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للإتصال
بنا

Report 50

Israel's QANA MASSACRE
18 April 1996
Israel's QANA
MASSACRE 30 July 2006

MER
FLASHBACK:

MER WEEKEND
READING -
4/15/2000:

QANA REMEMBERED

MID-EAST
REALITIES - MiddleEast.Org - Washington -
4/15/2000:    It was only four years ago; but
already it has been mostly forgotten -- the terrible Qana
Massacre in southern Lebanon, and the atrocious
cover-up by Israel, the U.S. and the U.N.
that followed.

The Israelis now want to
"withdraw" from Lebanon; and as
they do they threaten and prepare for even more death and
devastation.

The Israelis now want to
abide by U.N. Resolution 425, after repeatedly violated it for
18 years.  Furthermore at the same time the
Israelis  continue to violate so many other U.N.
Resolutions including 242 passed some 33 years ago.

The Israelis now want to end their
occupation of Lebanon, but at the same time
they continue their occupation of Syria and are
putting the Palestinians on Army-surrounded Reservations
claiming it is a "peace process".

The
Israelis want everyone to simply forget what they have
done.  They want everyone to forget the invasions, the
bombings, the massacres, the assassinations, the occupations,
the apartheid-like policies, the millions of Palestinian
refugees.  They want everyone to forget their arrogant
defiance of international law and the U.N. for decades.
They want everyone to forget their still-growing arsenal of
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their loud
threats to devastate any and all who oppose their designs.

The Israelis now want everyone to forget the many tens of
thousands of deaths they are responsible for in
Lebanon, not to
mention the billions of dollars of property destruction and
the terrible suffering they have inflicted on so many.

And while the Israelis always demand that
what has happened to them be constantly remembered, that they
be substantially compensated, that major reparations be paid
to them, when the tables are turned the Israelis are
hypocritical in the extreme.

So remember
Qana too. Remember the terribly bloody details.  Remember
the historic coverup.  Remember the connivance of the
Americans.  And remember the cowardess and impotence of
the United Nations.

The following was
originally published by MER at the time of the second
anniversary of the Qana massacre.

QANA MASSACRE & COVER-UP:

NO ONE HELD
ACCOUNTABLE, NO COMPENSATION PAID

ANOTHER
TERRIBLE U.N. FAILURE

MER - Washington, 4/18/98
- Today, April 18th, marks the two-year
anniversary of one
of the most brutal and unforgivable massacres in
Middle
East History.

The name "Qana",
like those of "Sabra and Chatilla" and "Deir Yassein",

goes down in history as among Israel's most
brutal and outrageous acts.
And it should not be forgotten
that without the ongoing and constant
support and
assistance of the United
States, Israel could not
act as
it does nor prevent international sanctions against
it.

Even though the
U.N. formally found that Israel had purposefully brought

about the massacre and then grossly lied to cover up its
deeds -- itself a

unique finding for the U.N. and one which was
further supported by an
independent Amnesty International
investigation and report -- to this date no
one has been
brought to justice and both the massacre and the cover-up have

gone completely unpunished. Much flowed to and from Qana.
Like the
assassination of "The Engineer" in Gaza the
previous January, Qana backfired
on Shimon Peres
personally. His attempts to look tough and act with military

force in order to win the upcoming election instead
resulted in a wave of
Hamas suicide-attacks and the
downward spiral in what was already a deceptive
and
disingenuous "peace process." And the defeat of Peres has
since lead to
another round in the "good cop/bad cop"
maneuvering by the politicians who
have a way of claiming
things would have worked out, "if only" this or
that... Of
course the actual realities are otherwise. Just as the Qana

massacre was so terribly distorted and covered-up; much
the same is done
daily by the same political players when
it comes to what the "peace process"
is really all about,
rather than what they say it is all about. The following

was originally published by MID-EAST REALITIES in June of
1996:

----------------------------------

MID-EAST
REALITIES SPECIAL:

QANA MASSACRE COVERUP SUCCESSFUL:

U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL AND SEC-GEN BOUTROS-GHALI

COLLAPSE UNDER
U.S. PRESSURE

PERES'
HOPE TO BECOME U.N. SEC-GEN UNDERMINED

In April, the
Israelis brutally massacred over a hundred persons at the Qana

U.N. Base in Southern
Lebanon. A U.S./Israeli cover-up immediately took

place. However unexpected hard evidence, including a video
tape of the
attack, convinced U.N. investigators that the
attack was premeditated. Severe
pressure was brought on
U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali not to

release the report to the Security Council or the public.
However, after
watering it down as best he could
Boutros-Ghali was forced to release the
report, some U.N.
officials going so far as to indicate they would resign if

he did not do so.  Shamefully though the U.N.
Security Council has refused to
act on the report or to
hold the Israelis accountable. Of course the American
veto
threat and tremendous pressures upon Boutros-Ghali and member
states at
the U.N. was behind this further demonstration
of U.N. impotence andcowardice.

