Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  A few months earlier, Major General Alain Pellegrini, a short, moon-faced French officer who commanded UNIFIL, had attended a meeting in Jerusalem with senior Israeli military staff at which the subject of a possible Hezbollah kidnapping along the Blue Line was brought up. Pellegrini was told that if there was another abduction, Israel would set “Beirut on fire.” “This was a real red line for Israel,” Pellegrini told me.

  The UNIFIL commander passed the warning on to the Lebanese government, but he was unaware whether it reached Hezbollah. If it had, it is unlikely that Hezbollah would have paid much attention. Hezbollah believed that the “balance of terror” along the Blue Line would continue to hold even if more Israeli soldiers were abducted. For all the headaches Hezbollah caused the Israeli government, there was little appetite in Israel for a war. In the aftermath of the raid on Ghajar, Major General Aharam Zeevi-Farkash, the IDF military intelligence chief, met with Ariel Sharon and told the premier that Nasrallah was trying to drag Israel into a war. “You worry too much,” Sharon replied to Farkash. “I know what they are trying to do.”

  “It’s Up to God”

  On January 4, 2006, Sharon suffered a stroke and fell into a coma. He was replaced by his deputy, Ehud Olmert, who went on to narrowly win a general election two months later. The key defense portfolio was conferred upon Amir Peretz, a former trade union leader who, like Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, had no military background.

  All the pieces were in place for a disaster. A hubristic Hezbollah was determined to kidnap more Israeli soldiers, confident in its powers of deterrence against an Israel that time and time again since 2000 had demonstrated no appetite for a major confrontation. And in Israel there was a raw, untested government whose top security ministers lacked any military experience. Adding to the brew was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff since 2005. A former head of the Israeli Air Force, Halutz strongly opposed the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon, supported the continued overflights in Lebanese airspace despite international protestations, and, according to Timur Goksel, the veteran UNIFIL official, believed that “every problem can be solved with a suitable application of firepower from his F-16s or Apache assault helicopters.”7

  On the morning of May 26, Mohammed and Nidal Majzoub, two brothers who were top officials in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, died when their booby-trapped car blew up on a busy street in Sidon. Mohammed Majzoub was PIJ’s liaison officer with Hezbollah, and until recently he and his brother had lived under Hezbollah’s protection in its “security quarter” in the southern suburbs of Beirut. According to a senior Hezbollah official, their fate was sealed when their wives grew bored with being cloistered in the “security quarter” and badgered their husbands into moving to Sidon, where Hezbollah could not provide the same level of security.

  In keeping with the tit-for-tat brinkmanship along the Blue Line, a retaliation was expected for the deaths of the Majzoub brothers. It came two days later, when eight Katyusha rockets were fired from close to the border fence south of the village of Aittaroun in the western sector. The surprising choice of target was the Israeli air control base on Mount Meron, six miles south of the border. Seven of the eight Katyushas struck the facility in what was at the time the deepest penetration into Israel by Hezbollah’s rockets. Hezbollah denied responsibility, but no other group in Lebanon had the capacity for such accurate rocket fire or the tactical bravado in selecting such a pertinent target.

  The Israelis initially preferred to blame the PFLP-GC, the usual address for messages involving rockets crossing the border. Israeli jets bombed PFLP-GC bases in the Bekaa Valley and south of Beirut. But after an unidentified gunman shot and wounded an Israeli soldier along the border hours later, the jets returned to Lebanese skies and staged more than sixty air strikes against Hezbollah positions in the border district. Hezbollah responded by mortaring Israeli border outposts, and by midafternoon, the biggest confrontation in five years was under way all along the Blue Line. The Israelis took advantage of the fighting to destroy most of Hezbollah’s observation posts along the border. Tanks blasted lookout towers and smashed walls and fortifications following what was clearly a pre-prepared plan. Only one Hezbollah fighter was killed in the clashes, however; all Hezbollah men had vacated the visible positions before the fighting began, in accordance with normal procedure.

