khaled a

Dear Friends,

Many of you have contacted me, expressing your concern for my safety and that of my family. I have been very touched by your empathy. We are fortunately in a relatively quiet part of Lebanon. Still, I cannot remain a silent witness to the horrors unfolding every day. Hence the following.

I arrived in Lebanon on Tuesday July 11th, looking forward to spending a few weeks at my family's Summer home in the mountains, visiting with my mother and stocking up on delicious Lebanese delicacies. Wednesday morning at 6:15 am, Israeli planes bombed the three runways of the newly finished Lebanese airport. Ever since the country has been up in flames.

Yes, a full-fledged war is being waged in Lebanon and you probably are seeing on TV or hearing about it on the radio. But the main aim is not to free two captured soldiers; it is not even to remove Hezbullah; it is purely and simply to bring Lebanon down on its knees and bring about its disintegration. Apparently, this is a condition sine qua non for the "Rebirth of the Middle East".

The attacks are vicious and systematic. Most of the road network has been bombed making it very difficult to move from one region to another. Wherever there is a bridge it has been destroyed. All the ports have been shelled and all the radar stations have been put out of function. Power plants, TV and cell phone relays, gas stations and gas reservoirs, trucks and containers, have been systematically targeted. And if all these targets, by a stretch, may be construed as part of a support network for Hezbullah, what of the small industries that went up in flames? Paper factories, plastic factories, furniture factories, marble and ceramics factories. Let us for example talk about LibanLait, a dairy factory that was completed a couple of years ago: It cost $40 million to build, and it was supplied with milk from all corners of the Bekaa. Today, it lies in ruins, and the dairy farmers have to throw away most of the milk they collect every day. What a waste!

Today is day 14th of the war. Yesterday, Condie Rice graced us with a two-hour visit during which she read the Lebanese the riot's act and never took a moment to listen to Lebanese grievances. She then went to Israel and told the government there that she will not put any time constraints on their mission. Is this really the American position: that Israel has to destroy Lebanon? No matter how long it will take? Arrogance coupled with ignorance can be dismayingly destructive. As we stand now, a cease-fire would bring about much needed calm so that the Lebanese population can lick its wounds, bury its 400 dead and treat the thousands of wounded, attend to the half million displaced (our little village is hosting 600 hundred of them), and start rebuilding. The cease-fire would also be advantageous to Israel as every day that passes is another demonstration that its army is unable to squash the Hezbullah fighters. Yes, the Israeli army is almighty (after all it receives several billion dollars every year in military assistance from the US-your and my tax dollars at work.) but have you ever tried to smash a colony of ants with a hammer?

It is also interesting that the US administration supports unconditionally Israel's demand that the two captured soldiers be freed but is totally silent about the tens of Lebanese that are rotting in Israeli jails since 1978 and who, in most cases did not benefit of any due process and do not know to this day what are the charges against them.. Israel had promised to free them in 2000 but then changed its mind.

And let us talk about Hezbullah and its place in the Lebanese society. As you well know, Lebanon is a mosaic of religious communities (17 different communities, each having its own legal code regarding personal matters such as birth, marriage, inheritance). The Shiite Muslim community is today the largest in Lebanon and comprises 30 to 40 percent of the Lebanese population of about 4 million people. During my youth, the Lebanese Shiite community had a very feudal social structure with a few families literally owning whole villages. But already in the seventies there were some changes happening, in particular a "movement of the disenfranchised" headed by a Shiite cleric and supported by Christian clerics and intellectuals.

Then Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the southern half of the country. The Lebanese State was very weak and its army even weaker. (It still is, with barely any equipment, no training, and no ammunitions). It befell to the Shiite community, the most numerous in the South, to organize the population and resist the Israeli occupation. Thus grew Hezbullah ("The Party of God"). By the year 2000, the Israeli army had lost 600 soldiers and, pressured by its own internal politics the Israeli government unilaterally decided to withdraw from Lebanon after 18 fruitless years of occupation.

You see then why Hezbullah is referred to as a "resistance movement". There is not one Lebanese, no matter his confessional denomination, who would deny that it is Hezbullah that freed Lebanon of the Israeli occupier. (It is also a well-known fact in Israel. Many a young Israeli soldier questioned the wisdom of occupying Lebanon. And many today are worried of a repeat performance. Actually, from what I have gleaned from radio programs, some of them are even protesting against what they see as "doing the dirty work" for the American administration.)

Hezbullah is a very tightly organized movement and a very exhaustive one, addressing every facet of life. You must have heard of their clinics and schools (essentials in what was a very neglected region) but they also have health prevention programs, agricultural research institutions, media and communications institutions, etc. All in all they have encouraged every member of the community, mostly illiterate in the seventies, to seek knowledge and to develop themselves. It is a stunning example of development of the whole community as opposed to the development of only a few families. There is not one Lebanese Shiite who will disown the Hezbullah. Even after the apocalyptic destruction of their stronghold in the southern suburb of Beirut, they defiantly proclaim their steadfast loyalty to the Party of God.

