A story that shows the depravity of Hezbullah, the complicity of Lebanese “civilians,” and why civilians are dying in Hezbullahland.
TYRE, Lebanon – When Dr. Fouad Fatah emerged bleary-eyed from the ruins of his hospital during a pause in Israeli air strikes last week, it felt like the first time in forever.
He counted himself as the last living soul in the five-room clinic, the only hospital serving this devastated swath of Lebanon’s south. His surviving patients had already been evacuated.
The surgeon led a group of journalists over what remained: mangled debris, shredded walls and a roof punched through by an Israeli shell.
“Look what they did to this place,” Dr. Fatah said, shaking his head. “Why in the world would the Israelis target a hospital?”
The probable answer was found a few hours later in a field nearby. Hidden in the tall grass were the burned remnants of a rocket-launcher.
Confronted with the evidence, Dr. Fatah admitted his hospital could have been used as a site from which to fire rockets into Israel.
“What choice to we have? We need to fight back from somewhere,” he said, tapping his foot on the ground.
“This is Hezbollah’s heartland.”
[…] Military experts say that over the past five years, Hezbollah fighters have steadily stockpiled weapons funnelled from Iran and Syria. They buried rockets in tunnels, houses and, according to Israeli officials, in hospitals.
Many of those civilians are complicit in hiding and supplying the rocket launchers.
“We’ve been preparing ourselves for this fight for the last five years. We can fight this for much longer,” said Abu Ismail, a local Hezbollah leader near the village of Bint Jbeil who uses a nom de guerre, like most of his fellow fighters.
Residents of the cluster of villages closest to the Israeli border, Hezbollah’s most loyal supporters, helped stow the weapons away.
I think when civilians are hiding weapons used to bomb Israel, they are no longer called civilians. The new term would be collaborators, or combatants.
But not all Lebanese civilians are happy for Hezbullah.
During a pitched battle in his village of Bint Jbeil last Thursday, the 48-year-old dentist watched from his kitchen window as Hezbollah fighters dragged a rocket launcher across the torn street in front of his house.
A few minutes later, he heard four successive blasts. Kareem barely managed to cover his four-year-old son’s ears before the rockets were fired. His own ears are still ringing.
“Five minutes after they fired the rockets, the Israelis started bombing,” he recalled from the safety of a shelter in Beirut.
“They are making us magnets for the Israelis,” he said.
You won’t see this in the wire services. But the Red Cross is finding proof of rocket launchers in civilian areas. The Red Cross. I doubt they’re reporting it to HRW or the UN.
Anger boiled over last week when a shelter in Qana was hit, killing 29 people, most of them children.
“What have they done to deserve this? Is this a military target?” wept Mohamad Chaloub, clutching the lifeless body of his daughter.
Local officials said there were no weapons or rockets in the house where the children slept in Qana, no warning before the bomb fell.
But the next day, the same Lebanese Red Cross team that dug out the children’s bodies stumbled across the shreds of more rocket launchers in a village nearby.
One was found deep inside a fruit orchard. Another was found wedged between two houses.
It’s funny how Reuters and the AP can’t find evidence of rocket launchers the way that Sonia Verma of the National Post can. UNIFIL can’t find them either, it seems. Wait, sorry, I forgot—UNIFIL’s mission is simply to observe that neither side violates the peace.
Will Human Rights Watch have these items in its reports on Lebanon? Who knows?
But it is obvious that this story will remain the most underreported of the war—because the media are not interested in the whole story. Only the side that makes Israel look evil.