah gradually fell back and resorted to long-range shelling of Israeli and SLA outposts. While the rate of attacks increased in the first six months of the year, the number of close-quarter operations dwindled.

Encouraged by the successes, Israeli commando units began infiltrating even farther into Lebanon to hit Hezbollah militants in their home villages, areas generally considered safe.