And this brings me to the much-touted qualifier of "terrorist". I can understand that politicians and demagogues will brandish this term indiscriminately. But what of an academic professor such as Condie Rice who must be familiar with the importance of categories and classifications, who must know the need for a tight definition?

As far as I am concerned, a terrorist is the closest there is to an anarchist: a person who does not hesitate to use violence to bring about chaos and the destruction of any existing system. A terrorist movement destroys haphazardly, without any rationale. A terrorist movement is not interested in building anything. Hezbullah is not a terrorist movement. On the contrary is has rebuilt southern Lebanon. It has provided its inhabitants with an environment propitious to development and self-improvement. The Lebanese Shiite middle-aged lady sitting next to me on the plane carrying me to Lebanon was first generation literate, yet she is now responsible for the marketing of Hermes and Louis Vuitton for the whole Gulf States and her son is holding a summer job at the "haut-de-gamme" Cristofle in Paris.

It is too tempting to brand any opponent as a "terrorist", in other word as a "sub-human", in order to treat him with total disregard to his humanity. The ceaseless pounding of whole villages, the systematic obliteration of whole streets (some people talk of being unable to point out where their home used to be.), the use of phosphorous missiles and cluster bombs, the targeting of cars loaded with fleeing families (so many families found burnt in the charred carcass of their vehicle.), the relentless attacks on relief convoys, the isolation of hospitals (the head of the Jabal Amel Hospital of Tyre was saying two days ago: "never mind that we don't have water, food or medicine, just please send us body bags so that we can attend to the corpses."), all this can only be explained by the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of the victims.

I am not quite sure what the armchair strategists of the American administration mean by the "Rebirth of the Middle East" that is supposed to be achieved by delaying the cease-fire. How can generating so much misery, creating so many personal tragedies, destroying so many hopes, be conducive to bringing about positive change?

A friend of mine, who is in the habit of mailing jokes and witty statements, recently sent me an essay/obituary on the death of "Common Sense". The essay/obit concluded: "Three stepbrothers survive Common Sense: I Know my Rights, Someone Else Is to Blame, and I Am a Victim." I have the strong suspicion that the "three stepbrothers" are in charge of the PR campaign of the Israeli government and its neocon supporters in the American administration.

khaled a
Lebanon, July 25, 2006

dany k

Reem,

I don't know how to explain that I cannot even describe it.
we drove up to Baabda to look over the city of Beirut, you can see the whole city as if nothing have changed, but that was only in the picture. The noise was different, usually on that hill you can hear thousands and thousands of cars riding the streets of the city but yesterday it was so quit, you can even hear an ant footsteps, so sad.

we went down next to the southern suburb of Beirut to find an unfinished bridge that is destroyed, flattened to the ground.

we drove to the south of Beirut where the beach is (ramleh el bayda), about 1 km of white sands beach, but unfortunately the sand is no longer white it is all covered with dark thick oil coming from a power plant in the south of Lebanon Israeli aircraft have targeted days ago, then we end up taking a walk in down town, the busiest part of Beirut but there were just us, streets were empty thousands of chairs that are usually full of people eating, drinking, smoking water pipes, kids playing around, deserted.

we couldn't go inside the Dahieh, but if you drive on the main streets you see the damages. you see a lot of building hitting the ground, horrifying.

we drove around the city, on a normal day that drive will takes about 2 hours to finish because of the traffic, we finished it in 20 min.

faycal d

Hi Reem,

Hope you and your family are Ok. Are you still in Amman? I'm still in Morocco and will be in Paris for the second half of August. Let me know if, by chance, you will be around.

Things are getting worse and worse in Lebanon ... 2 days ago Tsahal bombarded my village (Zefta) in south Lebanon, killing one person and injuring many. Many houses in the village were completely destroyed, and although it was not hit directly, our house (100 years old Lebanese family house) has its bricks and part of the ceiling down. This house, is such a symbol to us and my parents have invested a lot of time & effort to restore it and create and beautiful garden. It was occupied by Tsahal during the 82 invasion (since it is on a hill with a direct view on surrounding villages) and damaged before. My parents are still in Beirut, and being fatalist, as long as it is only material damage (we had lost 2 houses before in the 75-92 war, one in the suburbs, the other in the mountains). With all this, my father is not the type who accepts easily to leave.

There is a lot of bitterness in all this, but personally, although I'm a lot worried, these sad events haved boosted my commitment to my country and to my identity as a Lebanese. We should never let them steel the beauty of Beirut Nights, the Dolce Vita of Lebanon summer and all the chemistry that has been built again since the end of the previous war (which we started to forget until Tsahal destroyed Lebanon again).

Take care & send me your news

Always,
Fayçal

najla s

A piece by Edward Said's daughter Najla.

Do People Know How Much We Hurt?

By NAJLA SAID

How do I even start this? How do I write about my Beirut? My heartbreak, my home, my safety, my loss. again.

I suppose I just start.

