Israeli air strike kills at least 54 - 37 children

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Israeli air strike kills at least 54

Reuters
July 30, 2006

An Israeli air strike killed at least 54 Lebanese civilians, including 37 children, on Sunday, fuelling world pressure for a ceasefire in Israel's war in Lebanon against Hizbollah guerrillas.

The raid on the southern village of Qana -- the bloodiest single attack in Israel's 19-day-old war on Hizbollah -- aborted U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's mediation efforts. Lebanon told her she was unwelcome in Beirut for talks.

Rescue workers dug through the rubble with their hands for hours, lifting out the twisted, dust-caked corpses of children.

A Lebanese foreign ministry official told an urgent session of the U.N. Security Council that more than 60 people were killed, mostly women and children. But police in Lebanon put the death toll at 54, including 37 children.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Security Council to condemn the attack and call for an immediate end to hostilities. "I am deeply dismayed that my earlier calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities were not heeded," Annan said.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed "deep sorrow" at the bombing, but vowed the war against Hizbollah would go on.

Israeli U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman told the Security Council that Qana was "a hub for Hizbollah" and said Israel had beseeched the residents of the village to leave. But Lebanon said Israeli air strikes on roads and vehicles made it impossible for people in the south to flee.

As anger convulsed Lebanon and the Arab world, protesters smashed their way into the United Nations headquarters in downtown Beirut as thousands massed outside chanting "Death to Israel, Death to America".


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Britain, U.S. press for UN resolution

Globe and Mail
July 30, 2006

Two of Israel's strongest backers called yesterday for an urgent UN resolution to negotiate a way out of the crisis in Lebanon, as the United Nations despaired at its inability to reach people stranded in border areas.

With the 17-day Israeli operation against Hezbollah showing no sign of relenting, British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Washington yesterday where he and U.S. President George W. Bush called for a United Nations resolution that would create a multinational peacekeeping force and draw up conditions for an "urgent" cessation of violence in the region.

[...]

"We shouldn't be in any doubt at all -- that will be a temporary respite unless we put in place the longer-term framework," he said. "It can only work if Hezbollah are prepared to allow it to work."

[...]

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has also invited would-be peacekeeping participants to meet on Monday. France, Italy, Germany, Ireland and Turkey have already said they would consider contributing troops; other European Union countries and the present contributors to the UNIFIL force in southern Lebanon -- including China, India and Ghana -- are also expected to attend.

[...]

The UN's emergency relief co-ordinator, Jan Egeland, has asked for a 72-hour pause in fighting to allow relief workers to get aid into the south of the country, and evacuate the young, the elderly and the wounded.

"There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children than armed men," Mr. Egeland said, agencies reported.

Elsewhere in Lebanon, air strikes again flattened houses and tore up roads as Israeli forces pursued Hezbollah targets; agencies reported at least 12 dead in the day's attacks. The Lebanese Health Ministry believes the death toll is as high as 600 people, with as many as one-third of those still buried under collapsed buildings.

Heavy fighting also continued in Bint Jbeil, where Israel this week suffered its greatest one-day losses -- nine soldiers dead and 25 wounded. The army, which withholds details of wounded or killed soldiers until families are notified, had no immediate information on new casualties. An army spokeswoman said 26 Hezbollah fighters were killed there yesterday and a large weapons cache, including rifles, handguns, grenades and five anti-tank missiles, was uncovered.

[...]

Faced with growing concerns over the mounting death tolls at home and in Lebanon, Israeli army Chief of Staff Dan Halutz gave a round of interviews with Israeli media, acknowledging that Israel waited too long to act on Hezbollah's growing strength but saying a lack of military intelligence was not the problem.

"We never spoke in terms of subduing Hezbollah. We didn't say we will subdue, we will crush. It is not possible to crush ideology. But a weakening of Hezbollah can be achieved," Lieutenant-General Halutz told the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot.

Following an Israeli air strike on a UN post in southern Lebanon that killed four observers, the UN yesterday relocated 50 observers from the border to better-protected posts with lightly armed peacekeepers.

