I’ve become curious about the various attempts to spin the Israeli attack on Qana which occurred shortly after midnight on July 30. So I conducted a LEXIS/NEXIS search, which yielded 279 hits (some of them duplicates), and then looked for accounts by journalists who actually visited Qana. Excerpts from these reports are given below, arranged in reverse chronogical order. They disagree a bit as to the exact number of dead, but none lend plausibility to the IDF’s speculation — eagerly seized upon in some quarters — that the building was damaged but did not collapse for another eight hours.
The great majority of articles turned up by the LEXIS/NEXIS search were either op/ed pieces, defending or condemning the Israeli strike; or speculations as to what the attack would mean from a political and diplomatic standpoint.
Robert Fisk, Slaughter in Qana, The Independent Online, August 6.
Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were “hiding” in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana – today’s 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’s corpses into plastic bags – then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.
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Peter Wilson, Inside a Death House, The Australian, August 4, 2006
AS Fatima Hashim lay down beside her two sleeping daughters on a thin mattress, she did something many anxious young mothers do the world over.
She listened closely in the dark to make sure that her toddler, also called Fatima, 3 1/2, was breathing, then gently touched the warm chest of her 18-month-old baby, Rokaya, to find a heartbeat.
Yes, they were sleeping peacefully. She stretched out on her back beside Rokaya and tried to sleep. Outside she could hear occasional explosions from Israeli missiles but she was tired because it was 10pm, a couple of hours past her normal bedtime.
The three dozen children who were spread out on mattresses on the floor had almost all been asleep for two hours and the 30-odd adults among them were as tired as Fatima. Members of two extended families, they’d spent two weeks sheltering together in the basement of this house in a hilltop village in the middle of the conflict in southern Lebanon, and the strain had left everybody worn out.
When she did get to sleep, she rolled on to her left side, facing away from Rokaya.
Three hours later, at 1am, an Israeli missile brought the unfinished two-storey house down on top of them, turning their basement refuge into a smothering, bone-crushing trap. The two children Fatima and Rokaya choked to death, their mouths full of sand and dust, as their mother lay trapped beside them listening to them trying to breath.
The US-based rights watchdog Human Rights Watch puts the death toll at 28, including 16 children, and 13 missing under concrete and cinder blocks. Only eight in the house survived.
One of the striking features of the disaster was that the house was filled with women and children. The only men were elderly or disabled. Fatima says the other men were sheltering together and talking in a nearby house, a normal separation for conservative Muslims. They were not involved in the guerilla campaign, she says.
Her sister-in-law, Mona, does not want to discuss the men at all, refusing even to give her husband’s name.
One Hezbollah militant had said in Qana a few hours earlier that “everybody here supports Hezbollah and Amal (an allied Shia group with its own militia). We all have one mind and one voice when it comes to Israel”.
Fatima says that when she went to bed, about 50 people were sleeping in one big room. “When we spread out the mattresses (they) covered the whole floor. It was hot with everybody in there so we wanted to have the door open for air. The children were worried about creepy-crawlies coming in, so we took turns to have somebody awake all night watching the door.”
When the missile brought down the house, Fatima woke up under rubble, coated in sand and heavy dust.
“I screamed Allah Akhbar (God is great) over and over,” she says. She was pinned down on her side, with her back facing the girls. The force of the blast had pushed Rokaya’s head up against hers and both girls were whimpering.
“I could hear Rokaya moaning in my ear. It was terrible because I could not turn around to reach them but at least I knew they were alive.” Her sister Zainab was the first to fight free of the rubble. “I was calling in the dark for help but there was no answer. I was calling again and again but nobody came. I didn’t know why but then I realised they were all dead.”
[Incidentally, the account makes clear that Fatima Hashim views Hezbollah as her protectors. She may have done so before the IDF attacks began; she certainly does now.]
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Rory McCarthy, Israel Accused of Whitewash, The Guardian, August 4.
An Israeli military investigation into the Qana bombing, which killed at least 28 people, yesterday found that the air force did not know there were civilians in the building and blamed Hizbullah for using “human shields.”
The air force would not have hit the building, which is close to the border in southern Lebanon, had it known there were civilians present, the military said.
Human rights groups have criticised Israeli targeting in the air campaign. Amnesty International described the investigation as “clearly inadequate” and a “whitewash”. In a report into Israeli air strikes on Lebanon, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said the Israelis had “systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians”.
The Lebanese government said at least 54 civilians sheltering in the basement of the building were killed in the bombing. Human Rights Watch said the latest evidence showed that 28 people, including 16 children, were confirmed dead and another 13 were still missing. Others may be buried under the rubble of the house, where rescue work has been halted.
The house was attacked at 00:52am on Sunday morning with two aerial missiles, acording to the Israeli military. One exploded, the second apparently did not detonate.
Qana had been the launching base of more than 150 rockets in the two weeks before the attack and civilians had been warned to leave the area, the military said.
