Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Two Apache helicopters hovering south of the peninsula slowly ascended until they disappeared into the cloud. The third and closest Apache began describing large, lazy circles that brought it even closer to Tyre. It turned 90 degrees until it faced the peninsula. We eyeballed each other across a one-mile expanse of steel-gray sea before it, too, slowly rose and was enveloped by the cloud.

  As the last helicopter vanished from view, the soft crump of distant exploding artillery rounds rumbled across the silent city. To the southeast, tall columns of black smoke climbed into the sky from the foothills outside Tyre. The explosions appeared to be emanating from somewhere near Qana.

  The headquarters of UNIFIL’s Fijian battalion lay in the center of Qana village, a cluster of whitewashed one- and two-story buildings, some of them inscribed with “UN” painted in large black letters. The base had been there since UNIFIL’s arrival in 1978. Residents from nearby villages had begun to arrive in Qana on the first day of Grapes of Wrath, seeking the protection of the UN against the shelling of their homes. By day eight, some eight hundred refugees were crammed inside the base, most of them housed in the Fijian officers’ mess, a flimsy building consisting of a wooden frame and corrugated tin sheets, and the conference room, another simple prefabricated portacabin-style structure. The Fijian peacekeepers, tough soldiers but also gentle giants deeply committed to their Presbyterian faith, helped house and feed the refugees and played soccer with the children.

  The shelling in the distant hills continued as I walked back to the UNIFIL logistics base in Tyre. The UNIFIL convoy arrived minutes later, the heavy white-painted six-wheeled Finnish-built APCs lurching to a stop beside the gates. There was a sudden commotion as the peacekeepers, encased in light blue flak jackets and helmets, clambered out of the vehicles. Mike Lindvall, UNIFIL’s Swedish press spokesman, hurriedly briefed a throng of reporters. The Fijian headquarters had been struck by Israeli shells, he told us, and an emergency armored convoy was leaving immediately for Qana. There was no room for us on the APCs, so most reporters ran to their cars and tagged on to the rear of the convoy for protection. The APCs charged through the abandoned city before heading inland, following the road that wound through the chalky hills. The news had spread that something terrible had happened in Qana. Cars carrying civilians raced alongside us. One Mercedes almost collided head-on with an ambulance hurtling in the opposite direction. The ambulance’s windshield was smeared with the red earth of the south to prevent the sun from glinting on the glass and betraying its presence to Israeli jets and helicopters watching from the skies above.

  Hameeda Deeb, twenty-eight, arrived in Qana from Rishkananiyah village on the fourth day of Grapes of Wrath. In the early afternoon of April 18, she was sheltering in the Fijian conference room along with her sister Sukaina, thirty-four, her sister-in-law Sadiyah, twenty-seven, her nephews Mohammed, seven, and Hamzi, six, and her niece Fatmeh, eight months, as well as five other relatives aged between five and twenty years.

  “On that day in the early afternoon,” she recalls, “we were eating lunch in our building [the conference room]. It was very crowded, with maybe a hundred people inside. I remember feeling that something was wrong. The weather was dry but gloomy, and everyone was quieter than usual. It seemed as if something bad was going to happen but we did not want to admit it to each other.”5

  Shortly before two in the afternoon, the Fijians heard the hollow thump of outgoing mortar rounds fired from near the compound. The Fijians were among the most combat-experienced of all the battalions serving with UNIFIL, and they knew that an Israeli counterbombardment would arrive within minutes. They pushed as many refugees as they could fit into the bomb shelters and instructed other civilians to return to their rooms.

  As the UNIFIL convoy thundered into the narrow streets of Qana, a dense column of roiling black smoke marked the location of the Fijian battalion headquarters in the center of the village. Several headscarfed women stood on the side of the street, crying and wailing hysterically, their arms outstretched toward the passing UNIFIL vehicles.

  We halted behind an APC that was blocking the entrance to the Fijian camp. Reporters, UNIFIL soldiers, and civilians squeezed past the APC and hurried into the base. As I climbed out of the car, I momentarily stopped dead in astonishment. The air was thick with the musty reek of freshly spilled blood. It smelled like a butcher’s yard.

