Warriors of God

by Nicholas Blanford

  Some forty minutes later, the Israelis confirmed that two of their soldiers were missing. A Merkava tank and a platoon of troops in armored personnel carriers crossed the border in hot pursuit of the Hezbollah abductors. But the tank struck one of Hezbollah’s belly charges, a massive IED consisting of an estimated five hundred pounds of explosive, one of many planted at potential breach points along the border. The huge blast tore the tank to pieces, killing all four crew members. Another soldier was killed in clashes with local Hezbollah men lying in wait. That brought the number of Israeli soldiers killed that morning to eight, the highest single day fatality toll for Israeli troops in Lebanon since the Ansariyah disaster in September 1997.

  I was well on the way to south Lebanon by the time it was publicly confirmed that two Israeli soldiers had been kidnapped. The clashes around Aitta Shaab had spread. The Israelis were bombing bridges in a forlorn attempt to prevent the kidnappers from taking the two hostages farther north. The bridge spanning the limpid green waters of the Litani River on the coastal road just north of Tyre had already been destroyed by Israeli jets by the time I arrived there. A Lebanese soldier and two civilians were killed in the air strike. Soldiers blocked the road at a checkpoint a mile from the collapsed bridge and yelled at southbound motorists to turn around. I headed east through rolling chalky hills toward Nabatiyah, trying to find another way across the river. In the dusty hilltop villages, convoys of cars with yellow Hezbollah flags streaming in the wind drove through the streets honking horns at the news of the capture of the two soldiers. Hezbollah supporters stood in the center of roads handing out sweets to passing motorists in celebration.

  From Marjayoun, the crump of artillery fire echoed across the valley to the east as round after round exploded at the foot of the Shebaa Farms. The roar of a low-flying jet signaled an air strike was about to commence. A loud blast was followed moments later by a tall column of dust and smoke that climbed into the deep blue sky beyond Khiam.

  Within minutes of Hezbollah commanders learning of the success of the kidnapping operation, the call went out to hundreds of fighters living in the south to move to frontline positions in expectation of an Israeli counterattack. Among those receiving call-up orders was Abu Khalil, the veteran Hezbollah fighter who used to load Katyusha rockets for launching in the 1990s. He was at home when he received a call instructing him to report to a position in the Marjayoun area. Abu Khalil left his mobile phone behind, said farewell to his family without telling them where he was going, and rendezvoused with a Renault van that carried him to his destination. There were two other passengers in the vehicle besides the driver. None of them spoke. They listened to Koranic verses playing on the Renault’s CD player and contemplated what lay ahead. Abu Khalil thought of his two young daughters and his wife and parents and wondered if God would make him a martyr in the coming conflict. By midday, he was in position near Marjayoun, listening intently to his orders from a Hezbollah commander.

  Another fighter, Hajj Ali, a slightly built, gaunt-faced fifty-year-old veteran of more than two decades’ service with Hezbollah who today trains new recruits at camps in Iran, was sent to the southern Bekaa Valley at the start of the war to join a crew firing long-range rockets into Israel. “In 2000, when the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon many people [in Hezbollah] were upset because the line we follow is jihad and it had ended,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me—we don’t like war. We don’t treat it as a hobby. But when war came in 2006, many of us smiled because it was chance for us to once more follow the path of jihad.”

  “Lebanon Is Not Gaza”

  Nasrallah gave a press conference at 5:00 A.M. that was covered live on television. I watched it in a café in Marjayoun as I wrote my first dispatch for the day. The Hezbollah chief said that the Israeli soldiers were abducted to secure the release of the last remaining detainees in Israel, especially Samir Kuntar. And the only way the soldiers would return home was through indirect negotiations. “Any military operation,” he said, “will not result in rescuing these prisoners.”

  Even as he spoke, the Israelis had taken out two more bridges across the Litani River and were dropping aerial bombs on main roads, rendering them impassable. Hezbollah observation posts and security pockets were coming under air attack and shell fire.