“The Israeli Defence Forces operated according to information that the building was not inhabited by civilians and was being used as a hiding place for terrorists,” it said. “Had the information indicated civilians were present in the building the attack would not have been carried out.”
“The Hizbullah organisation places Lebanese civilians as a defensive shield between itself and us while the IDF places itself as a defensive shield between the citizens of Israel and Hizbullah’s terror. That is the principal difference between us,” the Israeli chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, wrote in the report.
Amnesty International called for an international fact-finding mission and said its interviews showed the civilians had been sheltering in the basement for two weeks before the raid. “Their presence must have been known to Israeli forces whose surveillance drones frequently flew over the village,” Amnesty said.
One Israeli air force base commander and F-16 pilot, named only as Colonel A, called the Qana bombing a “mistake” but defended the air campaign.
Pilots are given targets by air force headquarters, but they have the right to cancel a bombing mission while in the air if they see civilians nearby. “The question is whether the targets can be directly connected to an action against our civilians and soldiers,” said the colonel, who runs Hazor air force base. “What do you do if you see hundreds of rockets and they are against your family? For me, I hit the target. Once these civilians are letting people use their houses, they are involved.”
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Andrew Mills, A Trip Into Lebanon’s Destruction, Toronto Star, August 2, 2006
The Road Beyond Qana, Lebanon The sweaty Hezbollah guerrilla’s nervous eyes darted around as he shouted that we couldn’t go any further along the road from Qana.
It was clear he was anxiously waiting for something and it certainly wasn’t us.
“Halas, enough,” he insisted, as another fighter in a bombed-out wreck of a Volvo station wagon angrily screeched up the hill from the nearby village and around a corner, stopping and revving the engine. It wasn’t quite the end of the road of misery and death, but it was as far as Hezbollah would let us go, just 10 kilometres north of the Israel-Lebanon border. An unexploded Israeli shell sat on the pavement at the roadside.
Early Sunday morning, Israeli aircraft attacked a building down the road from here in the village of Qana. Members of two extended families, most of them women and children, had taken refuge there. They thought it was safe.
The Israeli attack killed more than 50 of them. It was the bloodiest attack of Israel’s 20-day offensive against Lebanon.
Israel says the civilian deaths are a mistake, but drive the 20 kilometres of winding road between Qana and Yater, deep into the heart of south Lebanon’s war zone, and it is clear there have been dozens of potential Qanas in the past few weeks.
None of the ancient villages along the route remains untouched. Israel has bombed and shelled dozens of sites: roads, shops, fields, houses. Dozens of people, including children, have been killed and injured along this route in the past 20 days.
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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘You go a bit crazy when you see little body after little body coming up out of the ground,’ Guardian, August 2
Three days ago, next to the gutted and destroyed house in Qana, seven bodies lay covered with bedsheets, a blanket and a prayer mat. One small arm stretched out from under the sheets; thin, the arm of a little girl, a piece of cloth like a bracelet wrapped around the wrist. As bodies were loaded on the stretcher, I saw another dead girl; she was dressed in a black shirt with a coloured scarf wrapped loosely around her head. Her face was swollen.
In some ways I was relieved. The rumour we had heard in the hotel in Tyre was that at least 40 people, half of them children, had been in the house in Qana when it was bombed by Israeli planes, and here I was an hour later, with Red Cross workers and others running up and down, and all I could see was the bodies of two girls and five adults.
It’s weird, the things that make you feel better in the south of Lebanon, but seven dead instead of 40 gave me a sense of relief.
But even as I stood there registering that emotion, hellish scenes were unfolding. Four medics carried a little boy by on an orange stretcher: he was perhaps 12 years old, dressed in black shorts and a white T-shirt with a coloured motorcycle on it. His arms were stretched behind his head, but apart from the bruises on his face and the swollen lips, he looked OK. For half a second I told myself, as I tell myself every time I see death, that he was just sleeping, and that he would be fine. But he was dead.
Then came two more boys in the arms of the rescuers. One of them, the younger, around eight years old, had his arms close to his chest, his nose and mouth covered with blood. The elder, around 10, had dirt and debris in his mouth. Their slight bodies were put on a blanket, the head of the younger boy left resting on the shoulder of the elder, then four men carried the blanket off, stopping twice to rest as they took them away. The bodies of the boys were piled with other corpses in the back of an ambulance.
Two more small dead boys followed them. The medics were running out of stretchers, so they piled the corpses of the boys on one orange stretcher. One of the kids was slightly chubby; he was wearing a red T-shirt and shorts. His head rested on the lap of the younger, who was about six years old; both had the same exploding lips, covered with blood and dirt. It was obvious to everyone that these boys were not sleeping.
Then another child was pulled from under the rubble, and another followed, and then another. You go a little crazy when you see little body after little body coming up out of the ground. I looked around me and all I could see in the house was the detritus of their short lives – big plastic bags filled with clothes, milk cans, plastic toys and a baby carriage.
