Massacre in Sanctuary; Eyewitness

The Qana Massacre took place on April 18, 1996 in the headquarters of the Fijian battalion of UNIFIL, located in the small town of Qana, in southern Lebanon.

The compound came under a heavy artillery shelling by the M-109A2 155 mm guns of a nearby Israeli Defense Forces unit in response to two rocket and mortar attacks launched earlier that day (towards the unit) from nearby the compound. As a result of the shelling, 102 civilians died and more were wounded, many of them women and children, and the compound was seriously damaged.

Most of the casualties were residents of nearby villages, which sought refuge in the United Nations compound from the fierce battle going on between the IDF and Hizballah, during Operation Grapes of Wrath. Four UN troops were also wounded.

Israel immediately expressed regret for the loss of innocent lives, saying that the UN compound was not the intended target of the shelling, but that it was hit "due to incorrect targeting based on erroneous data."

The UN investigated the incident in detail, concluding "while the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, the pattern of impacts in the Qana area makes it unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of technical and/or procedural errors".

A video recording made by a UNIFIL soldier showed an Israeli unmanned observation drone in the vicinity at the time of the shelling. The leaking of the recording caused considerable embarrassment to Israel, which had repeatedly denied the presence of a drone.

On Monday, 9 years would have passed since this horrendous event. Israel still occupies the Shebaa farms in Lebanon and still flies over Lebanese skies whenever it wishes.

-Israel never paid a compensation to the families of the killed and the injured for the great human loss and the huge material damage caused over the many years of continuous aggression on Lebanon.

- For many years, hundreds of Lebanese civilians suffered from vicious ways of torturing by the I.O.F. in many concentration camps in Khiam (Occupied Zone) and in Adlit (Northern Israel).

- Israel never "willfully" implemented a single United Nations Resolution (UNR), nor was forced by the International Community to comply with the UNRs and thus remains in defiance and keeps getting away with it.

- The South of Lebanon is Israel's testing

I have decided to post Robert Fisk's article to the Independent about what he saw in Qana on the 18th of April, 1996.

By Robert Fisk
The Independent, 4/19/96

Qana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.

In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.

"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area", a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...

Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home.

Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250 metres from a UN convoy on which I was travelling, blasting a house 30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Travelling back to Beirut to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on the river bridge north of Sidon.

Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon. The Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982 doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine.

The Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres may now wish to end this war. But the Hizbollah are not likely to let him. Israel is back in the Lebanese quagmire. Nor will the Arab world forget yesterday'a terrible scenes.

The blood of all the refugees ran quite literally in streams from the shell-smashed UN compound restaurant in which the Shiite Muslims from the hill villages of southern Lebanon - who had heeded Israel's order to leave their homes - had pathetically sought shelter. Fijian and French soldiers heaved another group of dead - they lay with their arms tightly wrapped around each other - into blankets.

A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms. And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst into the compound. They had driven in wild convoys down from Tyre and began to pull the blankets off the mutilated corpses of their mothers and sons and daughters and to shriek "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great") and to threaten the UN troops.

We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom. One bearded man with fierce eyes stared at us, his face dark with fury. "You are Americans", he screamed at us. "Americans are dogs. You did this. Americans are dogs."

President Bill Clinton has allied himself with Israel in its war against "terrorism" and the Lebanese, in their grief, had not forgotten this. Israel's official expression of sorrow was rubbing salt in their wounds. "I would like to be made into a bomb and blow myself up amid the Israelis", one old man said.

As for the Hizbollah, which has repeatedly promised that Israelis will pay for their killing of Lebanese civilians, its revenge cannot be long in coming. Operation Grapes of Wrath may then turn out then to be all too aptly named.