Quana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook, Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds-the shells exploded in the air-and now today I am heading south to look at the latest Qana massacre.<\/p>\n
Fifty nine dead? Thirty seven? Twenty eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago Hizbollah were \u2018hiding\u2019 in the UN compound. Untrue. Now we are supposed to believe that the dead of Quana- today\u2019s slaughter- were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie-because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children\u2019s corpses into plastic bags-the I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.<\/p>\n
But the roads, my God, the roads of Southern Lebanon. Windows open, listen for the howl of jets. I am astonished that only one journalist-a young Lebanese woman-has died so far. I watch the little silver fish as they filter through the sky.<\/p>\n
On my way back to Beirut, I find the traffic snarled up by a bomb smashed bridge, where the Lebanese army is trying to tow a vegetable-laden truck out of a river. I go down to them and slosh through the water to tell the army sergeant that he is out of his mind. He\u2019s got almost 50 civilian cars backed up in a queue, just waiting for another Israeli air attack. Leave the lorry till later, I tell him.<\/p>\n
Other soldiers arrive and there is a ten-minute debate about the wisdom of my advice, while I am watching the sky and pointing out a diving Israeli F16, then the sergeant decides that Fisk is not as stupid as he looks, cuts the tow rope and lets the traffic through.. I am caked in dust, and Katya Jahjoura, a Lebanese photographer colleague, catches sight of me and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. \u201dYou look as if you have been living in rubble!\u201d she cries, and I shoot her a desperate look. Better get out of this place, in case we get turned into rubble, I reply.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Benjamin Netanyahu tries another lie, an old one reheated from 1982, when Menachem Begin used to claim that the civilian casualties o Israel\u2019s air raids were no different from the civilians killed in Denmark in an RAF raid in the Second World War. Ho hum, nice try Benjamin, but not good enough.<\/p>\n First, the story. RAF aircraft staged an air raid on the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, but massacred more than 80 children when their bombs went astray. The Israelis are slaughtering the innocent of southern Lebanon from high altitude-high enough to avoid Hizbollah missiles. The reason the RAF killed 83 children, 23 nuns and 3 firemen on the 21st of March1945 was that their Mosquitoes were flying so low to avoid civilian casualties that one of the British aircraft clipped it\u2019s wing on a railroad tower outside Copenhagen central station, and crashed into the school. The other aircraft assumed the smoke from the high-octane fuel was the target.<\/p>\n Interesting though, the way Israel\u2019s leaders are ready to manipulate the history of the Second World War. No Israeli aircraft has been lost over Lebanon in this war and the civilians of Lebanon are dying by the score, repeatedly and bombed from a great height.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Electricity off , my fridge flooded over the floor again, my landlord Mustafa at the door with a plastic plate of figs from his front garden. The papers are getting thinner. However, Paul\u2019s restaurant has reopened in east Beirut where I lunch with Marwan Iskander, one of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri\u2019s senior financial advisers.<\/p>\n Marwan and his wife Mona are a source of joy, full of jokes and outrageous (and accurate) comments about the politicians of the Middle East. I pay for the meal, and Marwan produces-as I knew he would-a huge Cuban cigar for me. I gave up smoking years ago. But I think the war allows me to smoke again, just a little.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Huge explosion in the southern suburbs of Beirut shake the walls of my home. A cauldron of fire ascends into the sky. What is there left to destroy in the slums Which scribes still call a \u201cHizbollah stronghold\u201d?<\/p>\n The Israelis are now bombing all roads leading to Syria, especially at the border crossing at Masna (very clever, as if Hizbollah is bringing it\u2019s missiles into Lebanon in convoys on the international highway). Then the guerrilla army, which started this whole bloody fiasco, fires off dozens more rockets into Israel.<\/p>\n I put my nose into the suburbs and get a call from a colleague in south Lebanon who describes the village of Srifa \u201clike Dresden\u201d. World War Two again. But the suburbs do look like a scene from that conflict. My grocer laments that he has no milk, no yoghurt, which-as a milkaholic myself, I lament.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n More friends wanting to know if it\u2019s safe to return to Lebanon. An old acquaintance tells me that when she insisted on coming back to Beirut, a relative threw a shoe and a book at her. What was the book, I asked? A volume of poetry it seems.<\/p>\n Electricity back, and I torture myself by watching CNN, which is reporting this slaughterhouse as if it is a football match. Score so far: a few dozen Israelis, hundreds of Lebanese, thousands of missiles, and even more thousands of Israeli bombs. The missiles come from Iran- as CNN reminds us. The Israeli bombs come from the United States- as CNN, 4th does not remind us.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The day of the bridges. Abed and I are up on the highway north of Beirut with Ed Cody of The Washington Post (he who reads Verlaine) and we managed to drive on side roads through the Christian Metn district, which has inexplicably been attacked (since the Christian Maronites of Lebanon are supposed to be Israel\u2019s best friends here).\u201dYou cannot believe how angry we are,\u201d a woman says to me, surveying her smashed car and smashed home and shattered windows and rubble all over the road, A viaduct has fallen into a valley, all 200 metres of it, though another side road is left completely undamaged, and we cruise along it to the next destroyed bridge. So what was the point of bombing the bridges?<\/p>\n We drive back to Beirut on empty roads, windows open and the whisper of jets still in the sky. I go to the Associated Press office, where my old mate Samir Ghattas is the bureau chief. \u201cSo how where the bridges?\u201d he asks. \u201cI guess you were driving fast.\u201d He can say that again.<\/p>\n I do an interview with CBC in Toronto and talk openly of Israeli war crimes, and no one in the Canadian studio feels this is impolitic frightening or any of the other usual fears of television producers, who think they will be faced with the usual slurs about \u201canti-Semitic\u201d reporters who dare to criticise Israel.<\/p>\n I turn on the television, and there is Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah\u2019s boss, threatening Israel with deeper missile penetrations if Israel bombs Beirut. I listen to Israel\u2019s Prime Minister saying much the same in reverse.<\/p>\n I call these people the \u201croarers\u201d, but I leaf through my tatty copy of King Lear to see what they remind me of. Bingo. \u201cI shall do such things I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth.\u201d Shakespeare should be reporting this war.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lots of stories about a massive Israeli ground offensive, which turn out to be untrue. The UN in southern Lebanon suspects that Israel is manufacturing non-existent raids to pacify public opinion as Hizbollah missiles continue to fly across the frontier. But a friend calls to tell me that Hizbollah might be running out of rockets, possibly true, I reflect, and think of all the bridges which haven\u2019t yet been blown to pieces.<\/p>\n More gruesome photographs of the dead in the Lebanese papers. We in the pure \u201cWest\u201d spare our readers these terrible pictures- we \u201crespect\u201d the dead too much to print them, though we didn\u2019t respect them very much when they were alive- and we forget the ferocious anger which Arabs feel when these images are placed in front of them. What are we storing up for ourselves? I wrote about another 9\/11 in the paper this morning. And I fear I\u2019m right. “Lest we forget”; the veteran Middle East correspondent chronicles the aftermath of a massacre<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Miscellaneous"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/news.independent.co.uk\/world\/fisk\/article1215967.ece<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"