Warriors of God (61 page)

“We are anxiously waiting for it. We are ready to do whatever we are asked to do,” Hajj Rabieh said. “Their [the Israelis] experience in Maroun er-Ras and Bint Jbeil show they paid a high price. They will be paying the same price in every town and village they try to invade. Now they are beginning to admit that they can't achieve their objective of destroying us.”

Abu Mohammed smiled and said, “Victory is coming, coming, coming.”

The Israelis were running out of targets. Each day, the jets returned over Lebanon, but by the end of the second week of fighting they were attacking targets that already had been pounded into dust during earlier strikes. The momentum was being lost. Ground forces were engaged in a series of limited incursions along the length of the border, but they were making little progress, and Hezbollah's rockets kept slamming into Israel.

By now it was dawning on the Bush administration that Israel was badly bungling the job of crushing Hezbollah. The IDF was supposed to be the most powerful military force in the Middle East. Had it not bulldozed its way to Beirut in just nine days in June 1982? Why was it struggling to crush a few hundred Hezbollah “terrorists” in south Lebanon?

When the war broke out on July 12, it had appeared an opportune moment to deliver a mortal blow to Hezbollah's military capabilities. With leading Lebanese figures in the March 14 parliamentary bloc quietly urging the Americans to finish off Hezbollah, no wonder Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, saw little urgency in heading to the Middle East to begin cease-fire talks. On July 21, the same day that the government hospital in Tyre was preparing to bury the decomposing victims of Israeli attacks packed inside the refrigerator truck, Rice glibly described the war in Lebanon as “the birth pangs of the new Middle East.”

Three days later, Rice flew to Beirut to begin assessing proposals for an end to the conflict, one that would ensure that Hezbollah could no longer threaten Israel or the Lebanese government. Fouad Siniora had drawn up a seven-point plan to end the fighting, which included recommendations for a beefed-up UNIFIL, the deployment of Lebanese troops up to the border with Israel, the restoration of the 1949 Armistice Agreement, and the transfer of the Shebaa Farms to UN custody.

Olmert categorically rejected handing the Shebaa Farms over to the UN, but the Israelis, Americans, and Siniora government were in tacit agreement that Hezbollah had to emerge from the war weakened.

On July 26, key Middle East actors and UN officials gathered in Rome to hammer out an agreement to end the war. But the meeting failed to reach consensus on a cease-fire proposal. Most countries attending, including those of the European Union and Russia as well as the UN, sought an immediate cease-fire before finding a lasting political settlement. But the United States insisted that a cessation of hostilities was inadequate—“We cannot,” Rice said, “return to the status quo ante.”

I woke slowly, tired, craving more sleep, and irritated at the beep of an incoming SMS on my mobile phone. For a moment, I stared stupidly at the message. It told me there had been a massacre in Qana with more than two dozen dead. Qana? Again? Surely not.

Yet the terse message was correct. Just over ten years since the slaughter of more than a hundred civilians in the UNIFIL Fijian battalion headquarters in Qana, violent death had visited this hill village once again. Two families, the Hashems and Shalhoubs, numbering around sixty people, were sheltering in the basement of a three-story home on the edge of Qana when it was struck in the early hours of July 30 by a precision-guided bomb. Five minutes later, the other side of the home was hit by a second bomb. Twenty-seven people died, sixteen of them under the age of twenty.

It was with a sobering sense of déjà vu and a hollow, sick feeling in my stomach that I drove along the winding road from Tyre to Qana. Had I not taken this same route ten years earlier, back then a novice war reporter, mentally preparing myself to see bodies torn apart by artillery shells? That I could be repeating this same trip a decade later seemed inconceivable, yet also oddly typical of the callous coincidences one finds in war and of the bitter twists of fate that seem to blight south Lebanon with merciless regularity.

The Hashem home lay among a cluster of buildings at the end of a road on the edge of a small steep valley filled with olive trees and patches of tobacco. The house, a typical Lebanese construction of reinforced concrete frame and cinder block walls, leaned at a drunken angle, threatening to topple at any moment. Civil defense workers gingerly stooped beneath a collapsed floor to access the bowels of the home where the dead lay. The bomb had buried itself deep underground before exploding. The blast had lifted a huge pile of dirt that had smothered the sleeping families in the basement. It was soon apparent that most of the victims were children.