  UNIFIL helped broker a cease-fire in the late afternoon, and both sides retired to assess the outcome. The following day, I drove along a narrow lane that wound up the side of a steep hill overlooking the border village of Kfar Kila. Hezbollah had a position on the summit of the hill that had apparently been heavily damaged by Israeli air strikes during the fighting the previous day. I was not expecting to reach the top of the hill, but it was sometimes worth blithely driving into Hezbollah’s security pockets to see what would happen. A steel chain suspended between two concrete blocks marked the end of the road for me. A Hezbollah man, dressed in a green camouflage uniform and floppy bush hat and with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, stepped into the center of the road and raised his hand.

  Explaining that I was a journalist and flashing my Lebanese government-issued press card, I told him I had heard there had been an air raid on the hill and I was here to have a look. The fighter spoke into his walkie-talkie and instructed me to switch off the car engine and wait, as this would take some time, an hour, perhaps longer. The warm spring breeze carried the scent of wild thyme and ruffled the fluffy heads of purple thistles lining the road.

  Initially taciturn, the Hezbollah fighter grew friendlier as the minutes passed. He had joined the resistance ten years earlier and fought during the occupation and afterward in the Shebaa Farms. He denied that the Israelis had bombed the hilltop outpost the previous day, saying that the bulldozer grinding to and fro, out of sight but clearly audible to both of us, was simply destroying an old Israeli outpost. “The Israelis started the fighting by killing the two Islamic Jihad men in Sidon,” he said. “The Israelis are always making wars against their neighbors—Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria, Jordan, Egypt. When the Israelis occupied Lebanon it was natural for me to join the resistance and fight. Now we are defending Lebanon.”

  So when would the next battle with the Israelis be?

  The fighter smiled and said, “It’s up to God.”

  A black Range Rover without license plates—the mark of a Hezbollah security vehicle—pulled up beside us. A small, thin man with a wispy beard and dressed in civilian clothes and a baseball cap scrutinized my press card. He pulled from his pocket a small digital camera and sheepishly asked me to stand beside my car. Does one give a friendly smile or stare with a scowl for a Hezbollah mug shot?, I thought, as the photographer took the picture. Then, looking even more embarrassed and apologizing profusely, he asked me to turn sideways so that he could snap a shot of my profile. I was released shortly afterward, with more apologies for having been detained for so long.

  The following week, I met with Sheikh Nabil Qawq in Hezbollah’s press office in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The tall white-turbaned cleric strode into the room and we shook hands and greeted each other. He sat down in an armchair and leaned forward.

  “I liked your pictures,” he said with an amused smile.

  Qawq was Hezbollah’s top man in southern Lebanon, and it was natural that the mug shots of a foreign snooper would have been passed on to him. I could imagine him shaking his head in exasperation as he flicked through the photos. Blanford up to mischief again.

  He was in good spirits, though, and a lively conversation ensued. We discussed the latest round of fighting. The Israelis had struck a self-congratulatory tone, believing that the swift use of heavy firepower against the Hezbollah positions had given the party a bloody nose.

  “We hope the message from our response was understood correctly by the other side,” said Brigadier General Gal Hirsch, commander of the IDF’s Galilee Division. “If the message was not internalized and violence recurs, we will know how to retaliate ev
en stronger.”8

  Amos Harel, the defense correspondent of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, wrote that Nasrallah had fallen into an “ambush” by firing rockets at the Mount Meron air control base, thus giving Israel an excuse to smash its military infrastructure along the border. “When a guerrilla organization builds permanent positions, it provides its enemy with a range of easy targets,” he wrote.

  Yet unknown to everyone outside the circles of the Islamic Resistance was the fact that Hezbollah’s real positions—the steel-lined tunnels, bunkers, and camouflaged rocket-firing positions buried deep in the sides of south Lebanon’s hills—remained undiscovered and untouched. No wonder Qawq was dismissive of the Israeli claims.

  “We were not surprised by the Israeli escalation,” he said. “We knew it was likely … so we took precautions. Our positions were all empty.