  Nasrallah was not looking for a serious confrontation with Israel. He was gambling that a new, untested, and civilian-heavy Israeli cabinet would balk at launching a war against Hezbollah and instead would opt for prisoner swap negotiations as previous governments had done. Yet was there just a sense of unease in his voice as he warned Israel about the folly of overreacting to the abductions? Did Nasrallah, the master tactician, at that moment begin to wonder if he had miscalculated how the Israelis might react?

  “We do not want to escalate things in the south,” he said. “We do not want to push Israel into war. We do not want to push the region into war.”

  Senior Israeli military officials were already threatening that the “period of quiet is over” and that if the abducted soldiers were not released “we’ll turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years.”

  Responding to the threats, Nasrallah cautioned that the Lebanon of today was “different from the Lebanon of twenty years ago. If they choose confrontation, then they should expect surprises.”

  The ministers belonging to the Western-backed March 14 parliamentary bloc in Lebanon’s coalition government were furious at the kidnapping operation, especially as Nasrallah had previously provided assurances that Hezbollah would not embark upon any military adventures during the summer months that could jeopardize the lucrative tourist season.

  Saudi Arabia, which backed Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government, released an unusually frank statement, tacitly blaming Hezbollah and Iran for “irresponsible actions” and “uncalculated adventures.”

  Siniora learned of the kidnapping operation while meeting with Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese president. On returning to his office, he summoned Hussein Khalil, Nasrallah’s top adviser, and asked him why Hezbollah had mounted such an operation, and outside the Shebaa Farms.

  “He replied, ‘We got the chance,’ ” Siniora later recalled. “I asked him, ‘What will the Israelis do?’ He answered, ‘Nothing.’ ”1

  But Siniora was worried that Israel would unleash the same anger on Lebanon as it had on Gaza just three weeks earlier, when Palestinian militants from three separate groups had tunneled their way out of the Gaza Strip, infiltrated an IDF outpost, and snatched a soldier, Gilad Shalit. Israel launched a major offensive against northern Gaza to punish militant groups.

  Siniora reminded Khalil of the heavy Israeli response to the kidnapping in Gaza, but the unruffled Hezbollah official told Siniora, “Lebanon is not Gaza.”

  “This Is the First Surprise”

  But Israel at that moment was making plans that would lead to war. Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the IDF chief of staff and a former head of the air force, recommended using air power to punish and cow Hezbollah in a series of surgical strikes. One operation would target facilities suspected of containing Hezbollah’s arsenal of Iranian Fajr rockets and their launchers. Another would hit the runways of Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport, the border crossings with Syria, and a selection of infrastructure targets. The operations were approved by the Israeli cabinet on the evening of July 12. Most Israeli ministers assumed that the aerial offensive would be over in a couple of days and that Hezbollah, stunned by the ferocity of the Israeli response and suitably chastened, would sue for a cease-fire. The offensive would change the “rules of the game” in south Lebanon. Israeli deterrence would be restored and the international community would be well positioned to press for the fulfillment of UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demanded Hezbollah’s disarming. In the early stages of the war, some Israeli officials were looking to replace UNIFIL’s two thousand armed observers deployed along the Blue Line with a robust NATO force. A UNIFIL official who was on leave in Israel on July 12 rec
alls meeting with top military staff and urging them to take advantage of the kidnapping to pursue a diplomatic path and not to resort to a punishing military campaign. But the Israelis told him, “No. The Americans and French can put their troops where their mouths are.”

  The Israelis claim the operation to knock out the Fajr rockets in the early hours of July 13 took just thirty-four minutes, during which fifty-nine targets throughout south Lebanon were bombed, including private homes where launchers were allegedly stored. The Israelis hailed the operation as a “singular achievement” and the result of years of patient intelligence collection and analysis.

