Den originale Salon.com artikel:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/28/hezbollah/index.html
The "hiding among civilians" myth
Israel claims it's justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah
mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn't trust its
civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.
By Mitch Prothero
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Nabatiya, southern Lebanon
Photo by Mitchell Prothero/WPN
A dog walks through the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli airstrikes in
the nearly deserted town of Nabatiya, Lebanon, on Tuesday.
July 28, 2006 | TYRE, SIDON and NABATIYA, South Lebanon -- The bombs
came just as night fell, around 7 p.m. The locals knew that the 10-story
apartment building had been the office, and possibly the residence, of
Sheik Tawouk, the Hezbollah commander for the south, so they had moved
their families out at the start of the war. The landlord had refused to
rent to Hezbollah when they requested the top floors of the building. No
matter, the locals said, the Hezb guys just moved in anyway in the name
of the "resistance."
Everyone knew that the building would be hit eventually. Its location in
downtown Tyre, which had yet to be hit by Israeli airstrikes, was not
going to protect it forever. And "everyone" apparently included Sheik
Tawouk, because he wasn't anywhere near it when it was finally hit.
Two guided bombs struck it in a huge flash bang of fire and concrete
dust followed by the roar of 10 stories pancaking on top of each other,
local residents said. Jihad Husseini, 46, runs the driving school a
block away and was sitting in his office when the bombs struck. He said
his life was saved because he had drawn the heavy cloth curtains shut on
the windows facing the street, preventing him from being hit by a wave
of shattered glass. But even so, a chunk of smoldering steel flew
through the air, broke through the window and the curtain, and shot past
his head and through the wall before coming to rest in his neighbor's
home.
But Jihad still refuses to leave.
"Everything is broken, but I can make it better," he says, surrounded by
his sons Raed, 20, and Mohammed, 12. "I will not leave. This place is
not military, it is not Hezbollah; it was an empty apartment."
Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian
areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of
killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then
blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600
civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use
the civilian infrastructure for protection.
But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of
other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed
to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly
more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter
and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if
they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by
collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.
For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding
civilians, they'll get some fighters, too. The almost nightly airstrikes
on the southern suburbs of Beirut could be seen as making some sense, as
the Israelis appear convinced there are command and control bunkers
underneath the continually smoldering rubble. There were some civilian
casualties the first few nights in places like Haret Hreik, but people
quickly left the area to the Hezbollah fighters with their radios and
motorbikes.
But other attacks seem gratuitous, fishing expeditions, or simply
intended to punish anything and anyone even vaguely connected to
Hezbollah. Lighthouses, grain elevators, milk factories, bridges in the
north used by refugees, apartment buildings partially occupied by
members of Hezbollah's political wing -- all have been reduced to
rubble.
In the south, where Shiites dominate, just about everyone supports
Hezbollah. Does mere support for Hezbollah, or even participation in
Hezbollah activities, mean your house and family are fair game? Do you
need to fire rockets from your front yard? Or is it enough to be a
political activist?
The Israelis are consistent: They bomb everyone and everything remotely
associated with Hezbollah, including noncombatants. In effect, that
means punishing Lebanon. The nation is 40 percent Shiite, and of that 40
percent, tens of thousands are employed by Hezbollah's social services,
political operations, schools, and other nonmilitary functions. The
"terrorist" organization Hezbollah is Lebanon's second-biggest employer.
People throw the phrase "ghost town" around a lot, but Nabatiya, a
bombed-out town about 15 miles from the Lebanon-Israel border, deserves
it. One expects the spirits of the town's dead, or its refugees, to
silently glide out onto its abandoned streets from the ruined buildings
that make up much of the town.
Not all of the buildings show bomb damage, but those that don't have
metal shutters blown out as if by a terrible wind. And there are no
people at all, except for the occasional Hezbollah scout on a motorbike
armed only with a two-way radio, keeping an eye on things as Israeli
jets and unmanned drones circle overhead.
Overlooking the outskirts of this town, which has a peacetime population
of 100,000 or so -- mostly Shiite supporters of Hezbollah and its more
secular rival Amal -- is the Ragheh Hareb Hospital, a facility that
makes quite clear what side the residents of Nabatiya are on in this
conflict.
The hospital's carefully sculpted and trimmed front lawn contains the
giant Red Crescent that denotes the Muslim version of the Red Cross. As
we approach it, an Israeli missile streaks by, smashing into a school on
the opposite hilltop. As we crouch and then run for the shelter of the
hospital awning, that giant crescent reassures me until I look at the
flagpole. The Lebanese flag and its cedar tree is there -- right next to
the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It's safe to say that Ragheh Hareb Hospital has an association with
Hezbollah. And the staff sports the trimmed beards and polite, if
somewhat ominous, manner of the group. After young men demand press IDs
and do some quick questioning, they allow us to enter.
Dr. Ahmed Tahir recognizes me from a funeral in the nearby village of
Dweir. An Israeli bomb dropped on their house killed a Hezbollah cleric
and 11 members of his immediate family, mostly children. People in
Lebanon are calling it a war crime. Tahir looks exhausted, and our talk
is even more tense than the last time.
"Maybe it would be best if the Israelis bombed your car on the road
here," he said, with a sharp edge. "If you were killed, maybe the public
outcry would be so bad in America that the Jews would be forced to stop
these attacks."