  These positions are not real positions anyway.… [The Israelis] have an inferiority complex. They hit empty positions and then talk about an imaginary success.”

  Israel had ended the latest bout with restored confidence in its ability to confront Hezbollah and deal the organization a blow of sufficient strength for Hezbollah’s leadership to think twice before embarking on any more escapades along the border. And Hezbollah had emerged unimpressed with Israel’s boasts of military strength, remaining convinced that its own powers of deterrence still held. Both sides, blinded by hubris, had taken another step closer to the brink of disaster.

  “We are confident enough in our capabilities to make any Israeli adventure very expensive, so high that they cannot tolerate the burden,” Qawq said. “In fact they will have more damage than Lebanon.”

  In less than one month, that boast would be put to the test.

  TEN

  “Birth Pangs”

  You wanted an open war, an open war is what you will get. It will be a full-scale war. To Haifa and—believe me—beyond Haifa and beyond beyond Haifa.

  —SAYYED HASSAN NASRALLAH,

  July 14, 2006

  JULY 22, 2006

  SIDDIQINE, south Lebanon—The white minibus had coasted to a halt beside a metal garbage container on the side of the road overlooking a steep valley. The missile had struck the center of the tin roof, punching a gaping, jagged hole before exploding inside.

  A man slouched to one side in his seat as if the drive had lulled him to sleep. But the top of his head was gone, leaving an empty skull and thick gouts of blood and brain matter dribbling down what was left of his face. His yellowing hand dangled nonchalantly out the glassless window. A dead woman sat beside him slumped over the seat in front, the back of her pale blue dress drenched in blood, scorched from the explosion, and pockmarked by shrapnel. The interior of the vehicle looked as though someone had flung in buckets of scarlet paint. Beside the dead man and covered in the contents of his skull, a woman sat upright staring blankly ahead, lost in shock. Her black dress was sodden with blood, her face a gory mask.

  “Can you stand?” asked a Red Cross medic. The woman—I later discovered her name was Ibtissam Shayto—moved her mouth slightly, but her words were unintelligible. Two of the medics clambered onto the roof of the minibus, struggling under the weight of their cumbersome orange flak jackets and white helmets. They carefully hauled Ibtissam through the hole in the roof, tied a bandage around her head, and gently lowered her into the waiting arms of their colleagues.

  A few yards away, the other passengers lay on the ground, the more serious casualties groaning and writhing as medics tended to them. The driver of the minibus, a thin man with an unkempt beard, lay on his back, his hands over his eyes, crying out in anguish, “Ya Allah! Ya Allah! (Oh God! Oh God!)”

  There were nineteen passengers, all of them from the village of At-Tiri near Bint Jbeil. They had squeezed themselves inside the minibus in a desperate attempt to escape the killing zone that south Lebanon had become over the past week. Ali Shayto, a pudgy twelve-year-old boy whose naked torso was speckled in blood, said that they had been instructed by the Israelis over the radio to leave the village. “Someone came for us and we drove with our cars out of the village,” he said. “We were trying to keep up with the others when we were hit.”

  Like so many other civilian vehicles fleeing the south, they had trailed white sheets from the windows to signal to Israeli helicopters and drones that they were noncombatants. It had made no difference. The missile, probably fired from a drone, struck the minibus as it approached the village of Siddiqine. It was a miracle that only three people were killed in the densely packed vehicle; among them were Ibtissam’s mother and brother-in-law. All the other passengers were wounded to varying degrees of severity. Ali’s brother, Abbas, sobbed beside his supine mother, whose bandaged left arm was streaked with blood. She silently raised her right hand and held her son’s arm in a consoling gesture.

  This was our first trip out of the relative safety of Tyre since arriving in the port town five days earlier. We had planned to reach Tibnine and had shadowed an ambulance, hoping that the Red Cross emblem on the roof would provide some protection from the prowling missile-firing pilotless drones that had turned the narrow roads meandering through valleys and steep chalky hills east of Tyre into places of terror and death.

