Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  “It Was a War Crime”

  While Israeli officials had responded to the massacre with somber-toned expressions of sorrow and regret, there were no such indications of remorse and soul-searching from the gunners who had fired the shells into Qana. In an extraordinary article published by the Israeli Kol Ha’ir weekly newspaper, several of the soldiers openly expressed indifference about the slaughter. According to one member of the artillery battery, the captain commanding the unit told his soldiers minutes after the fatal shelling that “It was war. ‘Come on, the bastards fire at you, what can you do?’ He told us that we were firing well and we should keep it up, and that Arabs, you know, there are millions of them.”

  Another soldier said, “No one spoke about it as if it was a mistake. We did our job and we are at peace with that. Even S [the captain] told us that we were great and that they were just Arabushes.” Arabushes is Hebrew slang for “Arab rats.”

  Van Kappen met with the same artillery unit during his probe. The officers and soldiers were “extremely nervous … and very careful in what they said to me,” he says. “Also, they had this attitude of ‘What the hell are you doing here? We are in a war. Who are these peace doves and what is all this humanitarian crap?’ ”

  The hostility toward van Kappen and his team was not confined to a few scowling Israeli soldiers. Despite coordinating with the IDF, the convoy carrying the UN investigation team along the coastal highway from Beirut to Naqoura came under repeated shell fire from Israeli navy ships. Even during his investigation on the ground, which occurred while Grapes of Wrath was still in progress, van Kappen and his team were dogged by near misses from artillery guns and air strikes.

  On May 5, Israel concluded its own investigation into the shelling and shared its findings with van Kappen. The probe was headed by Brigadier General Dan Harel, the commander of the Israeli army’s artillery section, which one UNIFIL officer later told me was like “asking a murderer to investigate his own crime.” Harel said that the Fijian compound had been marked with a pin on a map that erroneously placed the base a hundred meters farther north than its actual position. His explanation earned guffaws of derision from UNIFIL headquarters.

  The “pin-in-the-map” excuse was the “biggest, sickest joke I have heard in my life,” Goksel said. The Israelis had extensive, highly detailed maps and aerial photographs covering all of south Lebanon. The idea that the Israelis had misplaced by a hundred meters a clearly visible, well-known UN compound of whitewashed buildings emblazoned with “UN” in large black letters that had been there for eighteen years was inconceivable, as far as UNIFIL officers were concerned.

  The Israeli excuse that a map error had caused the tragedy in Qana also left van Kappen unpersuaded. Indeed, the accumulated evidence uncovered by van Kappen’s team was damning, compounded by Israel’s contradictory and unconvincing explanations. Van Kappen’s findings were verified by artillery specialists attached to the UN. Back in New York, he showed his evidence to serving U.S. army officers for a second opinion. “They came back to me and said ‘We can’t officially support you, but you are absolutely right. Just don’t quote us.’ ”

  Van Kappen was left with a troubling conclusion: the cold, stark evidence suggested strongly that, even if the motivation was unclear, the Israelis had deliberately shelled the Fijian base. “While the possibility cannot be ruled out completely,” van Kappen wrote in a carefully phrased conclusion to his report, “it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors.”

  Yet there were powerful political interests that had no desire to see such disturbing findings released to the public. The Dutch general came under pressure from numerous officials both inside and outside the UN to tone down his report. He was told that accusing Israel of shelling the Fijian camp would be detrimental to Peres’s election campaign and would embarrass the Clinton administration in a presidential election year. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary general, was also urged to quash the report. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, warned Boutros-Ghali that its publication would complicate Middle East peace efforts. She allegedly told him that it would open deep wounds in Israeli society, to which the UN chief bitingly retorted that Israel’s artillery shells had opened even deeper wounds among the refugees in Qana.7

  “Madeleine Albright didn’t like the report at all,” van Kappen says. “She told me several times that I had no proof, etcetera. I said that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to count holes in the ground.”