I have experienced true terror a handful of times. The first was in 1983. The first time I evacuated Beirut. We had gone to visit my jiddo Emile, my teta Hilda, as we did every summer. Just after we arrived,the airport was shut down, Israeli soldiers were everywhere, the mountains were filling with smoke. We spent the next week in the staircase of our building as shells fell around us. My brother Wadie was almost hit by shrapnel.

My father, Edward, was in Switzerland. He knew we were in danger. I had no idea he wasn't with us because he was Palestinian. I didn't understand. Although I was born in 1974, I never knew about the war until the summer of '82 -- the first summer we didn't go. The summer we spent in Illinois. I did cartwheels in the living room trying to get Mommy and Daddy's attention. But all they did was watch the news and eat nuts and look worried. I wish I'd known how my Mommy's heart was breaking. I know now.

We got on the boat and fled to Cyprus leaving my family behind. The boat was filled with pilgrims going to Mecca. I didn't know what they were. I didn't understand. I didn't know Muslim or Christian or Jew. I didn't know anything. I knew fear and I knew confusion. I knew the sound of bombs. An inexplicable sound if you haven't felt it before, for it is a sound you feel and not a sound you hear. It is TERRIFYING. Your body shakes. You feel helpless and you cry, that's what happens. No sound effect can really replicate what it feels like when they're real.

I never thought I'd hear that sound again. I went into my Mommy's bed the night before we left. I was scared. The balcony door was open because there was no A.C., no electricity. As the curtains fluttered behind me I shivered and shook in my non-existent sleep. I felt the breeze behind my back and knew for certain the bombs would get me as I lay there vulnerable. But I was frozen in terror. Shivering and shaking, teeth chattering.

I wanted to move to the other side, switch places with Mommy, have her wrap her arms around me and keep me safe -- but then she would feel the bombs on her back, I reasoned, and she would die. I can't lose mommy, I thought. I'd rather die than lose Mommy. I'm so so so scared.

I wrote about that experience and it got me into Princeton. Wadie, my brother, did too. I didn't see Beirut again till 1992. I was 18. It was awful, destroyed. Where were the beaches, the fruits, the vegetables, the clean water, the fun, the bikinis, the people the joy? I remember feeling like I had walked into a cobweb-ridden home, frozen in time. I cried.

Each year after, though, I went back. It got better and better. It became home again. All the things I loved: the cucumbers and apricots and watermelon and sunshine and beaches and laughter and love and warmth and family and perseverance and resilience and strength and beauty and joy. They were there, and they continued to come back, along with thepeople who had fled, stronger than ever, year after year.

The most wonderful summer ever was twenty years after the scary escape. In 2003: Mommy, Daddy, me, Wadie, his wife Jennifer, all of us were in Beirut laughing, playing fighting, eating, drinking, beaching -- being a family. Back home. My parents originally fell in love in Beirut. In the late 60s/early70s. In fact, Daddy who is so so so revered as a "great Arab," actually rediscovered the Middle East he had lost as a child through Lebanon, through Mommy, who is, as I love to say, 3000% Lebanese.

And so we buried Daddy there, 4 months later. In Brummana, in the mountains next to Jiddo's home. In the Quaker family cemetery. That's where he wanted to be.

It was terror that came back to me when Daddy died, and, oddly, beautifully, it was Lebanon that saved me from it. It was the same quaking shaking shivering feeling I had had in the bed with mommy 20 years earlier. When Jenn walked into my bedroom and said we were going "to go say goodbye" I fell to the ground with the same feeling I had then, in Beirut, in '83, convulsing shaking crying gasping.

But the beauty was that when Daddy died, Lebanon became what I had. All I had. My safety, security, my home, my family, my everything. My good times, my laughter, my healing, my wholeness, my fun. My roots. My security...That's the only word I can write.

And now this summer. Evacuated again. Throwing up shaking fearing, hurting crying. Again. And again the feeling I keep having is that terror. That terror that I had twice before. The feeling that it's gone, it's over.

You summon your courage, your optimism, your humor -- the things that people love you for -- you decide that tomorrow Beirut will be back, that you will see Daddy again (oh how I kept turning my brain away from thoughts of him when he died -- it was too difficult to fathom the reality) the idea that you will never see something or someone you love again is unbelievably terrifying when you know really that it's over, it's gone and it's getting worse every day. And now I'm here in an internet cafe in Damascus.

And what now? This is what I think of when I think of Arab terror. My terror. Our terror. Do people know how much we hurt?

serene s & jomana k - fox news resignations

Dear All,

We would like to announce our resignation from Fox News in Amman. Although we never actually worked for your organization, we helped for the pastthree years in facilitating your work in the Middle East.

We base our decision on moral issues. We can no longer work with a news organization that claims to be fair and balanced when you are so far from that. Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propoganda, you are war mongorers with no sense of decency, and proffesionalism. You have crossed all borders and red lines. An Arab mother cries over the death of her child very much like an American and Israeli mother. Arab blood is not cheap, and we are not barbarians. You ought to bemore responsible and have more decency when you take one side against the other. You have a role to play and a responsibility to shoulder for the sake of your very naive viewers.