  The journey to Tibnine was abandoned, however, when we came across the minibus just minutes after it was hit. The ambulance loaded as many casualties as it could hold, and we hurtled back to Tyre. A car was burning furiously on the road outside the Najem hospital on Tyre’s outskirts, the result of yet another missile strike. The three occupants had managed to escape just before the vehicle was engulfed in orange flames.

  “This is getting worse and worse by the day,” said Qassem Shaalan, a young Lebanese Red Cross volunteer. His unit had made twenty trips into the Tyre hinterland that morning alone to recover casualties. By midday, he told me, ten cars, including an ambulance belonging to a local charity, had been attacked in the vicinity of Tyre. That night, Shaalan was almost killed when a pair of missiles, believed fired from an Israeli drone, slammed into two parked ambulances in Qana during a transfer of wounded civilians.

  At the Jabal Amil hospital in Tyre, the casualties continued to arrive along with more reports of targeted cars—two from At-Tiri, including the minibus, one from Qlayly, one from Aytit, and two from Jmayjme.

  A UNIFIL officer told me that the Israelis had promised the peacekeeping force they would not hinder vehicles traveling north on the main roads. But the evidence suggested that cars were being attacked regardless of their occupants and the direction in which they were headed.

  “They have been hitting civilian cars all over the place,” Peter Bouckart of Human Rights Watch told me. “I have been in many war zones, but this one is one of the most dangerous places I have ever seen.”

  “Yes, Our Fighters Are in Action”

  It had begun eleven days earlier on a bright sunny morning. I was scanning Lebanese and Israeli news websites as part of my morning routine when, shortly after 9:00 A.M., a one-line news flash popped up on the Haaretz ticker. Rockets fired from Lebanon had just struck the area of Shelomi in western Galilee. This was not an unusual occurrence. Every few months, anonymous groups or individuals launched short-range 107 mm rockets across the Blue Line into Israel, but rarely causing damage or casualties. I telephoned Hussein Naboulsi, Hezbollah’s foreign media spokesman, to try to find out what was happening. I expected him to say that Hezbollah had no information. Since May 2000, the only operations claimed by Hezbollah had all occurred in the Shebaa Farms, the tacitly accepted theater of conflict between the Islamic Resistance and the Israeli army. The Shebaa Farms was occupied Arab territory, which helped legitimize Hezbollah’s military actions, but attacks across the border into Israel would be considered acts of war.

  When Hussein picked up the phone, I jokingly asked if his “boys” were up to anything along the border. His reply made me sit up. “Yes, our fighters are in action,” Hussein said, “but I don’t have any further details.”

  I
f Hezbollah was admitting that it had launched an operation along the border with Israel, then it could only be something significant.

  “Hussein, has Hezbollah kidnapped an Israeli soldier?”

  Hussein hesitated before responding.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The military people haven’t told me anything yet.”

  In fact, Hezbollah had abducted not one but two soldiers, snatching them from an army Humvee seconds after attacking it with rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The Humvee was one of two on a routine patrol of the border fence facing the western sector, close to the Hezbollah bastion of Aitta Shaab. The rear Humvee, traveling about a hundred yards behind the lead vehicle, was disabled by machine gun fire and RPGs, the three soldiers inside shot dead. Two of the four soldiers in the lead vehicle were wounded but escaped and hid in bushes. The remaining two, Sergeant Udi Goldwasser, the patrol’s commander, and Eldad Regev, were grabbed by the Hezbollah fighters and driven away in civilian jeeps along a dirt track in the direction of Aitta Shaab.

  The ambush site was well chosen. It fell into a “dead zone,” out of sight of nearby IDF compounds, at the bottom of a wadi between the Israeli border settlements of Zarit and Shetula. The IDF had planned to erect a surveillance camera in the wadi the following week. As the kidnappers raced away, Hezbollah fire support teams staged a diversionary bombardment with mortars and Katyusha rockets against nearby Israeli outposts and the settlements of Zarit and Shetula. Hezbollah snipers shot out surveillance cameras along the border fence.