  The option of a cover-up was dashed, however, when some of the key findings were leaked to Foreign Report, a British publication specializing in international security and intelligence matters. UN headquarters in New York never discovered the source of the leak. However, I learned, it was released on the personal initiative of a UN official who was incensed by the massacre in Qana and worried that Boutros-Ghali would buckle under the pressure to quash the report. The leak was quickly picked up by the news wires, and once the story was in the public domain, there could be no question of suppressing van Kappen’s findings. The report was published in full on May 8, to the irritation of Washington and the outrage of Israel.

  Almost a decade and a half later, van Kappen’s analysis of the circumstances behind the Qana massacre has not changed. “I think it was a deliberate act. It was a war crime,” he says. “That is what I believe, although I refused to believe it for a long time. The evidence was so strong that there was no other way, as a professional soldier, you could come to any other conclusion.”

  In his view, the UAV above Qana relayed pictures of Hezbollah men running into the compound, and “somewhere in the line of command, somebody decided they had had enough of Hezbollah.… Someone in the chain of command broke the [moral] code and did it. When I look at all the evidence, this is the most logical [explanation].”

  Snubbing Warren Christopher

  The Qana massacre sealed the lid on Israel’s Grapes of Wrath campaign. The United States realized that the fighting was spinning out of control and turning into a fiasco for its Israeli ally. Instead of neutralizing Hezbollah, Israel’s disproportionate use of military muscle was deepening Arab sympathy for the Lebanese resistance and threatening to further undermine Washington’s credibility as the neutral referee of the Middle East peace process.

  Warren Christopher arrived in the region two days after the massacre and met with Hafez al-Assad in Damascus. Not for the first time, fortune had favored Assad’s cool patience as the world turned once more to Damascus. Assad endorsed the French proposal, telling Christopher that he recommended a written reaffirmation of the July 1993 understanding that would safeguard civilians on both sides of the border but permit Hezbollah to continue resisting the occupation.

  The Israelis insisted they wanted the United States, not France, to broker a deal, but Christopher found that he had little choice but to adopt the French proposal. Even then, Assad gave little ground, boldly refusing to meet the hapless American secretary of state on April 23, his third visit to Damascus in four days.

  Shimon Peres, too, realized that his margin for maneuver had narrowed significantly since the attack on Qana. Christopher’s earlier goal of reaching a detailed agreement signed by Lebanon, Syria, and Israel was scaled back to a simple one-page unsigned memorandum. The document was drafted and shown to Assad, who carefully scrutinized “every line, every word, every comma,” according to a U.S. official accompanying Christopher.

  On April 26, it was announced that an understanding had been reached to end the fighting. Hezbollah was prohibited from carrying out any attacks against northern Israel; Israel could not attack civilians or civilian targets; and both sides undertook not to launch attacks from populated areas or other civilian sites.

  “Without violating this understanding, nothing herein shall preclude any party from exercising their right to self-defense,” the memorandum said.

  The understanding came into effec
t at 4:00 A.M. on April 27.

  The “April Understanding,” as it came to be known, additionally established a monitoring group consisting of delegates from Lebanon, Syria, France, Israel, and the United States to watch for any breaches. The group agreed that the UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura would serve as the venue for their meetings. The American and French delegates would alternately chair the group, rotating every six months.

  Peres had launched the Grapes of Wrath campaign in part to add muscle to his security credentials, always his weak point, in order to help maintain his slim lead in the polls during the closely fought electoral battle with Netanyahu. But it was to no avail. Four weeks after the operation ended, Peres narrowly lost the election to his Likud opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the peace process between Israel and Syria went into deep freeze for the next three years.