The only good
thing to come from the Qana Massacre is that there is no
longer
a likelihood of Shimon Peres becoming
Secretary-General of the U.N. Peres is
known to covet the
job. At first, shortly after Binyamin's Netanyahu's

victory, Peres and his long-time aide Yossi Beilin,
maneuvered to join
another "national unity government"
with Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Peres
served as Foreign
Minister in previous Likud-led governments, as did Yitzhak

Rabin who served as Defense Minister.
Realizing this effort would probably
fail, at the same
time Peres took steps to reinvigorate the idea of his being

nominated to become U.N. Secretary-General -- an idea
Peres (with American
encouragement) had pushed prior to
the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The
notion that since
an Egyptian had been Secretary- General, now an Israeli

should be selected, was one Peres and
friends thought they could use to
catapult him into the
job. With Qana still fresh in memory, it seems this
latest
Peres gambit is running into considerable roadblocks though
there may
be further attempts to resuscitate the idea
later this year.

In an ironic
twist of fate, Peres' own most recent duplicity did him in.

After a half-year cease-fire with Hamas, it was Peres'
assassination of Yehya
Ayyash, "the Engineer", in Gaza in
January that unleased the terror-wave in
the streets of
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that in turn led to the attacks on

Hizbollah in Lebanon, that then led to Qana -- all of
which combined to lead
to Peres' electoral defeat. In
short, the Israeli people did not believe or
trust Peres;
and for good reasons. Certainly it would be the height of

historical chicanery if the notion of Peres heading the
U.N. after an
American/Israeli effort to push out
Boutros-Ghali should again be pushed
forward.

Robert Fisk,
writing in THE INDEPENDENT newspaper, has done more than any

other investigative journalist to report about the
realities of the recent
situation in the Middle East --
the false "peace process"; the deceptions of
Yasser Arafat
as he pretends to have an embryonic State and emulates Israeli

repression tactics against his own people; the duplicitous
conduct of Rabin
and Peres in preaching peace while
pursuing Middle Eastern apartheid.

The following
article by Fisk was published a few weeks ago in THE

INDEPENDENT and uncovers more of the realities behind the
Qana Massacre and
Shimon Peres' decline.

THE DEADLY SECRET THAT LED TO BLOODBATH AT QANA

By Robert Fisk

Tyre -- An
Israeli army operation to plant booby-trap bombs inside the
United
Nations zone in southern Lebanon led to the Qana
massacre last month in which
well over 100 Lebanese
civilians were killed by Israeli shells while
sheltering
in a UN base. It now emerges that the Israeli "patrol" which
came
under mortar fire from Hizbollah guerrillas on 18
April -- the incident which
led to the Qana bloodbath --
had been tasked to leave plastic explosive
charges and
mines near the village of Henniyeh, about five miles from
Qana.

The UN's
official report, which suggested that the Israeli massacre of

civilians was deliberate, quoted Brigadier General Dan
Harel, the commander
of the Israeli army's artillery
corps, as saying that an Israeli patrol,
whose location
was not given, had come under mortar fire from the Qana area

and that at least one round landed 40m from the Israeli
troops. What had not
hitherto been revealed was the task
the Israeli soldiers had been engaged in,
north of their
occupation area and inside the UN zone, when they came under

fire. A similar and even more complicated field of plastic
mines and booby
traps was left by Israeli soldiers close
to the village of Bradchit in the
UN's
Irish battalion area at around the same time.

Shortly after
the Israeli bombardment ended, it now transpires, Israeli

officers met UN ordnance officers and handed them detailed
maps of the booby
traps and mines they had planted. Polish
troops subsequently defused the
booby traps at Henniyeh on
a hilltop from which Katyusha rockets had been
fired in
the past, although the Irish army took longer to complete its

disposal of the Bradchit minefield.