The bodies emerged into daylight one by one, all gray-skinned with dust, one small boy's mouth stuffed with dirt, a stiff arm pointing accusingly at the sky. Wasps and flies buzzed with greedy excitement around his face and blood-sodden hair. “It's Ali Shalhoub,” whispered an onlooker as the child was placed on a stretcher and carried away.

The 1996 Qana massacre was a Goyaesque spectacle of visceral horror, of dismembered and carbonized bodies and the reek of freshly
spilled blood. But the victims of this second Qana massacre looked almost as though they could still be sleeping, as each limp body was carried in the arms of the rescue workers from the house. The dead were coated in dust, some with their mouths, ears, and noses clogged with dirt; yet few showed any signs of physical injury.

“They suffocated under the dirt,” muttered Sami Yazbek, Tyre's Red Cross chief.

Most of the residents of Qana had escaped the village earlier in the war, but the Hashem and Shalhoub families had been trapped in their homes. “We couldn't get out of our neighborhood because there are only two roads leading out and the Israelis bombed them both several days ago,” said Mohammed Shalhoub, a disabled forty-one-year-old who was recovering in a hospital in Tyre. As he was unable to walk, his wife, Rabab, had hauled him from beneath the rubble and dirt and had also rescued their son, Hassan, four. But their six-year-old daughter, Zeinab, had died.

Mohammed's mobile phone rang continually as friends and family asked after him and his relatives. One woman, her voice tinny but audible over the phone's speaker, introduced herself to Mohammed as a friend of Tayseer.

“I am his brother,” Mohammed told her.

“How is he?” she asked.

“May God have mercy on him,” Mohammed replied gently. The woman began to sob. “No, no!”

Another phone call, and Shalhoub reeled off a list of names of people who died or survived. “Najwa was injured, Zeinab was martyred,” he said. On mentioning his daughter's name, he choked and began weeping. A woman placed a comforting arm across his shoulder.

In a neighboring bed, Noor Hashem, thirteen, told us in a shy, trembling voice that her mother had pulled her free of the rubble along with her older sister and taken them to a neighboring house. Her mother returned to the bombed house to look for Noor's three brothers. “They haven't come to the hospital yet, and my mother hasn't returned,” she said, and began crying.

Her three brothers were among the dead, the youngest only nine months old, but no one at the hospital had the heart to break the news to Noor.

This latest massacre in Qana marked a turning point in the war, just as the slaughter at the Fijian headquarters ten years earlier had changed the direction of Grapes of Wrath. U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve a favorable cease-fire were left in tatters as international opinion began to weigh against Israel. Even Fouad Siniora, responding to the angry mood in Lebanon, snubbed Rice, forcing her to cancel a scheduled return trip to Beirut, just as Hafez al-Assad a decade earlier had refused to meet then secretary of state Warren Christopher during the Grapes of Wrath campaign. Yielding to U.S. pressure, Ehud Olmert agreed to a 48-hour halt in air operations.

The cease-fire provided an opportunity for reporters to visit the front lines where the main fighting had taken place. I knew Bint Jbeil had been bombed heavily during the fighting, but the level of destruction inflicted upon the center of the town was astonishing. The main street, where the weekly market was held, was gone, submerged beneath a carpet of rubble, chunks of concrete, asphalt, and stone, and pitted with pond-sized bomb craters. One unexploded bomb with Hebrew markings sat ominously in the middle of the street. Broken medicine bottles, pills, and diapers were scattered over the debris beside a gutted pharmacy. Several buildings had caught fire, and the smell of stale smoke and explosives hung heavy in the still air. Dozens of cars had been crushed by collapsing buildings. Almost all the small traditional stone houses of the old quarter were damaged or had collapsed into sad piles of stone and timber. Cheap plastic furniture, pictures, books, toys, clothing—the mundane detritus of people's lives—were strewn across the rubble, coated in the ubiquitous gray dust.

Slowly, frail elderly men and women emerged, wraithlike, from the bombed buildings, blinking in the sunlight, stumbling over the rubble and gazing in confusion at what had become of their town.

