Qana Massacre

WE WILL NEVER FORGET QANA
(Arabic word written in blood, "Peace.") 

WE WILL NEVER FORGET QANA Pictures

Killed By Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) Video's

The Grapes of the Wrath
" It was only minutes later that I realized my children were dead and my husband as well. I was on my own."-Fatmeh Balhas a survivor of the bloody massacre of Qana.Full story


Images from the shelling of the UNIFIL FIJI BATT compound at Qana, South Lebanon

Thursday, April 18, 1996

On Tuesday April 18, 1996 Israeli 155mm howitzers shelled UIFIL's Fiji BATT compound in the village of Qana a few kilometers south east of Tyre. Around 800 civilians had taken refuge at the base. Israelis targeted the base in retaliation for the Hizballah attack on one of their special forces groups who were in action north and outside of the Iraeli occupied "security zone" laying landmines. Over 100 civilians were killed.

The shelling is documented in a UN report discussed in Time Magazine's article Qana: Anatomy of a Tragedy by James Walsh.

These images are from raw and edited video supplied by Al Manar TV in Beirut, April, 1996.


Qana massacre coverup successful

Mid-East Realities, 2 July 1996

In April, the Israelis brutally massacred over a hundred persons at the Qana U.N. Base in Southern Lebanon. A U.S./Israeli cover-up immediately took place. However unexpected hard evidence, including a video tape of the attack, convinced U.N. investigators that the attack was premeditated. Severe pressure was brought on U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali not to release the report to the Security Council or the public. However, after watering it down as best he could Boutros-Ghali was forced to release the report, some U.N. officials going so far as to indicate they would resign if he did not do so. Shamefully though the U.N. Security Council has refused to act on the report or to hold the Israelis accountable. Of course the American veto threat and tremendous pressures upon Boutros-Ghali and member states at the U.N. was behind this further demonstration of U.N. impotence and cowardice.

The only good thing to come from the Qana Massacre is that there is no longer a likelihood of Shimon Peres becoming Secretary-General of the U.N. Peres is known to covet the job. At first, shortly after Binyamin's Netanyahu's victory, Peres and his long-time aide Yossi Beilin, maneuvered to join another national unity government with Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Peres served as Foreign Minister in previous Likud-led governments, as did Yitzhak Rabin who served as Defense Minister. Realizing this effort would probably fail, at the same time Peres took steps to reinvigorate the idea of his being nominated to become U.N. Secretary-General—an idea Peres (with American encouragement) had pushed prior to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The notion that since an Egyptian had been Secretary-General, now an Israeli should be selected, was one Peres and friends thought they could use to catapult him into the job. With Qana still fresh in memory, it seems this lastest Peres gambit is running into considerable roadblocks though there may be further attempts to resuscitate the idea later this year.

In an ironic twist of fate, Peres' own most recent duplicity did him in. After a half-year cease-fire with Hamas, it was Peres' assassination of Yehyah Ayash, the Engineer, in Gaza in January that unleased the terror-wave in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that in turn led to the attacks on Hizbollah in Lebanon, that then led to Qana—all of which combined to lead to Peres' electoral defeat. In short, the Israeli people did not believe or trust Peres; and for good reasons. Certainly it would be the height of historical chicanery if the notion of Peres heading the U.N. after an American/Israeli effort to push out Boutros-Ghali should again be pushed forward.

Robert Fisk, writing in THE INDEPENDENT newspaper, has done more than any other investigative journalist to report about the realities of the recent situation in the Middle East—the false peace process; the deceptions of Yasser Arafat as he pretends to have an embryonic State and emulates Israeli repression tactics against his own people; the duplicitous conduct of Rabin and Peres in preaching peace while pursuing Middle Eastern apartheid.

The following article by Fisk was published a few weeks ago in THE INDEPENDENT and uncovers more of the realities behind the Qana Massacre and Shimon Peres' decline.

THE DEADLY SECRET THAT LED TO BLOODBATH AT QANA

By Robert Fisk, The Independent,

Saturday 1 June 1996

Tyre—An Israeli army operation to plant booby-trap bombs inside the United Nations zone in southern Lebanon led to the Qana massacre last month in which well over 100 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli shells while sheltering in a UN base. It now emerges that the Israeli patrol which came under mortar fire from Hizbollah guerrillas on 18 April—the incident which led to the Qana bloodbath—had been tasked to leave plastic explosive charges and mines near the village of Henniyeh, about five miles from Qana.

The UN's official report, which suggested that the Israeli massacre of civilians was deliberate, quoted Brigadier General Dan Harel, the commander of the Israeli army's artillery corps, as saying that an Israeli patrol, whose location was not given, had come under mortar fire from the Qana area and that at least one round landed 40m from the Israeli troops. What had not hitherto been revealed was the task the Israeli soldiers had been engaged in, north of their occupation area and inside the UN zone, when they came under fire. A similar and even more complicated field of plastic mines and booby traps was left by Israeli soldiers close to the village of Bradchit in the UN's Irish battalion area at around the same time.

Shortly after the Israeli bombardment ended, it now transpires, Israeli officers met UN ordnance officers and handed them detailed maps of the booby traps and mines they had planted. Polish troops subsequently defused the booby traps at Henniyeh on a hilltop from which Katyusha rockets had been fired in the past, although the Irish army took longer to complete its disposal of the Bradchit minefield.