What has caused
particular concern to UN personnel is that it was a roadside

bomb in the village of Bradchit that killed a Lebanese
teenager last month,
an explosion which prompted the
Hizbollah to blame Israel and fire Katyushas
across the
border into Galilee in retaliation.  Shimon Peres said at
the time
that Israel had nothing to do with
the Bradchit bombs and the Katyusha
retaliation set off
Israel's bloody
Grapes of Wrath offensive. But the
revelation that an
Israeli unit was planting booby-trap devices in Bradchit

and Henniyeh on 18 April has cast new doubt on Mr. Peres's
denial.

Nor did another
claim by Mr. Peres during his abortive campaign for

re-election --that the Hizbollah fired rockets at
Israel from
"within" the UN
compound at Qana -- do anything to repair
the cynical state of relations that
now exist between
Israel and the UN.
Neither the Israeli army nor the UN
believe that Hizbollah
men opened fire on the Israelis from a UN position --
the
Hizbollah did so several 100 metres from the outer perimeter
of the Qana
camp -- and UN officers are mystified as to
why the Israeli Prime Minister
should have made such a
statement just before the election, when he must know
that
it is untrue.

"It was election
time in Israel," a security source in
southern Lebanon

commented. "On such occasions, truth goes out the window."

The written
ceasefire agreement that followed the end of the Israeli

bombardment has meanwhile been rendered meaningless
scarcely a day after
Binyamin Netanyahu was elected Prime
Minister.

The "monitoring
committee" that was to have ensured that all parties complied

with the truce terms has never met, and in the past three
days the Hizbollah
have killed four Israeli soldiers and
two pro-Israeli militiamen inside the
occupied zone of
southern Lebanon. Since the ceasefire, the Israelis have

also carried out three retaliatory air raids on
Lebanon, without
waiting for
the truce committee to pronounce  on
Hizbollah attacks, as they are obliged
to do under the
truce agreement.

In an Israeli
air raid on a Hizbollah arms dump near Baalbek before dawn
yesterday, an
attack which set off secondary explosions for an hour

afterwards, three civilians were slightly wounded --
another breach of the
ceasefire terms, which state that
civilians should not be harmed in any
Israeli-Hizbollah
battles inside Lebanon. Two
civilians were also reported
to have been wounded when the
Hizbollah killed four Israeli soldiers at
Marjayoun on
Thursday.

THE INDEPENDENT
- SATURDAY - JUNE 1, 1996

How
can we stand by and allow this to go on?'

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14287.htm

By Robert Fisk

07/31/06
"The
Independent" -- -- They wrote the names of
the dead children on their plastic shrouds. "Mehdi Hashem,
aged seven - Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in
which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12
- Qana',' "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one - Qana.'' And when the
Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it
bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his
father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses
brought to the Tyre government hospital and
other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran
out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in
carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood
running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone
not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this
experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an
atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the
"pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime.
Israel
claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from
the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified
this massacre. Israel's Prime
Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror"
threatening "western civilisation" - as if the Hizbollah had
killed all these poor people.
And in Qana, of all places.
For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli
massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli
artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town.
More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said
it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft
over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out
to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing
just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana
- whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which
Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world,
doomed forever to receive tragedy.
And there was no doubt
of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It
came from the United States, and
upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided
Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it
"combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey
house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They
had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli
bombardment, and that is where most of them
died.

I
found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in
Tyre, her jaw and face
bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not
weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her
face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had
her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just
six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at
one o'clock in the morning,'' she said. "What in the name of
God have we done to deserve this? So many of the dead are
children, the old, women. Some of the children were still
awake and playing. Why does the world do this to
us?"
Yesterday's deaths brought to more than 500 the total
civilian dead in Lebanon since
Israel's air, sea
and land bombardment of the country begun on 12 July after
Hizbollah members crossed the frontier wire, killed three
Israeli soldiers and captured two others. But yesterday's
slaughter ended more than a year of mutual antagonism within
the Lebanese government as pro-American and pro-Syrian
politicians denounced what they described as "an ugly
crime".
Thousands of protesters attacked the largest United
Nations building in Beirut, screaming: "Destroy Tel Aviv,
destroy Tel Aviv," and Lebanon's Prime Minister, the normally
unflappable Fouad Siniora, called US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and ordered her to cancel her imminent
peace-making trip to Beirut.
No one in this country can
forget how President George Bush, Ms Rice, and Tony Blair have
repeatedly refused to call for an immediate ceasefire - a
truce that would have saved all those lives yesterday. Ms Rice
would say only: "We want a ceasefire as soon as possible,'' a
remark followed by an Israeli announcement that it intended to
maintain its bombardment of Lebanon for at least another two
weeks.
Throughout the day, Qana villagers and civil defence
workers dug through the ruins of the building with spades and
with their hands, tearing at the muck until they found one
body after another still dressed in colourful clothes. In one
section of the rubble, they found what was left of a single
room with 18 bodies inside. Twelve of the dead were women. All
across southern Lebanon now, you
find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but
just as terrible, for the people of these villages are
terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had
dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their
homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught
began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their
houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the
Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia
Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun - close
to the scene of Israel's last
military incursion at Bint Jbeil - and yet none of them can
leave without fear of dying on the roads.