  The Grapes of Wrath operation was a military, political, and diplomatic failure for Israel. The disproportionate use of military firepower, culminating in the Qana slaughter, further blackened Israel’s reputation internationally and embarrassed the United States, which had to intervene diplomatically to extricate its ally from a mess of Israel’s own making. Despite Israel’s wielding some of the most powerful and sophisticated weapons of war then available, only fourteen Hezbollah fighters were killed during the sixteen-day offensive, and the damage inflicted upon Hezbollah’s military infrastructure—mainly the bombing of offices in the south and in southern Beirut—was negligible. Nawaf Mussawi, a member of Hezbollah’s political council, said that the Israeli campaign had inflicted not “a scratch” on the group’s capabilities.8

  Israel was also unable to halt Hezbollah’s daily barrage of Katyusha rockets. Fighter-bombers, UAVs, precision-guided missiles, and radar-directed artillery had shown their limitations against the mobile Hezbollah teams firing simple 122 mm Katyusha rockets from the hilly terrain of south Lebanon.

  Grapes of Wrath was the last major military operation waged by Israel during the occupation of south Lebanon to try to alter the status quo on the ground in its favor. After sixteen days, it was evident that there was no realistic military solution for defeating Hezbollah, especially while Israel remained, in the eyes of the world, an illegal occupier of Lebanese territory. Neither Operation Grapes of Wrath nor Operation Accountability three years earlier had dented Hezbollah’s resistance campaign nor turned the Lebanese population against the antioccupation struggle. On the contrary, Hezbollah emerged from the Grapes of Wrath campaign at the peak of its popularity, having won the consensus of the Lebanese to continue its resistance against the Israeli occupation. Syria had no intention of reining in Hezbollah, and the Lebanese government was in no position to object.

  The April Understanding itself changed little on the ground. Indeed, far from curbing Hezbollah’s resistance attacks and disarming the party, as the Americans and Israelis had originally intended, the Understanding enshrined for the first time Hezbollah’s status as a resistance organization. How could anyone continue to describe Hezbollah’s military operations against the Israelis in south Lebanon as acts of “terrorism” when the United States and Israel had tacitly recognized, in writing, Hezbollah’s right to resist the occupation?

  “It Feels Horrible to Still Be Alive”

  Yet Grapes of Wrath was fundamentally a terrible human tragedy. More than 160 Lebanese civilians perished during those two dreadful weeks. And for those survivors of the Qana massacre who lost entire families to Israel’s artillery shells, their experiences had scarred them physically and mentally for the rest of their lives.

  Fatmeh Balhas’s husband, brother, and three children, including baby Mohammed, were cut to pieces as they sat around her on the floor of the Fijian officers’ mess. Shortly before the first anniversary of the massacre, she recounted her ordeal to me while flicking through a photo album containing dog-eared pictures of her dead family. Some of the pictures showed her baby sons, Hussein and Hassan, playing in the courtyard of her home. But there were no photographs of seventeen-day-old Mohammed.

  Mounira Taqi, whose husband was almost decapitated by shrapnel as he stood beside her in the officers’ mess, devoted most of her time caring for her daughter, Lina, who was six years old in 1996. Mounira had initially believed Lina died in the shelling. It was only five days later that the little girl was discovered by family friends in a hospital. Although alive, she had suffered brain damage from her head wounds and was partially paralyzed and unable to talk. It took several years of therapy before Lina was able to speak clearly again.

  Hameeda Deeb lost a leg and an arm when shrapnel slashed through the conference room of the Fijian battalion headquarters. She lost nine members of her family. A year later, she was still struggling to learn to use crutches and artificial limbs. A bleak future lay ahead of her. Unmarried and childless, she had resigned herself to living the rest of her days with relatives and admitted that life held little value for her. “I look outside and see the spring flowers and remember that the last time I saw them my family were all here and alive,” she says. “It feels horrible to still be alive now. But it is God’s will.”

  Saadallah Balhas, a stocky man with a ruddy weather-beaten face framed by a shock of thick white hair and a white beard, lost his wife and nine children at Qana, from thirty-year-old Ghaleb to four-month-old Hassan. In all, thirty-two members of his extended family perished. The blast that killed his children also claimed his right eye. He plugged the empty socket with a glass substitute that gave him a permanent countenance of forlorn melancholy. Saadallah wore a pendant around his neck containing tiny photographs of his dead family. Hassan was represented by a bird, as there were no portrait photographs of the baby.