By three in the afternoon, when the corpse of a one-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble, he looked more like a mud statue than a child. The medics held him high above their heads, clear of the rubble. The faces of the rescue workers said everything that needed to be said.
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Ferry Biederman, Two Families Buried Alive While They Slept, London Financial Times, July 30
Two extended families – more than 60 people in all – had taken refuge from the heavy two-day Israeli shelling of the area. Now the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, many of them children, were being pulled from under the rubble. All but a few who came out first were dead, their arms stiffened above their heads as if they had been protecting themselves. The bodies were coated in dust, their mouths and noses filled with gravel.
In all, say the Lebanese authorities, 56 people were killed in the Qana carnage yesterday, among them 37 children, a carnage that brought memories of the bloodbath in a UN base a decade ago, when Israeli shells had killed more than 100 people in Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” offensive, an earlier and unsuccessful campaign to root out Hizbollah guerrillas.
Yesterday’s killings underscored what UN officials have been saying in recent days – that the conflict was claiming an unnaturally large numbers of child victims on the Lebanese side. Overall, up to 542 Lebanese have been killed during Israel’s offensive, according to Lebanese officials, the vast majority of them civilians. On the Israeli side 51 people have been killed, the majority soldiers.
“We were asleep when it happened. I was thrown to the side and my leg got trapped under a wall,” says Mohammed Shalhoub, as he lies in the Tyre government hospital, where most of the wounded and the bodies were transported.
He points to his four-year-old son, Hassan, who lies two beds away from him. “He is the only one who is left.” He already knows that his daughter and his sister are dead.
Mr Shalhoub, whose leg is broken, explains why he and his family had not left the village in the line of fire. “In the beginning it was not too bad and we felt safe,” he says. “Then they started bombing the roads around us and we did not feel it was safe to leave.”
UN officials and aid workers in Beirut yesterday stressed that Israel’s continuing bombardment of the south and refusal to allow a pause in its offensive, meant many more people were trapped in the conflict area.
The road between Qana and Tyre, the coastal town that is a regional hub, is eerily empty and so are the villages around it. The wrecked scooters by the side of the road serve as a stark warning that all transport may be targeted.
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Sabrina Tavernise, A Night of Death and Terror for Lebanese Villagers, New York Times, July 31.
The Israeli government apologized for that airstrike, as it did for the one here on Sunday. It said that residents had been warned to leave and should have already been gone.
But leaving southern Lebanon now is dangerous. The two extended families staying in the house that the Israeli missile struck — the Shalhoubs and the Hashims — had discussed leaving several times over the past two weeks. But they were poor — most worked in tobacco or construction — and the families were big and many of their members weak, with a 95-year-old, two relatives in wheelchairs and dozens of children. A taxi north, around $1,000, was unaffordable.
And then there was the risk of the road itself.
Dozens, including 21 refugees in the back of a pickup truck on July 15, have been killed by Israeli strikes while trying to evacuate. Missiles hit two Red Cross ambulances last weekend, wounding six people and punching a circle in the center of the cross on one’s roof. A rocket hit the ambulance convoy that responded in Qana on Sunday.
“We heard on the news they were bombing the Red Cross,” said Zaineb Shalhoub, a 22-year-old who survived the bombing. She was lying quietly in a hospital bed in Tyre.
“What can we do with all of our kids?” she asked. “There was just no way to go.”
They had moved to the house on the edge of a high ridge, which was dug into the earth. They thought it would be safer. The position helped muffle the sound of the bombs.
But its most valuable asset was water. The town, mostly abandoned, had not had power or running water in many days. A neighbor rigged a pumping system, and the Shalhoubs and Hashims ran a pipe from that house to theirs.
Life had taken on a strange, stunted quality. In a crawl-space basement area near the crushed house, five mattresses were on the floor. A Koran was open to a prayer. A school notebook was on a pillow. Each morning, the women made breakfast for the children. Ms. Shalhoub gave lessons. And they all hoped for rescue.
The first missile struck around 1 a.m., throwing Mohamed Shalhoub, one of the relatives who uses a wheelchair, into an open doorway. His five children, ages 12 to 2, were still inside the house, as was his wife, his mother and a 10-year-old nephew. He tried to get to them, but minutes later another missile hit. By morning, when the rescue workers arrived, all eight of his relatives were dead.
“I felt like I was turning around, and the earth was going up and I was going into the earth,” said Mr. Shalhoub, 38, staring blankly ahead in a hospital bed in Tyre.
Israeli military officials said the building did not collapse until the early morning, and that “munitions” stored in the house might have brought it down. But the house appeared to have been hit from above, and residents said the walls and ceiling came down around them immediately after the first bomb.
“My mouth was full of sand,” Ms. Shalhoub said. She said doctors had told her family that those who died had been suffocated and crushed to death.
“They died because of the sand and the bricks, that’s what they told us,” she said.