And
Mr Olmert's reaction? After expressing his "great sorrow", he
announced that: "We will not stop this battle, despite the
difficult incidents [sic] this morning. We will continue the
activity, and if necessary it will be broadened without
hesitation." But how much further can it be broadened?
Lebanon's infrastructure is being steadily torn to pieces, its
villages razed, its people more and more terrorised - and
terror is the word they used - by Israel's American-made
fighter bombers. Hizbollah's missiles are Iranian-made, and it
was Hizbollah that started this war with its illegal and
provocative raid across the border. But Israel's savagery against the
civilian population has deeply shocked not only the Western
diplomats who have remained in Beirut, but hundreds of
humanitarian workers from the Red Cross and major aid
agencies.
Incredibly, Israel yesterday denied safe
passage to a UN World Food Programme aid convoy en route to
the south, a six-truck mission that should have taken relief
supplies to the south-eastern town of Marjayoun. More than three
quarters of a million Lebanese have now fled their homes, but
there is still no accurate figure for the total number still
trapped in the south. Khalil Shalhoub, who survived amid the
wreckage in Qana yesterday, said that his family and the
Hashims were just too "terrified" to take the road out of the
village, which has been attacked by aircraft for more than two
weeks. The seven-mile highway between Qana and Tyre is
littered with civilian homes in ruins and burnt-out family
cars. On Thursday, the Israeli Army's Al-Mashriq radio, which
broadcasts into southern Lebanon, told
residents that their villages would be "totally destroyed" if
missiles were fired from them. But anyone who has watched
Israel's bombing these past two weeks knows that, in many
cases, the Israelis do not know the location in which the
Hizbollah are firing missiles, and - when they do - they
frequently miss their targets. How can a villager prevent the
Hizbollah from firing rockets from his street? The Hizbollah
do take cover beside civilian houses - just as Israeli troops
entering Bint Jbeil last week also used civilian homes for
cover. But can this be the excuse for slaughter on such a
scale?
Mr Siniora addressed foreign diplomats in Beirut
yesterday, telling them that the government in Beirut was now
only demanding an immediate ceasefire and was not interested
any longer in a political package to go with it. Needless to
say, Mr Jeffrey Feltman, whose country made the bomb which
killed the innocents of Qana yesterday, chose not to attend.

© 2006 Independent News and
Media Limited

PEACEFUL
PEOPLE OF THE WORLD UNITE

July
28, 2006

Yesterday, the laborers
from the second largest Labor Confederation in
Turkey, the DISK,
had marched to the Israeli consulate with lanterns and torches
and had sent a letter of protest to the Israeli prime minister
Ehud Olmert in continuation of actions within their campaign
initiated on July 26 called, PEACEFUL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD
UNITE! STOP ISRAEL

To counter the protests, the
Istanbul Consul of Israel, Mordehai Amihai paid a visit to
DISK, THE Confederation of Progressive Labor Unions and tried
explaining Israel position. He tried justifying the illegal
Israeli aggressions by mentioning unrelated issues such as
attacks from terrorists etc.

However, the Israeli
diplomat was lectured by the DISK officials, something the
Turkish government has not done, and reminded the forgetful
diplomat that the war started by Israel was not legitimate and
all the basis being used by Israel as an excuse were
unjustified. DISK officials also reminded the diplomat that
the terror organizations Israel complains about had been fed
and protected by the imperialists for years, and now, Israel
was attempting to use this excuse to attack its neighbors
where the poverty stricken laborers in the region were being
targeted.

In a gesture as well as part of the planned
actions against Israel, right after the meeting, the officials
of the DISK labor confederation left to join and continue the
sit-in protest of Israel in Istanbul central, main square, the
Taksim Plaza.