  Halutz would later claim that 90 percent of Hezbollah’s long-range rocket arsenal was destroyed during the war. That may be an overly optimistic assessment. Indeed, in Lebanon there was a certain amount of skepticism about the claimed success of the Fajr operation. Hezbollah was known to have built decoy launchers and rockets to fool the Israelis. Years earlier, Hezbollah had constructed a fake rocket from several oil drums soldered together with a cone fixed to one end. The rocket was placed on the back of a trailer, loosely covered with a tarpaulin sheet, and driven around the south, allowing it to be detected by Israeli reconnaissance drones or jets.

  Ehud Olmert and the Israeli government, buoyed by the apparent success of the Fajr operation, wanted more. The decision was made to escalate the reprisals by bombing Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The attacks began that evening. Multistory buildings, the homes and offices of Hezbollah’s leadership, including the building where I had interviewed Nasrallah three years earlier, pancaked into rubble and dust, each missile exploding in a huge percussive blast that shook the entire city. Hezbollah’s security center in the heart of the southern suburbs was turned into a wasteland of smashed concrete.

  It was only when the Israelis dropped leaflets warning residents of the southern suburbs to flee prior to the attack that the magnitude of the Israeli retaliation seemed to dawn on Hezbollah’s leadership. Until then, it was business as usual for Hezbollah staff at offices in Beirut and elsewhere. With the Israeli leaflet drop, the cadres received orders to relocate to “the points,” the secret wartime locations for the leadership, administrative, and media branches. The building housing the Al-Manar television channel was destroyed, but broadcasts were barely interrupted as the channel continued operating from its alternative location.

  Hezbollah responded with a heavy barrage of rockets, targeting for the first time Haifa, twenty-five miles south of the border. On the evening of July 14, Nasrallah gave a live speech on Al-Manar by telephone from his underground bunker deep below the southern suburbs. After praising the Islamic Resistance fighters, he directly addressed the Israelis, accusing them of “changing the rules of the game.” “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.”

  At that moment, unseen by the listening audience, Nasrallah was handed a note by an assistant. Continuing with his speech, the Hezbollah leader recalled that he had promised surprises in this war. “This is the first surprise,” he said, urging people in Beirut to stare out to sea. “Right now, the Israeli warship at sea—look at it now, it’s burning.”

  In the inky blackness of the night there was a distinct orange glow and showers of sparks. It was a stunning piece of theatrics. Cheers and applause could be heard emanating from balconies throughout west Beirut facing the Mediterranean. Nasrallah had promised surprises, and he had delivered.

  The stricken vessel was the INS Hanit, a Saar-5 missile boat. Hezbollah had launched at least three of its Iranian Noor radar-guided antiship missiles from the port of Ouzai at the southern end of Beirut. The first missile overshot the ship and continued flying out to sea before homing in on an Egyptian-crewed Cambodian merchant vessel, striking and sinking it more than forty miles offshore. The second Noor missile hit the Hanit, which was lying six miles off the Lebanese coast, killing four sailors and disabling the vessel. It turned out that the outcome of the attack could have been much worse. According to a diplomat briefed on the Israeli investigation into the Hanit attack, the third missile struck a section of the vessel’s superstructure at the last instant, deflecting it into the sea, where it exploded harmlessly. If the missile had maintained its original trajectory, the Hanit would have sustained much greater damage and could have sunk.

  A subsequent investigation by the Israeli navy claimed that the Hanit’s defense systems had been placed on “standby” mode instead of “high alert combat readiness” because the Israeli navy did not believe that Hezbollah had acquired a system that could threaten its vessels. However, there is a lingering suspicion within Western intelligence circles that rather than human error by the Israelis, Hezbollah actively jammed the Hanit’s radar, allowing the Noor missiles to speed toward the ship undetected. The claim remains unconfirmed—Hezbollah maintains its usual ambiguous silence on the matter. But Israel had good reason to pin the blame on the carelessness of an electronic warfare systems officer on board the Hanit rather than reveal a potential weakness of its Barak antimissile defense system. Israel was in intense negotiations with India at the time for a $300 million contract to co-develop the next generation of the Barak missile—a deal that could have collapsed if it was shown that the Barak was vulnerable to jamming.