Throughout the three years we worked with you, and helped you, we thought you would develop a degree of respect to people in this part of the world but the disdain and blatant one sided coverage of all Mideast conflicts only highlights your total lack of humanity and bias toward Israel. Your lack of professionalism has made you a tool of ridicule throughout the world. Your inexperienced anchors with their racist comments are not only a shameful scar on the American Media, they simply represent state run Television networks in countries you despise in the Middle East.

Finally, our decision again is based on moral and proffessional basis and from now on we will no longer help in any Fox related matters.

Serene S

Jomana K

tsilli g - israeli citizen

I accuse you!
by Tsilli Goldenberg, Israeli citizen
lundi 24 juillet 2006.

I, Tsilli Goldenberg, Israeli citizen
Accuse you - Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel, Amir Peretz, Minister of Defense, Dan Halutz Head of Staff Chief Commander of the Israeli Army, of committing this bestial barbaric slaughter in Lebanon.
I accuse you of committing Crimes against Humanity towards the Palestinian People. I accuse you of deserting our soldiers, when their lives could be saved by negotiations, and I accuse you of starting an unjustified war in my name.
Haniya, Prime-minister of the Palestinian people, was willing to negotiate with us not only the return of P.O.W Gilaad Shalit, but a long term cease fire, that would enable people of Israel and Palestine SECURITY and Sanity. You refused.
Nasrallah was willing to negotiate the return of the soldiers kidnapped in the north. You refused.
Instead you have endangered the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis, you have caused the death of 27 Israelis, [till now], civilians and soldiers,
You have caused the mass murder of more than 350 Lebanese, many of them children, you have caused 500,000 Lebanese to be refugees, and you continue to murder and starve Palestinian children, just because they are living on their land.
The Palestinians are not my enemies, nor are the Lebanese. You, have become my enemy. And I will fight you, and so will many other sane people around the world.
Tsilli Goldenberg, Masarik 11, Jerusalem 93106 Israel

mariam m - my mother

Ramroumeh,

I loved hearing your voice more than usual this time. I was wearing your perfume. You know how I am with smells. They are vehicles that carry me to pesudo-realities. You were with me, hearing your voice and smelling your scent. I needed only to kiss you..hug you..my hungry arms wer burning in pain...But what is this pain compared to that of Im Hassan's; one of 16 people who loged,nay, took shelter in the last house of the row of houses distributed in our street in the mountains.

I went to visit with them in the evening after your call. Over a cup of coffee that they insisted to prepare on the one-eyed cooker they managed to find.

They were all around me telling me about their house in the village. About the orchard of peaches, the vine trees that they made sure to have all the varieties that the soil in that area can grow. They elaborated much about the flowers. The Aunt’s eyes filled with proud tears as she counted all the perinials and annuals her many pots were flooded with."people would stop and enjoy looking at my flowers she said in a hissing voice as if she moved there physically and became too far to be heard...
But still, the strongest illicitor of my sympathy was Im Hassan's dream. "You know what I dreamt last night?" She said fixing her head scarf, never losing eye contact. She managed to steel me away from the other commentors,

"I dreamt I was there, in the house Biddayaá (in The Vllage; a figure of speech a lebanese uses to say he is talking about his own village he does not need to say its name, It means: my own home town, but in one word). I could tell she was like me, living a pseudo-reality very well!

"I was there, sweeping its floor, cleaning its windows, watering the plants. I even cooked stuffed squash and vine leaves. ( I know you will like that one reem). "I smelled it" she said sniffing with her nostrils. "I said who says we are still away? here we are back to our house and land. I was very happy, very happy, then I woke up to find myself here!"

She said the last word rolling her very sad eyes around the place. A shabby house battered like an old tomato by the Israilies in 1982 (the year you were born Reem). It belongs to a Kuwaiti family that was not interested to repair it, unlike the rest of the street of which one belonged to my sister and her family where we are staying. It has a door like plane of unfinished wood at its main entrance. The holes on both sides that were once country style windows are covered now with sheets of plastic to give some privacy and shelter to whoever occupies the rooms in the first floor. The space where we were sitting is actually a strip of dirt linked to a flight of stairs of best stones that can be afforede by a rich owner.
On our left five or six strips of rope stretched heavily loaded with all kinds of colored clothes like flags. Flags that nowadays reveals that the inhabitants are Nazeheen, internal refugees.

Those proud Nazeheen came all the way from one of the furthest villages. It took them three days to arrive here sleeping in their van on the road. Their youngest is two years old. The son of a guard in the army. The eldest is the aunt Munira who loves her flowers, 70 years unmarried limping woman.



Ramroumteh,
I could not finish my letter to you yesterday. I was supposed to goaround in Alay (the next town over) to where the Nazeheen are with your Aunt Latifi and Im Hassan that I told you about. They went to try to enlighten them of sanitary measurements they need to follow to keep disease away. But this did not happen. I received a call from a friend of mine in Beirut and your Aunt Laila that there is great need for cotton covers for the bare sponge mattresses theNazeheen there are using. The heat and moist together with lack of washing hasencouraged Scabies to flourish. Lice has formed another front to fight on...