The actions, which have been taking
place for the last three days against Israeli aggression
staged by DISK, will end this evening after a march.

Ankara
While
these developments continue in Istanbul, in Ankara, the capital of
Turkey, the members
of DISK joined forces with another large labor confederation,
KESK, the confederation of Public Workers Unions, held a press
conference in the city center. After the conference and the
rally, all participants distributed fliers exposing Israeli
atrocities and imperialism in Ankara most crowded streets.

Sendika.org

U.S. risks backlash in Mideast

Deadly Israeli assault strikes at core
of U.S. foreign policy in region

ANALYSIS
By Peter Baker
The Washington Post

Updated: 10:40 p.m. CT July 30, 2006

The
Israeli bombs that slammed into the Lebanese village of Qana
yesterday did more than kill three dozen children and a score
of adults. They struck at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the
region and illustrated in heart-breaking images the enormous
risks for Washington in the
current Middle East crisis.

With each new scene of carnage in southern
Lebanon,
outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against
Israel and
its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash
resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the
United
States, according to regional
specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.

Although the United
States has urged Israel to use
restraint, it has also strongly defended the military assaults
as a reasonable response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, a
position increasingly at odds with allies that see a deadly
overreaction. Analysts think that if the war drags on, as
appears likely, it could leave the United States more isolated
than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago
and hindered in its foreign policy goals such as shutting down
Iran's nuclear
program and spreading democracy around the world.
"The
arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction," said Richard
N. Haass, who was President Bush's first-term State Department
policy planning director. "The biggest danger in the short run
is it just increases frustration and alienation from the
United
States in the Arab world. Not
just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will
get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this
will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights."
The
White House recognizes the danger but thinks the missiles
flying both ways across the Israel-Lebanon border carry with
them a chance to finally break out of the stalemate of
Middle East geopolitics. Bush
and his advisers hope the conflict can destroy or at least
cripple Hezbollah and in the process strike a blow against the
militia's sponsor, Iran, while forcing the region
to move toward final settlement of the decades-old conflict
with Israel.
"He
wants a resolution that will solve the problem," White House
spokesman Tony Snow told reporters yesterday. "Not only do we
feel sorrow for what happened in Qana, but also a
determination that it is really important to remove the
conditions that led to that."
"This moment of conflict in
the Middle East is painful and tragic," Bush said in his radio
address Saturday. "Yet it is also a moment of opportunity for
broader change in the region. Transforming countries that have
suffered decades of tyranny and violence is difficult, and it
will take time to achieve. But the consequences will be
profound for our country and the world."

Broader
struggle with Iran
At the heart of the
crisis for the United
States is a broader struggle with
Iran for
influence in the Middle East,
one that arguably has been going on since the Islamic
revolution of 1979 and that has escalated during Bush's
presidency. The United
States not only backs Israel in the current war but
also has accelerated weapons delivery to Israel. Hezbollah,
on the other hand, has long acted as a surrogate for
Iran, and in the
past three weeks it has shown off Iranian weapons never before
used by the radical group.
"It's really a proxy war
between the United States and Iran," said David J. Rothkopf, a
scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and
author of "Running the World," a book on U.S. foreign policy.
"When viewed in that context, it puts everything in a
different light."
The Hezbollah attacks on
Israel that
touched off the latest conflict came just as international
pressure on Iran to give up
uranium enrichment had reached a crescendo. Bush aides suspect
Iran orchestrated
the attacks to distract attention from its nuclear program or
to demonstrate the consequences of pushing too hard. "It's
tempting to believe that," said a senior official involved in
the crisis but not authorized to speak on the record.
"Iran spends a very
large amount of money on Hezbollah."
The president hopes
the crisis will ultimately help him rally world leaders
against Iran's nuclear
program. Even as the U.N. Security Council today considers a
peacekeeping force for Lebanon, it may vote on a
U.S.-backed resolution to threaten sanctions if
Iran does not
suspend uranium enrichment in August.
"There's no question
that this is going to stiffen up in the long run the resolve
of the Europeans in dealing with Iran," said Henri J. Barkey, a
former State Department official who teaches at Lehigh
University. "Even if
they don't like what Israel is doing," he said, they
will recognize that Iran "is a menace."

Others are not so hopeful. Outside the White House, the
mood among many foreign policy veterans in Washington is strikingly
pessimistic, especially as leaders of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda,
traditional rivals based in different Islamic sects, began
calling for followers to take the fight to the enemy.