  The first anniversary of the massacre in 1997 was marked with speeches, martial processions, brass bands, and the usual pomp and ceremony, ending, perhaps inevitably, in a fistfight between rival Hezbollah and Amal partisans outside the entrance to the cemetery.

  Yet with each passing year, the massacre was slowly forgotten, the tributes and commemorations dwindling in size, until just a few survivors made the annual pilgrimage to the cemetery beside the abandoned buildings of the former Fijian battalion headquarters to pay their respects to their loved ones.

  The cemetery itself fell into a pitiful, shameful state of disrepair. The long rows of marble-topped tombs were chipped and cracked, weeds grew between the tiles on the ground, cinder blocks and building materials lay scattered untidily around the site. The officers’ mess, where more than half the victims died, lies a few yards from the cemetery. It was left untouched, probably more from indifference than design, and it is still possible to see the rusting tin cans from which some of the victims would have eaten their last meal minutes before the bombardment began.

  I last saw Saadallah in April 2006, shortly before the tenth anniversary of the massacre. He was planting tobacco seedlings in the stony soil of a hilltop field. The noon sun was merciless, and Saadallah wiped his wrinkled brow with a thick, calloused hand. He looked frail and tired, his stockiness had gone, and he appeared a decade older than his sixty-six years. “My sons tried to marry me off again, but I refused,” he says. “No one can replace my wife, my partner in life.”

  Saadallah lived through the July 2006 war—and yet another massacre in Qana—only to die in June 2008. A black banner was slung across the road outside his home in Siddiqine, paying tribute to the “living martyr.” In accordance with his dying wishes, Saadallah was interred alongside his family in the Qana cemetery.

  Today, beside the cemetery is a building that was supposed to be a museum, built with Syrian funds and opened in 2000. It is locked most of the time, not that there was much to see inside. The few exhibits consist of a handful of posters and gruesome photographs of the carnage wrought by the Israeli artillery shells.

  But more haunting than all the images of butchered and burned corpses is one particular snapshot taken a few minutes before Israel unleashed its seventeen-minute bombardment. Men, women, and children
were caught by the photographer chatting and laughing together, sitting on the floor of the Fijian officers’ mess, unaware that they had but a few minutes left to live. And there, to one side of the picture, is Saadallah Balhas, a smile playing on his grizzled face as he hugs his infant son, Hassan, for what must have been the last time.

  “Lebanon Pursues Us Like a Curse”

  After a brief lull following the end of Grapes of Wrath, Hezbollah resumed military operations with an evident determination to demonstrate that it had not been cowed by Israel’s offensive nor by the April Understanding. On May 9, two SLA militiamen were wounded by a roadside bomb explosion, the first attack since the understanding took effect. On May 30, as Israel was absorbing Netanyahu’s electoral victory, Hezbollah detonated two roadside bombs against a convoy of Israeli jeeps in Marjayoun, killing four soldiers and wounding another three.

  Just ten days later, Hezbollah fighters ambushed a squad of Israeli soldiers returning from a night patrol. Five soldiers were killed and another six were wounded.

  In the weeks after Grapes of Wrath, planeloads of fresh arms were flown into Damascus airport from Tehran and then trucked across the border into Lebanon to replenish Hezbollah’s arsenal. In August, Israeli officials claimed that Hezbollah had amassed a stockpile of a thousand Katyusha rockets, including about thirty of the larger 240 mm variety, capable of reaching Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city.

  Trying to ascertain exactly what weapons Hezbollah possessed was a permanent preoccupation of observers and journalists watching the war in south Lebanon. Hezbollah characteristically—if frustratingly—adopted a noncommittal policy, preferring to keep their Israeli foe guessing.

  I had many interviews over the years with Sheikh Nabil Qawq, Hezbollah’s southern commander, a tall, soft-spoken cleric whose amiability and strong sense of humor were at odds with his public image as a hard-liner. Qawq grew to tolerate my repeated questioning of Hezbollah’s military assets, giving me a sympathetic smile every time I asked him to confirm whether the party had acquired this or that missile before declining to discuss the issue.