  “My family were all around me, my sons were sitting in a row in front of me,” recalls Saadallah Balhas, fifty-six, a tobacco farmer from neighboring Siddiqine village who was sheltering in Qana with twenty-two members of his extended family.

  I remember a shell exploding in the room no more than a meter from where I was sitting. My children were all blown to pieces, but because they were between me and the explosion, they saved my life. I was hit in the eye by a piece of shrapnel and my eardrums burst from the sound. I brushed my face to wipe away the blood and my eye fell out. My brother had been standing beside me but I could not find him; there was nothing left but meat. I could not even identify my children because there was nothing left of them.

  Fatmeh Balhas, twenty-five, a thin, sallow-faced mother of three children, was in line for food when the shell warning was announced. She returned to the officers’ mess—the same building that housed Saadallah Balhas and his family. Fatmeh sat down holding her sons, Hussein, three, and Hassan, two, while Qassem, her husband, cradled the infant Mohammed, who was only seventeen days old.

  “When the first shell landed, everybody started screaming and panicking,” she recalls. “Then the second shell exploded and for a moment there was silence. The room was full of smoke and I could see nothing. I was dazed and numbed from the impact. It was only minutes later that I realized my children were dead and my husband as well. I was on my own.”

  A naked severed leg lay on the ground, ripped off at the hip and blasted out of the ruins of the officers’ mess. The sheets of corrugated iron that comprised the walls and roof of the building had been blown away and lay on the ground, warped and twisted like autumn leaves. Only a knee-high cement wall and the wooden frame of the one-room building remained standing. The air was filled with the urgent shouts of rescue workers and the terrible screams of anguish and shock from the survivors frantically searching for their loved ones.

  “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” wailed one man staring into the officers’ mess, his hands gripping the sides of his head.

  Mounira Taqi, forty-two, a tall woman with tired, melancholy eyes, was sitting beside the entrance of the officers’ mess when the shelling began. Standing next to Mounira were her husband, Ibrahim, forty-three, and her two daughters, Dunia, eight, and Lina, seven. In her arms she held her seven-month-old baby boy, Ali.

  “I was sitting next to the door with my husband, Ibrahim, when the second explosion occurred. A piece of shrapnel from the explosion slashed his throat open, and the last sound I heard him make was the rush of air emptying from his lungs as he collapsed. I also had Ali in my arms, but God helped him survive. I could not see my daughter [Dunia] because of the smoke. But as the smoke cleared, I was only able to recognize her from a piece of her pajamas. She had been blown to pieces and there was nothing else left.”

  • • •

  The body of Ibrahim Taqi was lying at the entrance of the ruined officers’ mess. His corpse was partially hidden by a woolen blanket thrown over him by one of the Fijian soldiers. A flap of flesh at the back of his neck was all that connected his head to his torso. His head was stretched back at an absurd angle, exposing the ghastly wound.

  The officers’ mess was a charnel house. The Fijian soldiers tried to lend the dead some dignity by covering the torn corpses with blankets. But the shrouds could not hide the horror. There were dozens of bodies, wrapped, embraced, and coiled together in the cold intimacy of death. They covered the entire floor of the officers’ mess. Some had been blown into the corner, like a pile of swept leaves. Bewildered Fijian soldiers stood silently, wide-eyed with shock, staring at t
he corpses, momentarily unsure what to do next. Many of the corpses had lost heads, arms, and legs. Pieces of human meat had been blasted onto the low surrounding wall and the wooden support columns. Thick gouts of dark red blood smeared the floor and soaked the blankets. There was so much blood, streams of the stuff ran down the cement steps and collected in dark congealing pools in the dust. It stuck to our shoes. I later noticed that I had minced human flesh wedged into the rubber treads of my boots. Stunned camera crews and photographers raised the corners of blankets and gazed fearfully at what lay beneath, some of them openly sobbing as they mechanically recorded the horror in relentless and clinical detail.