Analysts foresee a muddled outcome at best, in which
Hezbollah survives Israel's airstrikes, foreign
peacekeepers become bogged down, and U.S. relations with
allies are severely strained. At worst, they said, Hezbollah
and Iran feel emboldened, Islamic radicalism spreads, and a
region smuggling fighters and weapons into Iraq fractures
further along sectarian lines.
Increasingly isolated
U.S.?
"What the
conflict has exposed in a really clear way is how linked all
these issues in the region are to each other," said Mara
Rudman, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton
White House now at the liberal Center for American Progress.
"The worst-case scenario . . . is a much more radicalized
Islamic fundamentalist Middle East and much more isolated
Israel and
a much more isolated United States and
fewer people to talk with."

Haass, the
former Bush aide who leads the Council on Foreign Relations,
laughed at the president's public optimism. "An opportunity?"
Haass said with an incredulous tone. "Lord, spare me. I don't
laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long
time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A
once-in-a-lifetime chance?"
In the long run, he and others
warn, the situation could cement the perception that the
United
States is so pro-Israel that
a new generation of Arab youth will grow up perceiving
Americans as enemies. The internal pressure on friendly
governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere
could force them to distance themselves from Washington or crack down on
domestic dissidents to keep power. In either case, Bush may
have little leverage to press for democratic reforms.
Jon
B. Alterman, a Middle East specialist at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, outlined "not even the
worst-case scenario, but a bad-case scenario: South Lebanon is
in shambles, Hezbollah gets credit for rebuilding it with
Iranian money, Hezbollah grows stronger in Lebanon and it's
not brought to heel. The reaction of surrounding states
weakens them, radicalism rises, and they respond with more
repression. None of this is especially far-fetched. And in all
of this, the U.S. is seen as a
fundamentally hostile party."
All of this is far too
gloomy for administration officials, who see such dire
forecasts as the predictable reactions of a foreign policy
establishment that has produced decades of meaningless talks,
paper peace agreements and unenforced U.N. resolutions that
have not solved underlying issues in the Middle East.
"Some of the overheated
rhetoric about how the United
States can't work with
anybody, we've lost our leadership in the world, is just
completely ridiculous, and this crisis proves it," said the
senior administration official involved in the crisis. "We are
really indispensable to solving this crisis, and you're not
going to solve this problem merely by passing another
resolution."
While the diplomats work, the Pentagon is
studying the possible impact on an already-stretched
U.S. military.
Commanders have diverted the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit
and the Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group from a training
mission in Jordan where they were
available as reserves for Iraq. Now they are
on ships in the Mediterranean Sea to help with humanitarian
efforts, and another unit has been put on alert as backup for
Iraq.
The
Pentagon has done contingency planning for U.S. troops
participating in a multinational peacekeeping mission, but
Bush aides have all but ruled out such a scenario. A more
likely option, officials said, would have the
United
States provide
command-and-control and logistics assistance.

U.S.
troops in Lebanon?
Peter
W. Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international
security affairs, said that officials are studying the
possibility of putting troops in Lebanon but that it
is too early to comment on what such a force would look like.
"The concept is still under development, and discussion of any
potential U.S. participation
would be premature."
Some analysts acknowledge the varied
challenges the United States faces
but consider the possible gain worth the risk. "It's a Rubik's
Cube. It's very, very difficult to resolve," said Peter
Brookes, a former deputy assistant defense secretary under
Bush who is now at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "But
if we were able to dismantle Hezbollah, that would be very
positive for the war on terror."
The White House is
acutely aware of the dangers of stirring up anti-American
sentiment in the region. "There may be times when people say
that they're unhappy with whatever methods we pursue," the
White House's Snow said last week. "We are confident that in
the long run, people are going to be much happier living in
freedom and democracy than, for instance, in nations that are
occupied by terrorist organizations that try to hijack a
democracy in its formative stages."

Staff writer Josh
White contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington
Post Company
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14110834/from/RS.1/

News
Analysis

From
Carnage in Lebanon, a
Concession

Rina
Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Israelis
took cover Sunday morning as a rocket fired by Hezbollah
passed over the town of Kiryat Shmona.

Published:
July 31, 2006

JERUSALEM,
Monday, July 31 — Taken aback by the carnage from the Israeli
bombing of Qana, Lebanon, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice wrung the
first significant concession from Israel late on Sunday in its
nearly three-week-old war against the Hezbollah militia: an
immediate 48-hour suspension of aerial strikes. Skip
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Especially
notable about the suspension was that Ms. Rice’s deputy, Adam
Ereli, and not the Israelis, announced it after she held
intensive talks with both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Israeli
foreign minister, Tzipi Livni.

