Desert of trapped corpses testifies to Israel's failure
By Robert Fisk
The Independent, Tuesday, 15 August 2006
They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa - or what was once
the village of Srifa - is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls,
rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of
victory for the Hizbollah, whose fighters walked amid the
destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is
to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war -
or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern
Lebanon and killed so many of its people?
There was no doubt what the village mukhtar thought. As three
Hizbollah men - one wounded in the arm, the other carrying two
ammunition clips and a two-way radio - passed us amid the piles of
broken concrete, Hussein Kamel el-Din yelled to them: "Hallo,
heroes!" Then he turned to me. "You know why they are angry? Because
God didn't give them the opportunity of dying."
You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying
destruction - way south of the Litani river, in the territory from
which Israel once vowed to expel them - to realise the nature of the
past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the
Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the
neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over
36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the
smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday
afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty
roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the
settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is
not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.
Far from humiliating Iran and Syria - which was the Israeli-American
plan - these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched
and the Hizbollah's reputation lionised across the Arab world. The
"opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of
State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has
turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the
weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli
armour was to be seen inside Lebanon - just one solitary tank could
be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even
from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that
the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the
Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were
yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern
Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during
the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.
Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of
tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of
their cars , many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens.
At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and
craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing
out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices
urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of
unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one
Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were
wounded yesterday.
But to what are these people returning? Haj Ali Dakroub, a 42-year
old construction manager, lost part of his home in Israel's 1996
bombardment of Srifa. Now his entire house has been flattened. "What
is here that Israel should destroy all this?" he asked. "We don't
deny that the resistance was in Srifa. It was here before and it
will be here in the future. But in this house lived only my family.
So why would Israel bomb it?"
Well, I did happen to notice what appeared to be the casing of a
missile hanging from the balcony of a much-damaged house facing the
rubble of Ali Dakroub's home. And a group of Hizbollah militiamen,
one of them with a pistol tucked into his trousers, walked past us
nonchalantly and disappeared into an orchard. Was this, perhaps,
where they kept some of their rockets?
Mr Dakroub wasn't saying. "I am going to rebuild my home with my two
sons," he insisted. "Israel may come back in 10 years and destroy it
all over again and then I'll just rebuild it all over again. This
was a Hizbollah victory. The Israelis were able to defeat all the
Arab countries in six days in 1967 but here they could not defeat
the resistance in a month. These resistance men would come out of
the ground and shoot back. They are still here."
"Come out of the ground" is an expression I have heard several times
these past four weeks and I am beginning to suspect that many of the
thousands of guerrillas did indeed shelter in caves and basements
and tunnels, only to emerge to fire their missiles or to use their
infra-red rockets on the Israeli army once it made the mistake of
sending troops into Lebanon on the ground. And does anyone believe
that the Hizbollah will submit to their own disarmament by a new
international force of UN and Lebanese troops once - if - it
arrives? There was a symbolic moment yesterday when Lebanese
soldiers already based in southern Lebanon joined Hizbollah men in
Srifa to clear the rubble of a house in which the bodies of an
entire family were believed buried. Lebanese Red Cross and civil
defence personnel - representatives of the civil power which is
supposed to claw back its sovereignty from the Hizbollah - joined in
the search. The mukhtar, who so blatantly regarded the Hizbollah as
heroes, is also a government representative. And at the entrance to
this shattered village still stands a poster of Nasrallah and the
Iranian President Ali Khamenei.
Far from driving the Hizbollah north across the Litani river, Israel
has entrenched them in their Lebanese villages as never before.