I simply came back from the gas station where I managed to secure a couple of gallons to spare for the shortage everybody is expecting. I left those at home and rushed to Im Hassan to cancel my appointememnt with her. Luckily, in Beirut, we found a textile shop which Auntie Fadia directed me to. She also is providing for a school of 300 people!
I managed to buy two meters of cloth for each mattress. i found enough tocover 56 of them. Elderly ladies needed some Kuftans as they came withnothing except the clothes that were on them when they managed to escapetheir bombarded areas. I found some 40 of them in a shop. Trials to findsome more failed. They are disappearing form the shelves. The roads toSyria are all hit. The last one was hit this morning so bad that all trips stopped.

Anyway, we managed to get those neccessary items to their destination only to wake up this morning to more bad news and catastrophic scenes. I was getting ready to go for a cup of coffee in Verdun Beirut near our house.

I missed the days of peace. I picked up the phone to call Aunt Fadia to ask her to meet me there like the days before this war! (it seems like months ago not just over two weeks!)

I was infront of Aljazeera screen which was on mute at the moments and I read the subtitles..."Another massacre in Qana...20 children at least underrubble.."" by the time I felt my tears rolling down my cheeks the numberjumbed to 30 then 40. Now they talk of 55 casualties...I couln't lastlong infront of the screen.

Tears were replaced by great great anger.. It resonated with the furious comments coming out of all the people at once who gathered infront of the UN Esqua building in central Beirut.

Too bad the UN is a tool for the Americans it seems. None of the resolutions agaunst Israel were ever implimented. And when it comes to a resolution directed towards the non-Israelis in the area, wars are wedged...and normal life destroyed...People are very bitter and angry. To think that with morecasualties and losses ordinary people are going to turn againstNasrallah, is a phantom myth. They become more supportive and more defensive of him as Israel continues to massacre us. Israel and America for that matter( no one differentiate between the two now!) is losing the public opinion war very quickly.

A peace between Israel and Lebanon is becoming more and more remote to establish.I am going to and fro between the two screens. The tv and the computer.Things today are escalating with the pictures coming from Qana whererescuers are pulling out one body after another. Even at the café where Papa meets his friends on Sundays news was coming continuously.

He just came in. I was surprised that he already heard of Qana's massacre, of the refusal to meet Condaliza Rice declared by Sinioura, and of the UN Esquademonstrations tha fueled up after people saw more pictures of the massacre...I can imagine them jumping up from infront of their tv or radio sets and spontaneously rushing to the nearest link to the outsideworld community: The Escwa building...

Word of mouth has become a very effective tool these days especially when electricity is out and some communiction means and cell phone towers are being bombed..the primitive ways and the resort to instincts can still work for people in crisis..
I’ll stop here for now. my heart is loaded oscillating between grief,insecurity and anger. All are strong leaving me too weak to make anydecision!!Love you the world. hang on..mama

rosie a

Dear Samar,

Ha! I think I am becoming a reporter now! First, we are still safe, but hardly anyone sleeps. The bombing has been continuous, day and night with no reprieve. We are in the mountains and we are awakened by the sound of the explosions. And it's not as if you can just fall back asleep after hearing a bomb land. You can imagine what it is like if you are in Beirut. The situation is extremely serious.

I want to reiterate that we need your help in disseminating this information and hopefully getting it to the press. The news you are receiving is skewed. This is a well orchestrated war that Israel is carrying out. This is not a reaction to Hizbullah's apprehending two of its soldiers. It becomes clearer by the day that there is a master plan that Israel is executing. Israel has literally kidnapped the entire country. One by one they are destroying every single road that leads out of the country. Just this evening around 8:00 p.m. we heard Israeli planes flying overhead only to hear a few minutes later on the radio that theydestroyed a mountain road that leads to the Bekaa valley. This road is further up the mountain from where we live, in a primarily Christian village.

On the news earlier we heard that of the 93 Lebanese killed, only 3 were soldiers. As of 8:30 p.m. more than 120 Lebanese are dead and over 500 wounded.

Yesterday they bombed a small port in Amchit, a Christian village about one hour north of Beirut. Why? The Israelis got wind that a French ship carrying medical supplies was arriving. Damaging the port they prevented these critical medical supplies from reaching their destination.

Yesterday, my niece was attending a wedding-poor couple-could they really delay their wedding after months of planning? The wedding was held not too far from Jounieh, a major port about 25 minutes north of Beirut, a Christian town and definitely not a Hizbullah stronghold (you know Jounieh of course). Everyone was on the terrace celebrating when Israel repeatedly attacked the Jounieh port. My niece said that everyone ran into the church and prayed. The bride was crying. The groom was crying. My niece left the wedding flying down the main highway while bombs whistled by. Nice memories for the newlyweds.

This afternoon, the Israelis decimated a small Christian village,Ain Ebel in the south of Lebanon. The mayor was pleading with the UN for a cessation of the Israeli bombing so they could evacuate women and children, and eventually to get food and medical supplies. Again, Ain Ebel is far from being a Hizbullah basis.