[...]


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Merkel Skeptical About Sending German Troops to Middle East

Deutsche Welle
July 29, 2006

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said in an interview that at the present time she does not support the idea of German troops being part of a peacekeeping contingent in Lebanon.

In an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, Merkel said she saw other opportunities for Germany to help out in the region, such as providing training for the police and military forces.

The German leader said the capacity of the country's armed forces, or Bundeswehr, were "largely exhausted."

"We are in Congo, we provide the most troops in the Balkans, and we have our largest contingent in Afghanistan," she said.

"As Germans, we should proceed in this region with utmost caution," she added.

While Germany has not ruled out sending troops, officials insist that any talk of a contribution is premature until a UN mandate for a multinational force is drawn up.

In the newspaper interview Merkel said besides Germany helping train Lebanese units, one of the most important areas was aiding in the "stabilization of the Lebanese reconciliation process."

also made clear that Germany's history gave it certain responsibilities.

"It is a historical duty of German policy to strongly support the right of Israel to exist," she said. "We have to be clear on the fact that the current crisis was sparked by Hezbollah. Hezbollah has fired rockets at Israel for months and kidnapped Israeli soldiers."


Divided opinion

The question of German participation in an international peacekeeping contingent has been a controversial one in Germany.

Jewish groups in Germany have been fiercely opposed, but members of the power-sharing government say the country cannot turn its back on its international responsibilities. Up until now, Merkel seemed to be keeping her options open.

As recently as Thursday, she told the daily Der Tagesspiegel: "This question is not one we have to answer for the time being,"

But Germany's main Jewish group has said it would be deeply unhappy if German soldiers were involved.

"Many survivors of the Holocaust are still living in Israel and I don't know how they would react if German troops had to act against an Israeli soldier who was defending his country," Stephan Kramer, the Secretary-general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told German public radio last week.

German politicians are divided on the question.


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Lebanon doomed to start all over again

The Globe and Mail
July 29, 2006

For a moment last year, after standing for weeks in the centre of her beloved Beirut with hundreds of thousands of other Lebanese and demanding change, Asma Andraos almost had the country she wanted.

Sixteen months ago, the 35-year-old public-relations consultant was one of the driving forces behind the popular uprising that became known as the Cedar Revolution. Last spring, weeks of mass protests forced the resignation of the unpopular government of then-prime-minister Omar Karami, and eventually caused the Syrian army to withdraw from Lebanon after a 29-year stay.

A country that had been torn apart by decades of civil war and foreign occupation had regained its sovereignty and was rediscovering its pre-war identity. Free elections, the first in the country's history, were held in June of 2005, returning a moderate, pro-Western government. Extremists, like Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and his Hezbollah movement, were slowly being pushed to the margins of the country's political scene.

Today, that Lebanon seems again lost. The country is once more embroiled in war, sectarian tensions are on the rise and foreign powers are again jostling for influence on its soil. Just when it was nearing the end of a long and painful process of reconstruction and reconciliation, Lebanon seems doomed to have to start all over again.

The achievements of the Cedar Revolution are completely undone.

"It all seems so far away now. I was as hopeful as I could be, as hopeful as I've ever been," Ms. Andraos said, recalling the massive crowds that filled the centre of Beirut, waving the country's red and white flag. "Back then, the sky was the limit, but maybe we were naive. Looking back now, I think we were very naive."

The Cedar Revolution was hailed by U.S. President George W. Bush as a breakthrough for democracy in the Middle East, and was held up as proof that his administration's controversial policies in the region, particularly the invasion and occupation of Iraq, were bearing real fruit. The Lebanese, Ms. Andraos says, were ecstatic that the United States was behind them, and happy to be the U.S. poster child in the Middle East.

Now, she says, all that is gone after 17 days of Israeli attacks for which the White House has provided political cover. While she's angry at both Hezbollah and Israel for dragging her country back into war, she reserves much of her fury for those she feels betrayed Lebanon even more.