Mohammed Bazzi, a white-haired and wizened seventy-year-old, said he and his sister, Mariam, had been trapped since the beginning of the war in the basement of their building after it was bombed. They had
survived on instant coffee, powdered milk, and water. “It has been a nightmare,” he said.

Mariam was too frail to walk or even speak. Reporters briefly set aside notebooks and cameras to carry the seventy-six-year-old woman across the rubble in a wool blanket. Her long white hair fluffed around her face as she sipped from a bottle of water.

By the end of July, the IDF had begun calling up some fifteen thousand reservists to help the floundering regular forces. Once the cease-fire was over on August 2, the IDF dispatched larger numbers of troops into Lebanon in an attempt to seize the territory that comprised the old occupation zone. By August 5, there were around ten thousand IDF soldiers operating inside Lebanon. But progress was slow and hesitant. The reservists were ill-trained and poorly equipped, were often reluctant to fight, and suffered a shortage of basic supplies in the field such as food, water, and ammunition because of a badly coordinated logistics chain. Most reservists had spent the previous six years policing the West Bank and Gaza, where the enemy consisted of undisciplined street fighters, suicide bombers, and stone-throwing children. They were not trained for fighting Hezbollah. In fact, only a handful of elite soldiers, such as those belonging to the Egoz commando unit or the Paratroop Reconnaissance Battalion, had ever fought Hezbollah at close range in south Lebanon. Most IDF soldiers in the 1990s had pulled garrison duty in the hilltop compounds, dodging mortar shells and trying to avoid IEDs on foot patrols. Not only were the reservist units ill-prepared to wage a more conventional conflict, the enemy they faced in Lebanon in 2006 was qualitatively different from the guerrillas the IDF had confronted six years earlier. No wonder some soldiers were reluctant to tangle with the missile-wielding Hezbollah men lurking in the villages and valleys ahead of them. The commander of a battalion marching on Aitta Shaab ordered a “tactical retreat” after suffering just one casualty. A reservist engineering officer point-blank refused orders to clear a road into Bint
Jbeil, protesting that “ten soldiers had already been killed there.” The brigade commander had the entire platoon arrested and jailed.
⁴

The poor quality of the troops and the lack or morale did not go unnoticed. “Israeli troops looked unprepared, sloppy, and demoralized,” one former senior U.S. commander noted. “This wasn't the vaunted IDF that we saw in previous wars.”
⁵

When I joined a UNIFIL relief convoy on August 5 to Dibil, the Christian village where the late SLA commander Aql Hashem lived, not a single Israeli soldier could be seen, even though we were traveling behind the IDF's lines. But there was ample evidence of their passing from the churned earth of tank tracks meandering through small fields of green tobacco on valley floors. There was evidence, too, of fierce fighting in the neighborhood. A burned-out Merkava tank lay on the side of the road a mile west of Aitta Shaab, its sleek lines blackened and blistered, a victim of Hezbollah's antitank missiles. The twin machine guns mounted on the turret were still in place. Beside the tank were broken stretchers and a green canvas military sack stuffed with food and covered in dried blood.

Shelling and air strikes continued uninterrupted, punctuated by the sharp report of outgoing rounds from border gun emplacements and the metallic crack of exploding shells on the hillsides. The barrages had turned swaths of the normally green hillsides around Dibil into black wastelands of carbonized bushes and scorched rock.

Unlike their Shia neighbors, many villagers in Dibil had opted to remain in their homes, a risky decision rooted in a belief that their Christian village would be spared the worst of the onslaught directed against Hezbollah. Most of the villagers had gathered in the center of the village, instinctively drawing closer to the stone church with its bright red-tiled roof. They had run out of flour, milk, and fuel for the cars. There was no electricity, the landline telephone was down, and the cellular network was jammed. “All we can do is pray,” said Father Yussef Nadaf, the village priest, with a hopeless shrug. He looked exhausted, and his dog collar hung loosely from his black shirt.

The artillery shells were howling over our heads and exploding in a nearby valley when we reached Jibbayn, a Sunni-populated border village
just west of Dibil. The sharp report of each round fired from an emplacement just over the border felt like a physical slap in the face. There were only a few panic-stricken elderly people remaining in the village. They flocked around the UNIFIL armored personnel carriers begging for rescue.