In the southern suburb of Beirut, Israelis knocked out all telecommunications-both land and mobile.They just struck the airport again, as I have been writing this.
This must be the sixth or seventh time, I lost count!

Over 1 million Lebanese, that's nearly one third of the entire population has been displaced! Hotels, homes in the mountains are packed to the brim trying to accommodate these people made refugees in their own country.

Is anyone really still convinced that Israel is attacking only Hizbullah targets? is anyone really still convinced that Israel has a right to defend itself-and if so, in this way?

Even during the 15 years of war, never ever were all roads, ports, and airports simultaneously blocked. When I was in Saudi, we would fly to Cyprus then take the boat to Jounieh. Now there is no way out. Israel has kidnapped and trapped the entire country.

There are more than 17, 000 French citizens, more than 10, 000 English, more than 25, 000 Americans and many more other foreign nationals trapped because Israel has blown up all major roads, bridges, airports and ports. Their actions are barbaric. The British Ambassador made a public announcement on television telling his compatriots that the roads are not safe enough to travel on for an evacuation and urged them to just remain at home. How reassuring! You hear news of evacuations, but we are all wondering how anyone can get out when roads, bridges and ports have been damaged so severely.

Now, to end with a little story. A news item that I am sure did not make big news in the American press:

On June 21, 2006, about three weeks ago, The Daily Star, published an article about Lebanon expecting complete support from the UN Security Council about a complaint the Lebanese government was presenting to them. The Lebanese were following proper international protocol. What was discovered? The Mossad has a network in Lebanon and has assassinated at least 3 Lebanese citizens which the Israelis believed to be "terrorists."

I ask here: What is worse? Hizbullah's kidnapping two Israeli soldiers or Israeli agents coming onto Lebanese territory and assassinating its citizens? It's like having a North Korean secret service cell in the U.S. killing American citizens. Would the U.S.sit back and do nothing? It's an outrage. Yet, Israel destroys

Lebanon with impunity and no one pays attention to the infractions that Israel does. And what right does Lebanon have to defend itself? If Lebanon, dared to do what Israel is doing to it now, it would be labeled "terrorist."

I once again plead with you to get this news out. Israel is destroying Lebanon while the United States puts its head in the sand! These atrocities must stop!

10:10 p.m. The bombs are exploding. Another sleepless night ahead..
Rosie A

bassam k

This came in an email from a friend living in Kuwait:

Kareem is my Cousin's Son... another beneficiary of the US & Israeli democracy and humanitarian work in Lebanon!!!! THANKS for the both of them!!!! He was very lucky he was only injured some other kids were not that lucky, some lost an eye or a limb and the majority are dead...

spencer o

July 23, 2006

Beirut Diary part 2: War crimes, a moment of humanity, and Harper's shame
by Spencer Osberg

Special to Shunpiking Online

Halifax native Spencer Osberg is a journalist with the English-language Daily Star of Beirut and a former intern with shunpiking magazine

HAAN, Germany (Friday, 21 July 2006: 17:20:45) - AS I WRITE, the dust from Beirut rubs into the prints of my fingers from the keys of my laptop. I'm in Haan now, near Duesseldorf, Germany.

Whatever I've seen happening in Beirut, the situation in South Lebanon is so much worse, and seems to have garnered little to no attention in international media. I recorded an interview a German-Lebanese man who I met outside the bus in Syria, just over the Northern Lebanese border. We were waiting for our passports, left at the border post on the Lebanese side after our bus convoy fled an Israeli attack on the road a few hundred metres behind us. [I will call him Rami, as he asked me not to use his name as he is afraid of retaliation on his family members who remain in Lebanon. He spoke in German and my girlfriend translated] He'd come to Lebanon two weeks ago to visit his family in the village of El Qlaile, close to the city of Tyre in South Lebanon. He said the first week was great, getting to see everyone again, his mom had just had a heart operation and was recovering, and then the bombing started.

Rami says reports are not getting out about what's happen in South Lebanon because its so dangerous that no reporters are going there, which I've also heard from other reporters. The Beirut correspondent for the CBC News told me going to south Lebanon is tantamount to suicide.

I asked Rami if there are any battles between Hizbullah fighters and the Israelis in the towns, and Rami said no. The Hizbullah fighters are bunkered down in positions in the mountains, so the Israelis have taken to bombing the towns and villages.

"Precise targeting": Israelis are bombing homes, schools, hospitals

In the villages in the hills east of the costal town of Naquora, Rami says the Israelis have bombed all the roads and bridges, meaning nobody can leave and supplies cannot get in. People are beginning to starve and they're too afraid to leave the basements of their homes. Now the Israelis are bombing the houses. He says there is nowhere to hide and you unable to run.
Between 40 and 70 families from the town took refugee from the bombing at a school, and then on Monday the Israelis bombed the school, killing almost everyone. Rami says seven families where sheltering in a large house next to the hospital and the Israelis bombed them. It took emergency crews two days to remove all the bodies because the Israeli jets continued to bomb it over and over again, killing some of the emergency workers.