Mr. Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, have said that they hope to see a "new Middle East" emerge from the conflict, one that's democratic and presumably one where people elect governments that are pro-Western and free market. Ms. Andraos, who was honoured by Time magazine as a Hero of Change for her behind-the-scenes role in organizing the Cedar Revolution, says that's exactly where Lebanon was heading before war broke out again.

"What is the new Middle East? I just find it all so arrogant. Who are the Americans to tell us?" she said, her voice rising to a shout.

"We thought [last year] that maybe Lebanon was something that the U.S. wanted to happen, and that we wanted to happen, that our interests were converging. Now, I seriously question whether they ever wanted anything good for Lebanon. If they wanted, they could get a ceasefire in half an hour. Only the U.S. is blocking it."

And with every Israeli shell that falls in Lebanon, she says, the political moderates who tried to point the country westward look sillier and sillier. And with every civilian death, support for the extremists in Hezbollah grows.

The crowd that gathered in the centre of Beirut on March 14, 2005, was astonishing in size, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. One million people, an amazing figure for a country of just four million, had gathered to mark the one-month anniversary of the assassination of the popular former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, a killing most Lebanese blamed on Syria.

The movement was dubbed at the time as "anti-Syrian," but it was something more remarkable than that. It was the first time that so many people here had put aside their sectarian differences and identified themselves not as Sunni, Shiite, Druze or Maronite Christian, but as Lebanese.

The reason was Mr. Hariri himself. A Sunni Muslim businessman-turned-politician, he was personally associated with Lebanon's postwar efforts to rise from the ashes of the conflict. A self-made billionaire, he organized, paid for and played host to the peace conference that brought an end to the civil war. During the war, he personally put tens of thousands of Lebanese children through school, and afterward his money and his influence helped rebuild shattered Beirut.

The crowd that turned out that day on Place des Martyrs was not only mourning Mr. Hariri, it was defending Lebanon's right to be something other than the battleground on which other countries, particularly Israel and Syria, fought their wars. They were defending Mr. Hariri's vision of a Lebanon that was modern, united and independent.

Even Hezbollah recognized the power of what was going on. As it held counter-rallies praising Syria's role in the country, it told its supporters to wave only Lebanon's cedar-tree flag at rallies, rather than the Syrian flag or its own yellow banner.

But despite adopting its symbol, Hezbollah was never comfortable with the direction of the Cedar Revolution. It saw the people-power movement as increasing the clout of France and the United States at the expense of its patrons in Syria and Iran, and worried about calls by the new government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora for the full implantation of United Nations Resolution 1559, which called for the militia's disarmament.


Still, until July 12, when Hezbollah fighters crept into Israel and captured two soldiers, drawing a massive response that has hit nearly every part of Lebanon, many believed that the disarmament issue would eventually be solved through dialogue, within Lebanon and among Lebanese.

"The message of the Cedar Revolution was that the majority of Lebanese wanted to live a normal life . . . with prosperity and peace and so forth. But that came up against a very different vision expressed by Hezbollah," said Michael Young, opinion editor of Beirut's English-language Daily Star newspaper. "There was, perhaps, too much hope that the Cedar Revolution had permeated all segments of society. Today, we are seeing the backlash from that and paying for it."

Ghena Hariri, Mr. Hariri's niece, says that because of the Cedar Revolution, her uncle's idea of Lebanon survived his assassination. After death, he became a larger-than-life figure who was paid homage to in Paris, Washington and London. Then war returned, and much of what he had done was undone.

"All of us here, we feel like we have been personally attacked," the 27-year-old said in an interview at the offices of the Hariri Foundation in the southern city of Sidon. "We feel the Israelis are attacking every single thing that Rafik Hariri built, from the airport, to the bridges, to the downtown. Everything that was making Lebanon into a modern country."

Before the war, Ms. Hariri was a symbol of a Lebanon that had survived the shock of her uncle's death and still was moving forward. Following in her uncle's footsteps, she was looking at starting her own business and doing a feasibility study for a fruit-packing company. Today, she's overseeing the Hariri Foundation's relief efforts, sleeping and eating at her office as she tries to find space for the tens of thousands of refugees who have arrived in the city.