The American
decision to break the news on what was essentially an Israeli
tactical change reflected the increased concern in the Bush
administration about the rising civilian death toll in Lebanon
and the havoc it is wreaking with America’s already shaky
relations with the Arab world.

Indeed, while
Mr. Ereli took pains to assure reporters that American
officials had confirmation of the temporary suspension
directly from Mr. Olmert’s office, Israeli officials had said
nothing publicly about the suspension as of early
Monday.

Ms. Rice, who
had been making little progress in her talks with the Israelis
this weekend, clearly needed to come away with something in
response to the Qana bombing, which killed dozens of people,
many of them children, and incited a new level of world anger
against the Israeli military campaign in southern Lebanon.

Even so, one
fact is unchanged: the United States is still not
calling for an immediate cease-fire.

Ms. Rice’s
maneuvering highlights the deepening crisis in which she now
finds herself — by far the biggest in her tenure as
America’s top
diplomat.

By refusing to
call for an immediate cease-fire, even in the face of the Qana
bombing, Ms. Rice was teetering on the edge of a public
relations disaster, particularly in the Arab world. All day on
Sunday, scenes of dead children being pulled out of the
wreckage at Qana dominated the airwaves.

But American
officials continued to say that, despite the civilian death
toll, an immediate cease-fire would do little good unless
underlying issues were first addressed, including the ultimate
disarmament of Hezbollah.

In the meantime,
Israeli officials continued to say, publicly, that they needed
more time to diminish Hezbollah’s military abilities, and
America’s
insistence on reaching agreement on a political package before
calling for a cease-fire worked to give Israel that time.

But that left
the impression that Ms. Rice and the Bush administration were
willing to stomach the killing of innocent children to reach
their larger aims.

After learning
about the Qana bombing, Ms. Rice canceled her planned trip to
Beirut on Sunday, and instead
is heading back to the United
States on Monday. A State
Department official said Ms. Rice would travel to New
York on Wednesday or Thursday to push
for a Security Council resolution that would include a
cease-fire as one of its components.

The contents of
the diplomatic package are basically set, and Bush officials
said Ms. Rice would lay out its terms on Monday. Under the
proposal, Israel and Lebanon would agree to a
cease-fire as part of a larger pact that would include
installing 15,000 to 20,000 international peacekeepers
throughout southern Lebanon, American
and Israeli officials said. The Lebanese government would work
to disband Hezbollah, and the United States and other
countries would funnel money and send military officials to
help train the Lebanese Army, so that it could work to prevent
future attacks on Israel.
Israel would agree
to talks on whether it would withdraw from a disputed border
area known as Shabaa Farms, a Hezbollah demand.

“We want the
Security Council to take it up soon, and we want the Security
Council to take it up with as much concrete progress toward a
real cease-fire as is humanly possible by the time that that
meeting takes place,” Ms. Rice said. She spoke at a hastily
called news conference on Sunday, just two hours after
learning of the bombing at Qana. She appeared shaken, and said
she learned of the bombing while she was meeting with the
Israeli defense minister, Amir Peretz.

She said she
reiterated to Mr. Peretz her “strong concern about the impact
of Israeli military operations on innocent civilians,” and
added that she was “deeply saddened by the terrible loss of
innocent life.” American officials scrambled to try to counter
the wrenching TV scenes of the devastation at Qana.
Immediately after Ms. Rice’s news conference, State Department
officials worked quickly to get her statement broadcast on
Arab TV stations, including Al
Jazeera.

But that job was
made harder when the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who
met with Ms. Rice on Saturday night and again on Sunday,
released a statement saying he told Ms. Rice that
Israel needed 10 to
14 more days to complete its war aims.

“Do you think
that, with the close relationship he has with Bush and Condi,
he would go and say something like that without their
consent?” one senior Israeli official asked.

The official,
who asked that his name not be used because he was not
authorized to speak publicly on the issue, said he believed
that American diplomats accepted that Israel’s armed forces needed
more time to clear out a buffer zone in southern
Lebanon before an
international peacekeeping force could enter.

Even if Ms. Rice
does begin work on a Security Council resolution on Thursday,
he said, the resolution would probably take days to
pass.

