U.S.-Israeli war crimes exposed to the world

Aug. 2—Three weeks after launching massive air strikes on Lebanon and attempting several ground offensives, the Israeli apartheid state has failed to achieve any tangible military results. But the widespread destruction it has wreaked has generated world outrage.

On the night of Aug. 1-2, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos flew 60 miles deep inside Lebanon to attack a hospital in Baalbek, not far from the Syrian border. In the nearby hamlet of al-Jamaliyeh, “villagers said at least 15 civilians were killed during Israeli airstrikes providing cover to the commandos. The dead included seven members of one family caught in their backyard.” (New York Times, Aug. 2)

The next day, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that thousands of Israeli troops had “entirely destroyed” the infrastructure of Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance organization.

But even as Olmert was speaking in Jerusalem, “shadowy Hezbollah fighters, flitting between shattered villages and underground bunkers, were showering Israel with the biggest barrage of rockets in the 22-day-old war.”

The Times report went on: “Much of southern Lebanon was a landscape of destruction today, with smoke rising from shelled villages, roads cratered and littered with ruined cars. Israeli soldiers, including paratroopers, clawed their way less than four miles into Lebanon, meeting stiff resistance from guerrillas setting ambushes and firing from hidden positions.”

The continued opposition by the lightly armed but highly organized Hezbollah has shown the world that Israel, even with its endless supply of U.S. high-tech weapons, is no longer invincible. But this hated proxy for U.S. imperialism is very dangerous. It has called up thousands of additional troops and is intensifying its offensive using U.S.-supplied tanks, planes, armored earth movers and bunker-buster bombs.

This ruthless all-out war, which is against both the Lebanese and Palestinian people, is not due to the capture of one Israeli soldier in Gaza or two in Lebanon, as Tel Aviv says. Nor was the massacre perpetrated by Israeli missiles in the Lebanese town of Qana early on the morning of Aug. 30 due to a targeting error or faulty intelligence on the part of the Israeli command.

Photos of the death and destruction caused by this attack on the homes of defenseless civilians have aroused an international outcry.

On July 25, Israel had launched a U.S. missile that destroyed a well-marked, well-known United Nations observation post in southern Lebanon, killing four UN personnel. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan charged the targeting of the post by Israeli forces was “apparently deliberate.”

The direct hit on the UN observation post took place after eight hours of phone calls from UN headquarters in New York to the Israeli command, telling them to cease its shelling in the area. As in past Israeli invasions, the attack on the post forced the UN to withdraw forces it had stationed to mark a cease-fire line.

It is important to understand that this is the way Israel has fought every war. It has invaded Lebanon five times in the past 30 years. It has also invaded Jordan, Egypt and Syria and bombed Iraq—all with full U.S. diplomatic, political and military support.

Since the creation of the Zionist state of Israel, well-publicized, targeted massacres of hundreds of civilians have been used to force the evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians and to empty out wide areas of their land. The destruction of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin is only the most infamous of the 33 massacres that forced 75 percent of the Palestinian people off their land in 1948. In the 58 years since then, Israel has continued to seize more land and expel more Palestinians while refusing to allow any of them the right to return.

On April 18, 1996, the Israeli army had committed an earlier massacre in the same town of Qana. Its shells hit a UN compound where hundreds of civilians had sought refuge, resulting in 106 deaths. Then, too, the Israeli command called it “mistaken targeting.”

After that attack the UN appointed a Dutch military adviser, Maj.-Gen. Frank lin van Kappen, to investigate the massacre. Van Kappen reported that the Israeli army had “intentionally attacked the UN compound.” Of course, Israel has never been punished for this 1996 war crime in Qana or for its hundreds of other massacres.

The Israeli military is now engaged in a ruthless battle to clear a wide swath of land along the Lebanese border. While relentlessly pounding the whole area, they have ordered the local population to flee. More than 1 million Lebanese—one quarter of the population—are now refugees in their own country.

After almost three weeks of total U.S. support for Israel’s aggression, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced from Jerusalem on July 30 that Tel Aviv would begin a 48-hour pause the next day in its bombing of south Lebanon and would allow civilians to leave the area. It was a tactic to depopulate the south. But thousands of Lebanese have stayed because they are poor, have large families, don’t have the vehicles or resources to leave, or don’t have anywhere to go.

Israel’s fraudulent story

The claim by the Israeli military that it targeted the low-rise building in the narrow streets of Qana because it thought Hezbollah was using it to fire missiles is a fraud.

Tom Clonan, a security analyst for the Irish Times newspaper, wrote on July 31 that the type of missile being used by Hezbollah cannot be launched from within houses, mosques, hospitals or even the UN facilities that Israel has targeted.

Hezbollah’s missile launchers create a massive back-blast. They can only be fired from open ground, says Clonan. To try to fire them from within a building would result in instant death for the missile crew and the probable destruction of the missile before its launch.