Hours after Israeli warplanes struck in Sidon for the first time, she was thinking not of the Lebanon her uncle had tried to build, but of the one she and her family had fled in 1982, after previous Israeli invasion. "I was three years old in 1982, and when this started I just had flashbacks to how we were evacuated," she said, fiddling with her mobile phone. "This is all bringing back bad memories of how it used to be."

It was the second Saturday night of the war and D J R, as he's known to patrons at the Vida Loca nightclub, was doing his best to pull the crowd out of their dimly lit booths and onto the dance floor. But nothing he tried -- not even spinning the latest hit by Shakira, the half-Lebanese pop sensation -- could shake the largely Christian crowd out of its depressed stupor.

"Usually people are dancing by now," he yelled above the music, holding his headphones between his right ear and shoulder. "But because of the war, because of Israel, nobody wants to dance."

It's not just D J R who is having a hard time dealing with Lebanon's old new reality. Across what three weeks ago was the Middle East's good-times capital, the large majority of restaurants and bars have indefinitely closed their doors. The mood in those that do open is sombre.

"It's the end of my life as I knew it before," said 30-year-old Hani Hakim, as he sat in a coffee shop in the Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Hamra. "I have to come to terms with that. We're still in disbelief that this is happening in 2006."

It had been a long and expensive road back from the abyss, but 2006 was the year when it was supposed to start paying dividends. The country was expecting 1.8 million tourists this year, the highest number in more than three decades, since before the civil war.

Lebanon, which had always been more cosmopolitan and more Western than the rest of the Arab Middle East, suddenly started to sprint far ahead of the pack. Beirut -- a city that still bears the scars of the 1975-1990 civil war that, until the Cedar Revolution, was the country's defining experience -- was not just being rebuilt, it was recovering its style, swagger and reputation as the Paris of the Middle East.

New, swish, restaurants were opening up all over the city; sushi joints were in vogue. The capital's hedonistic nightclubs, which blew away any stereotypes a Westerner might have about the Middle East, were packed. Housing prices skyrocketed as rich Gulf Arabs flocked to make the scenic Mediterranean port their summer home. The country's own wealthy expatriates, who had fled from the war and been slow to return, came back and started to invest heavily in their native country.

The losses since the war began on July 12 have been staggering. Hundreds of people, almost all of them civilians, have been killed, and many believe the real figure is substantially higher. The country has sustained more than $2-billion (U.S.) in damage to its economy, and is struggling to deal with an estimated 700,000 people who were forced to flee their homes because of the Israeli assault.

Crucially, tens of thousands of the repatriates who were key to the country's economic rebound have again left. Many who boarded the Canadian-chartered ferries that evacuated people from Beirut this week said they hoped never to return to Lebanon. They'd tried to come back once, and wouldn't be fooled again.

It seems a staggering waste of opportunity for nearly all involved -- for the United States, which says it wants to see moderation and democracy replace the fanaticism and dictatorship that now dominate the Middle East; for Israel, which says it wants a peaceful northern neighbour; and for the Lebanese, who had almost buried their sectarian divisions, and now face not only an Israeli military assault, but a deepening division between the country's Shia Muslims on one side, and the Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslim communities on the other.

The only winners to date seem to be Syria and Iran, the backers of the Shia Hezbollah militia that provoked the war. They have emerged as the brokers with the power to end the current conflict, provided they get something back.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has seen its support soar among Lebanese from 29 per cent to 87 per cent since the war began. The number that believe the United States backs Lebanon has fallen from 38 per cent to 8 per cent.

Those that remain in Lebanon while so many others head for the exits wonder at what kind of country they're going to be living in once the fighting stops.

These days, Ms. Andraos is not a revolutionary, but an aid worker, helping the government's Higher Relief Council co-ordinate its response to the humanitarian crisis that has swept the country. Instead of the Lebanon she dreamed of, she's once more living in the nightmare country she grew up in and had hoped she'd never see again.

"The Lebanon of after this will be very different than the one of March 14. . . . At this point, it's very difficult to even think of a tomorrow. We're just living hour by hour."


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