  A Fijian soldier, wearing rubber gloves and grasping a black trash bag, muttered prayers to himself as he stooped to pick up scraps of flesh from the ground outside the building.

  A civil defense worker wearing a helmet and flak jacket raised the corpse of a tiny child. The top of the infant’s head was gone. Its tiny arms and legs flopped lifelessly like a rag doll’s as the civil defense worker, his face stricken, held the child aloft in front of the cameras. The infant was seventeen-day-old Mohammed Balhas, Fatmeh’s youngest son.

  • • •

  Hameeda Deeb, who had felt a sense of impending doom all day, was beside the Fijian battalion’s conference room when the first shells struck.

  I heard no warning and the shelling came as a surprise. Everybody was panicking and looking for somewhere safe. Then I ran back inside the building [the conference room] and hugged Hamzi and Mohammed [her nephews]. There was an explosion and that was when I lost my arm and leg, although I didn’t know they had gone at the time. Both Hamzi and Mohammed, who were in my arms, were killed. I felt no pain; I was in shock. My eyes were open but I was not aware of what was happening around me. The building was on fire and the flames were less than a meter away. But I could not move. I felt my back begin to burn and I looked around for my sister. She was lying next to me, but I was not sure if it was her at first because her face had disappeared. Someone, I don’t know who, came into the room and saw that I was still alive. He dragged me … out of the flames. I hardly remember being taken to the hospital. I was in a car and my head was hanging out of the door and my hair was brushing the road. I could hear the screams of injured people in the car with me, so I knew I was not alone.

  Three Fijian peacekeepers directed a feeble trickle of water over the smoldering remains of the conference room. Pools of pink diluted blood collected at their feet. The shell that tore the flimsy structure apart also turned it into an inferno. The mangled remains of the conference room contained a congealed, smoking, stinking mass of incinerated plastic chairs, tables, clothing, blankets, tinned food, and—as the eyes adjusted to the amorphous shapes—corpses, burned and blackened beyond any semblance of human form. Lying beside the conference room were yet more bodies dragged from the flames. One carbonized corpse was so hot when it was dragged out of the blaze that it had charred the blanket in which it was wrapped.

  Nearby, a woman wailed over the dismembered corpse of her brother. With her arms raised and her face frozen with shock, she babbled a near-incoherent stream of grief. She tugged on her brother’s lifeless arm. His other arm was missing, as were his legs. The shrapnel had cut him in half at the waist. A blanket covered the lower half of his body to conceal the terrible wounds. The brother’s blood-smeared face wore an expression of placid indifference as his sister keened over him.

  The clatter of approaching helicopters drew nervous glances skyward, but it was UNIFIL’s Italian air wing arriving to evacuate the wounded. Even as the dead were gathered and the wounded taken away, Israel continued its relentless artillery barrage of the area, with shells exploding less than a mile away.

  Amid the horror and shock, there was rage. Three young men ran into the compound. One of them screamed abuse at a cameraman and drew a pistol from beneath his shirt. His two colleagues restrained him. Another man knocked a camera aside and threatened to kill anyone who took more pictures. Gradually, the Fijians began to restore some order, marshaling themselves into a line clutching their M-16 rifles to block access to the bloody interior of their headquarters.

  One shocked Fijian soldier told me, “Hezbollah fired some mortars near the camp and then the Israelis shelled us.”

  Another, staring blankly into the distance, simply said, “I can’t speak. I’m too moved. They just have to find peace now.”

  “I Thought, My God, This Is Not an Accident”

  To this day, no one knows exactly how many people died in the slaughter at the Fijian headquarters on April 18, 1996. Estimates vary between 102 and 109, with more than two hundred others wounded.

  The massacre in Qana received instant and worldwide condemnation. In an abrupt reversal of his earlier indifference toward the fighting, Clinton called for an “immediate cease-fire” and dispatched Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, to the region. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary general, said he was “shocked and outraged” by the massacre and sent to Lebanon Major General Franklin van Kappen, his Dutch military adviser, to launch an investigation.