When I volunteered that the Bush administration cared little for
journalists, let alone ones who reported from Hezbollah territory, he
shrugged. "Maybe if it was an American bomb used by the Israelis that
killed an American journalist, they would stop this horror," he said.
The handful of people in the town include some from Hezbollah's
political wing, as well as volunteers keeping an eye on things while the
residents are gone. Off to the side, as we watch the Israelis pummel
ridgelines on the outskirts of town, one of the political operatives
explains that the fighters never come near the town, reinforcing what
other Hezbollah people have told me over the years.
Although Israel targets apartments and offices because they are
considered "Hezbollah" installations, the group has a clear policy of
keeping its fighters away from civilians as much as possible. This is
not for humanitarian reasons -- they did, after all, take over an
apartment building against the protests of the landlord, knowing full
well it would be bombed -- but for military ones.
"You can be a member of Hezbollah your entire life and never see a
military wing fighter with a weapon," a Lebanese military intelligence
official, now retired, once told me. "They do not come out with their
masks off and never operate around people if they can avoid it. They're
completely afraid of collaborators. They know this is what breaks the
Palestinians -- no discipline and too much showing off."
Perhaps once a year, Hezbollah will hold a military parade in the south,
in which its weapons and fighters appear. Media access to these parades
is tightly limited and controlled. Unlike the fighters in the half dozen
other countries where I have covered insurgencies, Hezbollah fighters do
not like to show off for the cameras. In Iraq, with some risk taking,
you can meet with and even watch the resistance guys in action. (At
least you could during my last time there.) In Afghanistan, you can
lunch with Taliban fighters if you're willing to walk a day or so in the
mountains. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Fatah or Hamas fighter is
almost ubiquitous with his mask, gun and sloganeering to convince the
Western journalist of the justice of his cause.
The Hezbollah guys, on the other hand, know that letting their fighters
near outsiders of any kind -- journalists or Lebanese, even Hezbollah
supporters -- is stupid. In three trips over the last week to the south,
where I came near enough to the fighting to hear Israeli artillery, and
not just airstrikes, I saw exactly no fighters. Guys with radios with
the look of Hezbollah always found me. But no fighters on corners, no
invitations to watch them shoot rockets at the Zionist enemy, nothing
that can be used to track them.
Even before the war, on many of my trips to the south, the Lebanese
army, or the ubiquitous guy on a motorbike with a radio, would halt my
trip and send me over to Tyre to get permission from a Hezbollah
official before I could proceed, usually with strict limits on where I
could go.
Every other journalist I know who has covered Hezbollah has had the same
experience. A fellow journalist, a Lebanese who has covered them for two
decades, knows only one military guy who will admit it, and he never
talks or grants interviews. All he will say is, "I'll be gone for a few
months for training. I'll call when I'm back." Presumably his friends
and neighbors may suspect something, but no one says anything.
Hezbollah's political members say they have little or no access to the
workings of the fighters. This seems to be largely true: While they
obviously hear and know more than the outside world, the firewall is
strong.
Israel, however, has chosen to treat the political members of Hezbollah
as if they were fighters. And by targeting the civilian wing of the
group, which supplies much of the humanitarian aid and social protection
for the poorest people in the south, they are targeting civilians.
Earlier in the week, I stood next to a giant crater that had smashed
through the highway between Tyre and Sidon -- the only route of escape
for most of the people in the far south. Overhead, Israeli fighters and
drones circled above the city and its outlying areas and regular blasts
of bombs and naval artillery could be heard.
The crater served as a nice place to check up on the refugees, who were
forced by the crater to slow down long enough to be asked questions.
They barely stopped, their faces wrenched in near panic. The main wave
of refugees out of the south had come the previous two days, so these
were the hard-luck cases, the people who had been really close to the
fighting and who needed two days just to get to Tyre, or who had had to
make the tough decision whether to flee or stay put, with neither choice
looking good.
The roads in the south are full of the cars of people who chose wrong --
burned-out chassis, broken glass, some cars driven straight into posts
or ditches. Other seem to have broken down or run out of gas on the long
dirt detours around the blown-out highway and bridge network the Israeli
air force had spent days methodically destroying even as it warned
people to flee.
One man, slowing his car around the crater, almost screams, "There is
nothing left. This country is not for us." His brief pause immediately
draws horns and impatient yells from the people in the cars behind him.
They pass the crater but within two minutes a large explosion behind us,
north, in the direction of Sidon, rocks us.
As we drive south toward Tyre, we soon pass a new series of scars on the
highway: shrapnel, hubcaps and broken glass. A car that had been maybe
five minutes ahead of us was hit by an Israeli shell. Three of its
passengers were wounded, and it was heading north to the Hammound
hospital at Sidon. We turned around because of the attack and followed
the car to Sidon. Those unhurt staked out the parking lot of the
hospital, looking for the Western journalists they were convinced had
called in the strike. Luckily my Iraqi fixer smelled trouble and we got
out of there. Probably nothing would have happened -- mostly they were
just freaked-out country people who didn't like the coincidence of an
Israeli attack and a car full of journalists driving past.
So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the
civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south
Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah
doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to
evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why
they fight so well -- with no one to spy on them, they have lots of
chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by
continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion.
And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their
affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the
only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire.
Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe
that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now
saying that they want to fight.
--
Jesper
"Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can
negate the use of terror as a means of battle."
(He Khazit, Lehi underground newspaper, 1943)