He was helping with the emergency crews trying to rescue people from the rubble and get people to hospital [the Israelis also bombed a section of the hospital on Sunday]. The hospitals in his area and around the south are running out of drugs, bandages and all supplies, and don't have enough doctors or nurses because many of them fled. This means many of the wounded that could be saved are dying because they can't be treated. These people are not yet on the official casualty count. The morgue has so many bodies that they had to simply start stacking them on top of each other; a lot of the time they were simply collecting pieces of people and putting them in bags to store at the morgue.

Rami described how four members of a German-Lebanese family were killed in the South when an Israeli bomb hit their house. The grandparents were on the first floor and were blown apart by the blast wave, while the mother and young child were climbing the stairs from the basement, and so were cut in half by the same blast. The father was on the back deck, and was thrown through the air by the explosion,losing an arm but surviving, but has gone insane with despair and rage.

The Israelis hit the house of another friend in the Red Cross. The blast wave tore most of the skin off the front of his wife, exposing her internal organs. She is still alive but is certain to die within the next few days. His young daughter was also heavily wounded and is now blind. Rami says his friend just fell apart and started banging his head on a wall and screaming.
I asked him if there were a lot of people knew who were killed, and he said it was really hard to tell, because most of the bodies, if still whole, are burned black and unidentifiable.

Rami says people are trying to flee at night with the lights off in the cars, driving very fast. This is causing a lot of accidents and making the whole situation that much more dangerous.
After a week he decided to try and leave and get his family out. He got them to a car and started to try and drive up what's left of the costal highway. He saw a Lebanese army jeep near them on the highway being hit by a missile, showering his car with debris. There was nothing left of it. A minivan with fleeing refugees behind the jeep was also hit by the explosion. He doesn't think anyone survived.

It took him eight hours to reach Beirut because they had to use many backroads [the drive from south Lebanon to Beirut normally takes a little over an hour].
His family is now staying at a refugee centre set up at a school in Beirut, and Rami, with German citizenship, is going back to his home in Hamburg.

A moment of humanity

(20 July 2006) In Beirut the fabric of society is beginning to unravel. The basics of life, even in those areas not under constant bombardment, are becoming short in supply. Running water ran out for my next door neighbour -- Ali Sayyed, another Canadian from Ottawa -- the day I left (Wednesday), and my water tank on the roof had stopped refilling, leaving some 10 litres of water left in the bottom. That's not much when between your neighbor and yourself you're putting up seven refugees from the southern suburbs of Beirut. Fresh fruit and vegetables are hard to come by in the stores because the major roads leading from the farms the city are destroyed, and the Israelis have put out a warning stating that they will bomb every truck in the country headed south, whether it's full of watermelons, garbage, water or fuel, just in the off chance it might be carry missiles for Hizbullah. Most shops sell out of bread before noon.

Today, the Israelis also bombed the largest glass-bottling factory in the country, so the supply of fresh milk and juice will run out in a couple days. Given that Israeli naval warships are blockading supplies from entering the country, they've blown up the airport and the runways and the land routes into the country, no new supplies are getting in to people who need foud and nourishment. Every other gas station in town is also closed as fuel is running out -- the blockade would make it bad enough, but to hasten the strangulation the Israelis also bombed the major fuel storage tankers in west Beirut, at the airport, the big electricity plant and in south Lebanon. Syria has taken in some 500,000 refugees -- total population of Lebanon before the bombing: 3.5 to 4 million.

{The Israeli "Defence" Forces are committing war crimes on a massive scale, and it is doubtful that any member of the IDF or the Israeli government will ever be brought to account for their atrocities}

I made the final decision to leave on Tuesday, and it's the hardest one I've ever had to make. I feel a duty to report to every TV, Radio station and newspaper that will listen about this unjustified war and hundreds of innocent people are being murdered as their country is pounded into dust. The official body count this morning is 330 dead Lebanese civilians, thousands injured, and five dead Hizbullah fighters. The Israeli "Defence" Forces are committing war crimes on a massive scale, and it is doubtful that any member of the IDF or the Israeli government will ever be brought to account for their atrocities.

I'd done more phone interviews than I can count with anyone who can get through, and was sending out as much information as I could to anyone I could contact, but the barrage of missiles and bombs destroying the neighbourhoods just over a kilometer from my house, and the pictures of dead and mangled infants and families bleeding through the TV screen was making me numb and ineffective at doing work. I could not properly describe the magnitude of the evil crushing the Lebanese.

I am also only a freelancer, unable to tap the resources the major media networks provide for their reporters. If later the situation degraded to the point where my life was immediately in danger and all the foreign national evacuations had finished, I feared I would be stranded and basically fucked.

{As one of the richest countries in the world, this is beyond shameful}
The list of failures and ineptitudes of the Canadian government and its embassy in Beirut to care for the well being of Canadians in Lebanon is too expansive and profound for me to address in this letter, and judging from phone calls to Lebanon this morning, they are still utterly unable to put together any sort of effective evacuation. As one of the richest countries in the world, this is beyond shameful.