  Israel’s initial response was defiant. Peres blamed Hezbollah for launching rockets and mortars close to the Fijian battalion headquarters and said that the offensive would continue.

  In Beirut, Hezbollah issued a statement denying it had fired from near the Fijian base. But as the UN’s van Kappen subsequently revealed in his report, fifteen minutes before the Israeli shelling, Hezbollah had fired between five and eight 120 mm mortar rounds from beside a cemetery two hundred yards southwest of the Fijian base.6 A unit of the still-classified Egoz commandos had been spotted by Hezbollah planting IEDs just north of the occupation zone. The first mortar rounds fell about a hundred yards from the commandos, then they inched closer, guided onto target by Hezbollah’s forward observers. The Israelis said they initiated a rescue fire mission by shelling the location of the Hezbollah mortar. Some of the shells had overshot their target, the Israelis told van Kappen, and “regrettably” had hit the Fijian base.

  But van Kappen’s team was unconvinced. From an examination of the ground, they found evidence of thirty-six shell impacts and discerned that the rounds fell into two distinct concentrations. One was centered on a group of buildings close to the cemetery where the Hezbollah mortar team was located. The second impact site was in the middle of the Fijian headquarters. Witnesses said that there had been a perceptible shift in the weight of fire during the seventeen-minute bombardment, from the first location to the UNIFIL base. In other words, at some point during the shelling, the Israeli gunners had switched targets from near the cemetery to the Fijian base itself.

  When van Kappen was dispatched to Lebanon, he initially believed that the slaughter was caused by a technical or operational error. A tragic accident, but an accident nonetheless.

  “When I arrived in Lebanon at the Fijian headquarters, the first thing I did was stand on the roof of the main building and look at the fall of shot, and then I got an uncanny feeling … I thought, my God, this is not an accident,” van Kappen recalls.

  “We Got Five or Six of the Bastards”

  Van Kappen’s team also discovered that the majority of the shells that struck the Fijian headquarters were fitted with proximity fuses, designed to explode a few feet above the ground to maximize the shrapnel spray. Shells fitted with proximity fuses are typically employed against troop formations and soft-skinned vehicles rather than hardened positions such as buildings.

  The Israeli explanation for the bombardment of Qana was looking increasingly suspect as van Kappen and his team probed deeper. The Israelis claimed that they were unaware that Lebanese civilians had been sheltering at the Fijian headquarters. However, UNIFIL had informed Israel that some nine thousand civilians were staying in UN facilities, a statistic that had also been widely reported in the media.

  Then there was the discrepancy over the presence of helicopters and a drone above Qana. The Israelis repeatedly told van Kap
pen they had had no aerial assets over Qana “before, during, or after the shelling.”

  But the Dutch general had evidence from thirty-five eyewitnesses including UNIFIL peacekeepers, Lebanese soldiers, and civilians, all of whom testified to seeing a UAV and helicopters in the vicinity of Qana at the time of the shelling. Additionally, he had in his possession a videotape shot by a Norwegian UNIFIL soldier on a hilltop opposite Qana that clearly showed a drone flying above the village during the bombardment.

  Israeli officials also claimed that the Hezbollah mortar team had sought protection from the shelling by running into the Fijian base. The allegation raised the obvious question of how the Israelis could have known that Hezbollah men were fleeing into the base unless they had a drone overhead relaying real-time video footage to Israel. Van Kappen suspected that the Israeli artillery gunners switched from targeting the mortar site to the Fijian headquarters because footage from the passing drone had shown Hezbollah men entering the camp. Indeed, Brigadier General Amiram Levine, the fiery-tempered head of the IDF Northern Command, inadvertently admitted as much to van Kappen. In a meeting between the two, Levine angrily denounced the investigation, accusing the UN of bias against Israel and blaming Hezbollah for consistently firing rockets and mortars from near the Fijian battalion headquarters.

  “Then he said, ‘But we got five or six of the bastards that fled into the camp.’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ Then he realized he had made a mistake and tried to gloss it over.… That, for me, was a clear indication that Levine knew what had happened.”