The missiles are fired on open ground from the backs of flat-bed trucks. Since they generate an enormous flare of light, heat and sound energy when fired, they are instantly detected by Israeli high-tech systems.

Hezbollah forces disperse immediately after firing a missile. Such flat-bed trucks with multi-launch systems can hardly be hidden in a small village like Qana, let alone inside a building like the one that was demolished.

There were no scorch marks from a Hezbollah missile launch visible in the area near the destroyed house and no Hezbollah fighters among the dead or wounded. The Israelis knew the village was populated.

Massacre as a political weapon

Israel has a history of using massacres to intimidate a population under occupation. In 1982 after Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon all the way up to Beirut to force the withdrawal of Palestinian resistance fighters, it sent death squads into the disarmed Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of defenseless refugees were executed.

Ariel Sharon’s role in this massacre was so well known that even the Kahan Commission set up by the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, found him guilty of war crimes. He was then dismissed as Israeli defense minister. This hardly hurt his support among hard-core Zionists. He never served a day in prison and went on to become prime minister.

Zionist military policy has drawn on tactics, including massacres to drive out indigenous people, that have been used by the U.S. ever since its wars against the Native peoples in North America.

Massacres of civilians who supported resistance to U.S. imperialism were used extensively in Washington’s wars in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam.

In the 1991 U.S. war on Iraq, in an effort to break the people’s morale, the Pentagon fired two laser-guided “smart bombs” directly into the well-marked Amariyah bomb shelter in Baghdad, filled with civilian families. The number of people estimated to have been incinerated by the missiles ranges from 500 to 1,500.

Aggression masked
as self-defense

Despite decades of U.S. sanctioned and financed aggression, Israel is always described in the corporate media as an army defending itself from attack. Both Gaza and Lebanon are portrayed as quiet until Hamas or Hezbollah initiate attacks. Nothing could be further from the truth.

After the Lebanese resistance led by Hezbollah forced Israel to withdraw its occupying troops in 2000, Israel routinely bombed, raided and violated Lebanon and continued to occupy its Shabaa Farms area. This May, Israel again bombed Lebanon and assassinated two Palestin ian activists. As a further provocation, it bombed areas in the south that support Hezbollah. All this was barely mentioned in the U.S. corporate media.

Israel also continued to hold hundreds of Lebanese prisoners in violation of a prisoner exchange agreement. Hezbollah made it clear that it captured the two Israeli soldiers in order to facilitate an exchange of prisoners with Israel.

Claiming self-defense, Israel used the seizure of the two soldiers as a pretext to launch an all-out war that it and the U.S. had been planning for more than a year. It was only after Israel had bombed Lebanese cities, including the capital, Beirut, had smashed Beirut’s infrastructure of electricity, water and communications, had destroyed its port and airport, and had bombed convoys of fleeing civilians that Hezbollah responded by firing rockets at Israeli cities.

Although Hezbollah’s rockets are far smaller than Israel’s missiles, not as accurate and do far less damage, this was one of the few times in all the decades of Zionist attacks on surrounding countries that major Israeli cities had themselves come under sustained attack. Never theless, Israel, with full U.S. backing, has refused to end its aggression despite calls from all over the world for a cease-fire.

While Israel has tried to destroy the infrastructure of Lebanon in preparation for an invasion, for the first time it has had great difficulty moving beyond the border because of Hezbollah’s stiff resistance and careful preparation of tunnels and bunkers.

To the south of Israel, in Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians are concentrated, Israeli aggression has never ended. When Hamas won a democratic election there in January, both the U.S. and Israel responded by attempting to starve and divide the entire population. Aid, credits and loans were cut off. Even Palestinian tax revenue was illegally withheld. Shipping and transport was halted. Work permits were denied en masse.

On June 9, more than two weeks before an Israeli soldier was seized in a Pales tin ian commando operation, an Israeli missile attack had killed a Palestinian family of seven picnicking on a Gaza beach. On July 13 another Israeli missile killed nine Palestinian civilians and two activists. On June 24, the day before the soldier was captured, Israel captured a Palestinian doctor and his brother in Gaza.

But after the capture of its soldier, Israel, claiming self-defense, kidnapped dozens of democratically elected parliamentary representatives and cabinet members. It destroyed the only power plant in Gaza and bombed apartment blocks, ambulances and schools.

The corporate media continue in all news coverage to present these crimes as Israel’s justified response to totally unprovoked attacks.

Threat of wider war

A cornered beast can become more dangerous. The U.S./Israeli inability to defeat Hezbollah may lead them to commit even more desperate measures and greater crimes.

With the U.S. unable to break the resistance in Iraq or create a stable puppet government there, the assault on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon may be the next stage in a far wider war: a full-scale military assault on Syria and Iran.

The Bush administration has made it clear that it is supporting the Israeli offensive because imperialism is determined to shape a “new Middle East.” Yet everywhere its plans are in deep disarray.

In the face of such dire threats, what is called for is an aroused global movement that stands in full solidarity with all the peoples under attack—be they Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian or Iraqi.