Ms. Rice was set
to travel to Beirut on Sunday afternoon
for talks with Lebanese leaders when the Qana bombing
curtailed her trip.

At 8:38 Sunday
morning, as Ms. Rice and Mr. Peretz were meeting in a suite at
her hotel in Jerusalem,
Assistant Secretary of State C. David Welch received an e-mail
message — on his Blackberry — from Jeffrey D. Feldman, the
United
States ambassador to Lebanon, alerting
him to the bombing. In the message, Mr. Feldman described some
of the scenes broadcast on TV in Lebanon.

Mr. Welch,
Blackberry in hand, went into the hotel suite to give Ms. Rice
the news, a senior American official said. It was unclear, the
official said, whether Mr. Peretz was already aware of
it.

“She was
sickened,” said the official, who asked that his name not be
used because he was not authorized to speak about the meeting
between Ms. Rice and Mr. Peretz. After the meeting, the
official said, Ms. Rice told her staff, “We have to get it
done.” She was referring to the 48-hour suspension of the
aerial bombardment, he said.

In the meeting
with Mr. Olmert and a later meeting with Ms. Livni, the
foreign minister, Ms. Rice pushed for a temporary suspension
of Israel’s
airstrikes. Around 9:45 p.m. on Sunday, American officials in
Jerusalem received a call from
Mr. Olmert’s office that Israel was willing
to commit to the suspension, beginning immediately.

A
Night of Death and Terror for Lebanese Villagers

By
SABRINA
TAVERNISE

Published:
July 31, 2006

The
Scene

QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — The dead
lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with
dirt. Faces were puffy. A man’s arm was extended straight out
from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl
and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their
skin like wax.

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Tyler
Hicks/The New York Times

Rescue workers and neighbors
removed one of the victims of Israeli airstrikes in the
Lebanese town of Qana.

In the all-day
scramble to retrieve the bodies from the remains of this one
house — backhoes dug for hours at the site after an
early-morning airstrike — tallies of the dead varied, from as
many as 60 to 27, many of them children.

This was the
single most lethal episode in the course of this sudden war.
The survivors will remember it as the day their children died.
For the village, it is a fresh pain in a wound cut more than
10 years ago, when an Israeli attack here killed more than 100
civilians. Many of them were children, too.

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.

At least eight
people in the house survived, and told of a long, terrifying
night. Some remained buried until morning. Others crawled
free. Ms. Shalhoub sat under a tree with Mohamed Shalhoub,
without his wheelchair, and three others, listening to the
planes flying overhead in the dark.

“You couldn’t
see your finger in front of your face,” said Ghazi Aidibi, a
neighbor.

Ms. Shalhoub
said she tried to help a woman who was sobbing from under the
wreckage, asking for her baby, but she could not find the
child. A neighbor, Haidar Tafleh, said he heard screaming when
he approached the debris, but that bombing kept him away.

“We tried to
take them out, but the bombs wouldn’t let us,” Mr. Tafleh
said.

The area took
several more hits. A house very close to the Shalhoubs’ was
crushed. A giant crater was gouged next to it. Residents said
as many as eight buildings had been destroyed over two weeks.

Collapsed
buildings have been a serious problem in southern Lebanon. Dozens of
bodies are still stuck under the rubble. The mayor of
Tyre, Abed al-Husseini,
estimated that about 75 bodies were still buried under rubble
in Slifa, a village on the border.

A grocer, Hassan
Faraj, stood outside his shop, near a monument to those killed
in the 1996 attack. He said that Hezbollah fighters had not
come to Qana, but that residents supported them strongly.
There was little evidence of fighters on Sunday, but Hezbollah
flags and posters of Shiite leaders trimmed the streets. “They
like the resistance here,” he said.

He cautioned
people not to stand in the street in front of his shop,
because that was where the ambulance convoy was hit in the
morning.

At the
Hakoumi
Hospital in
Tyre, Mr. Shalhoub sat in
bed. His face was slack, stunned. His relatives poured him
spicy coffee, and the room filled with its scent. The
survivors spoke of their faith as a salve. The children, Mr.
Shalhoub said, were in paradise now.

But 24-year-old
Hala Shalhoub, whose two daughters, ages 1 and 5, were killed,
was moaning and rocking slightly in her hospital bed.

“I want to see
them,” she said slowly. “I want to hold
them.”

A relative said,
“Let her cry.”

Zaineb Shalhoub,
in the next bed, rested quietly.

“There’s nobody
left in our village,” she said. “Not a human or a
stone.”

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