However, my girlfriend, Nicole, a German citizen, was leaving Wednesday morning on a German bus convoy heading north through to Syria. She had spoken with the German embassy a few days earlier about putting me on their evacuation list, and it sounded promising, but we were still unsure whether simply being 'boyfriend' would ensure that I would be place under the care of the German government.

So, Tuesday morning we decided to get married. For that we needed two thing; someone to marry us and rings to exchange. A Lebanese friend of ours called a priest he knew but was told it would take a lot of paper work which could not be organized in a short period of time. We then headed out in our neighbourhood of Beirut, Fern El Chebak, then to Hamra in west Beirut, and then Ashrafieh in east Beirut, looking for a jewelry store to sell us rings and a priest to marry us.

During war however, people need bread and water, so the food stores stay open, but people don't tend to be buying much in the way of luxury items. All the stores were closed. Despite a visit to many a church, we were only able to speak with one priest who asked us if we were Roman Catholic. We said yes, and then he said that unfortunately he was a Maronite Catholic priest and could not help us, then he directed us up the street to a Roman Catholic church, which, like many others in Beirut, happened to be closed and locked up.

Back at the apartment, everyone pitched in to make it happen. The refugees staying with us, Ali's uncle's family and their neighbours from downstairs, went out and somehow, somewhere found a wedding bouquet. Ali's aunt gave Nicole a gold ring that she's held onto for the last 20 years, and one of the young guys of the downstairs neighbour refugees made a ring for me by cutting and bending a solid copper choker Nicole's mom had given her years ago.

Everyone gathered on our balcony, Ali's cousin snapping away the happy pics as Ali himself lead the ceremony, Nicole and I on either of his sides. We exchanged rings and "I dos", Ali pronounced us Husband and Wife, I kissed my bride, and, being without champagne, we wrapped our wrists around the each others' and shot Tequila.

In the tragedy that is this war with all its destruction, this small moment had the beauty of putting smiles on the faces of all us and reminding us that there is still things to be happy for in this world. We are still human beings.

'The witnesses are gone'; Israeli disinformation and the dishonour of Canada
The next day, Nicole and I lined up with thousands of others at Biel, the massive conference centre area just north of Downtown Beirut. When we got to the head of the line she announced to the German officials that she and her Canadian husband wanted to be evacuated. They let us in. We waited there for about 12 hours, listening to the Israel jets overhead and the concussion bombs in the distance, as busload after busload of German nationals were carted away in convoys. We were eventually put on one that left near twilight. The skinny, decrepit highway in north Lebanon brought us to the border with Syria around 10 p.m.

Just after the Lebanese officer had taken our passports into the border post for the exit stamp, something exploded behind us. The bus drivers pressed the gas pedal to the floor, flew past the Lebanese and Syrian border posts, and didn't stop until they were several kilometers inside Syria, where we had to wait until someone went back to get our passports. We later heard reports on the radio that the Israelis had bombed the road, a Canadian bus convoy coming up behind us had been blocked and had to turn around, and the Syrians were closing the border. From there we drove to Turkey, and to an airport near the coast at Adana, where a German

Airforce Luftwaffe Airbus A310 flew us to Cologne.

Did I deserve to leave any more than anyone else trapped in Lebanon? No. But no German was displaced by me, and having been made painfully aware of the incompetence of my government and its inability to help me in a crisis situation, there was no other choice. Now I can only pray that by some miracle others left behind will find a way out, or at least stay safe.

Israel has issued another call telling people in South Lebanon to flee, but they are not letting them leave because they keep bombing vehicles on the roads. There's been small Israeli invasions over the border with troops and tanks, but they're now calling up thousands of reservists and putting up to four divisions of troops on the border.

Also, with the mass exodus of foreigners from Lebanon, the depravity of the killing can only intensify, the idea being 'the witnesses are gone.'

I remember on the second or third day I heard of a statement concerning the Israeli offensive by my honourable Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to the effect of "Israeli has the right to defend itself." And as I was thinking this we were watching footage on TV from the village of Dweir in the area of Nabatieh, where an Israeli missile had brought down a house where a family of ten where sheltering. They were all killed, and emergency people were now digging their corpses out of the smashed concrete.

One of diggers stopped as he passed by the camera and held up a body he was carrying by its under arms. She wasn't heavy, would have stood hip height if she could, maybe eight-years old, maybe 10 or 12, it was kind of hard to tell.

She was covered in grey dust from her shoeless toes to the curls on her drooping head, and as the camera panned past her lifeless face you could see the blood caked beneath her nose, and I thought, what exactly is Israeli defending itself from? I guess if she had survived, when she grew up she might hate the people who'd killed her family, destroyed her home and the homes of her neighbours and flattened her country. This in turn could place her in the category of 'potential security threat.' So to avoid such 'potential threats' that living children may pose later on, Israel is killing them now in Lebanon. It all makes complete sense.