  “This Is Israeli Terror, but We Will Resist”

  In the southern villages, the exodus had begun in earnest, with hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the onslaught. The Israelis told UNIFIL that Israel intended to establish a “special security zone” including twenty-one villages along the Blue Line and that any vehicle seen entering the zone would be fired upon. The Israelis attempted to empty the border district of its population by issuing ultimatums via leaflet drops and radio broadcasts on the same frequency once used by the SLA-run “Voice of the South” station, which had closed in 2000. Even bullhorns were used for those villages close enough to the border fence to hear Israel’s instructions to leave. On July 16, the Sunni inhabitants of Marwahine, a tiny village close to the border, were informed by bullhorn that they had two hours to leave their homes. A pickup truck and a Mercedes, carrying among them thirty-three men, women, and children, drove out of the village and headed west toward the coast. The pickup truck broke down, however, close to the chalk cliffs at Biyyada and within view of an Israeli navy gunboat. The driver frantically tried to restart his vehicle while some of the passengers climbed out of the two vehicles, hoping that the Israelis could see they were civilians. But within minutes both vehicles were attacked by a drone firing missiles and a helicopter gunship blasting the burning vehicles and initial survivors with its 30 mm machine gun. In all, twenty-three people were killed, including fourteen children and seven women, two of whom were pregnant. The next day, a UNIFIL relief column attempting to rescue the remaining beleaguered residents of Marwahine came under Israeli shell fire. As a dozen 155 mm rounds exploded nearby, the body-armored peacekeepers flung themselves on top of civilians to protect them from flying shrapnel.

  On July 17, I headed toward Nabatiyah, planning to spend the night in the area. The bridges across the Litani had all been destroyed, cutting off a large part of southwest Lebanon, including Tyre. Israeli navy ships were imposing a blockade along the coast and had threatened to target any southbound vehicles driving along the coastal highway, echoing the tactic of the Grapes of Wrath operation in 1996.

  I joined three carloads of other reporters and we drove south along the empty highway out of Beirut. With the coastal route off-limits, we headed up into the Chouf Mountains and wound along the sides of yawning, densely forested valleys. Near Mukhtara, the ancestral seat of Walid Jumblatt, the paramount Druze leader, the road became clogged with the familiar sight of northbound refugees who had escaped their homes in the Shia areas south of the Chouf. There were hundreds of cars crammed with people—bearded fathers hunched over steering wheels, mothers with babies on their laps,
grandparents squeezed into the back with cousins, aunts, and uncles. Black trash bags full of clothing and household goods were tied to the roofs along with the ubiquitous foam mattresses. Children sat in open car trunks and dangled their legs above the road. This was the first major evacuation from the south since April 1996, and these children were fulfilling what had become a tragic rite of passage for generations of southern Lebanese fleeing violence.

  In Nabatiyah, we were told that there was a route across the Litani after all, a small causeway of bulldozed earth over cement pipes to allow the water to flow through. The causeway lay just over a mile from the coast and was the only route to the beleaguered Tyre district. It was an unpleasantly tense drive along the empty roads leading down into the Litani River valley. We could see explosions emanating from villages south of the river, and when we paused to check directions, we could hear the ineluctable rumble of jets and whine of drones. Once across the causeway, it was a mere ten-minute dash along the coastal road to reach the outskirts of Tyre.

  We found the town in a state of panic. The beachfront Rest House hotel, a popular weekend destination in normal times, was filled with refugees from nearby villages. Many of them were expatriate Lebanese, citizens of the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries who had returned to their ancestral homes for the summer holidays. Talking to them gave us the first idea of what conditions were like in the villages along the border. Ali Hijazi said that his village of Aittaroun, just east of Bint Jbeil, had run out of basic food and there was almost no drinking water left. At least twenty villagers had been killed when their homes were demolished in Israeli air strikes, he said. The residents of Aittaroun and Bint Jbeil were ordered by the Israelis to leave their homes by 3:00 P.M. on July 18.