What has caused particular concern to UN personnel is that it was a roadside bomb in the village of Bradchit that killed a Lebanese teenager last month, an explosion which prompted the Hizbollah to blame Israel and fire Katyushas across the border into Galilee in retaliation. Shimon Peres said at the time that Israel had nothing to do with the Bradchit bombs and the Katyusha retaliation set off Israel's bloody Grapes of Wrath offensive. But the revelation that an Israeli unit was planting booby-trap devices in Bradchit and Henniyeh on 18 April has cast new doubt on Mr. Peres's denial.

Nor did another claim by Mr. Peres during his abortive campaign for re-election --that the Hizbollah fired rockets at Israel from within the UN compound at Qana --do anything to repair the cynical state of relations that now exist between Israel and the UN. Neither the Israeli army nor the UN believe that Hizbollah men opened fire on the Israelis from a UN position—the Hizbollah did so several 100 metres from the outer perimeter of the Qana camp—and UN officers are mystified as to why the Israeli Prime Minister should have made such a statement just before the election, when he must know that it is untrue.

It was election time in Israel, a security source in southern Lebanon commented. On such occasions, truth goes out the window.

The written ceasefire agreement that followed the end of the Israeli bombardment has meanwhile been rendered meaningless scarcely a day after Binyamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister.

The monitoring committee that was to have ensured that all parties complied with the truce terms has never met, and in the past three days the Hizbollah have killed four Israeli soldiers and two pro-Israeli militiamen inside the occupied zone of southern Lebanon. Since the ceasefire, the Israelis have also carried out three retaliatory air raids on Lebanon, without waiting for the truce committee to pronounce on Hizbollah attacks, as they are obliged to do under the truce agreement.

In an Israeli air raid on a Hizbollah arms dump near Baalbek before dawn yesterday, an attack which set off secondary explosions for an hour afterwards, three civilians were slightly wounded—another breach of the ceasefire terms, which state that civilians should not be harmed in any Israeli-Hizbollah battles inside Lebanon. Two civilians were also reported to have been wounded when the Hizbollah killed four Israeli soldiers at Marjayoun on Thursday.


The Blood of 102 People Massacred at Qana
Still Cries Out


News of atrocious attack on civilians in Tel Aviv is coming in as I write this article. This will be worldwide news, as it should be. The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz says Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said the attack was "a natural result of the continued Israeli crimes against our people." "Natural" as if no one ordered this attack on civilians. A repulsive excuse.Yet the steady stream of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army's low intensity warfare and siege against the Palestinians, goes by almost unnoticed [26 killed including 5 children in the last three weeks].

Coincidentally enough the current attacks take place almost exactly ten years after a terrible Israeli massacre of Lebanese inside a UN compound in Lebanon [April 18, 1996] This was during the days Israel occupied southern Lebanon, when Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres was Prime Minister. During the election campaign Peres decided to have a little war to improve on his "dovish" image. So he launched "Operation Grapes of Wrath" causing 400,000 people to flee their homes, some 800 of them to a UN base called Qana.

On April 18 the IDF shelled Qana. I quote from the August 1996 issue of a journal I edit, "The Struggle". "The TV showed battle hardened journalists weeping as they walked among the corpses. No TV news in the world could show the most revealing pictures. Rescuers for a long time didn't know how many people were killed. There were heaps of body parts all around." Go on the internet and google "+qana +massacre". Available for viewing is an absolutely horrifying video of the mangled bodies of children.

The Israeli government offered various excuses. They said the IDF was firing at Hizbullah positions and a few shells went long. They explained that their soldiers didn't know the UN base was so close, or that it held civilians. They denied they had any aircraft in the area. PM Peres was quoted as saying, "In my opinion, everything was done according to clear logic and in a responsible way. I am at peace."

The Israeli excuses were all lies. 36 shells were in and around the base. A UN soldier with a camcorder recorded five minutes of the shelling and the image of an unmanned Israeli spy plane flying overhead. UN soliders spotted two helicopters in the area. A UN commander pleaded with the Israelis during the shelling for a halt. The pleas fell on deaf ears and the gunners continued their slaughter. The UN issued a report on Qana which determined that it was "highly unlikely" that human or mechanical error caused the deaths, but it ended there. Shamefully the UN didn't blame anyone.

Why did the Israeli government do it? Well, Israel was losing the war to Hizbullah. Its troops were suffering the same number of casualties as were the Lebanese. Six months before "Grapes of Wrath" Yitzhak Bailey, an Israeli Defense Ministry official, wrote about a strategy for an attack on Lebanon. In it he said, "Unfortuantely, the only way to stop Hizbullah actions against the Israeli forces in south Lebanon is to inflict heavy blows on the passive population...Then Hizbullah would be loathed." Pure terrorism. Bin Laden wouldn't say it any differently.

And how were the killers punished? Not at all. Peres lost the election to Netanyahu, but notice of his political death was premature. He was lately Sharon's Foreign Minister and next Monday he will preside with the swearing in of Israel's new Knesset. No Israeli soldier was put on trial.

The US President at the time was Bill Clinton. He never said a word of criticism of the Qana attack and in fact greeted Peres warmly in Washington a week after the massacre.

On December 15, 2005, relatives of those killed filed suit in a Washington, DC, court against former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon for his role in the deaths. The lawsuit was prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Yaalon, who is a visiting scholar in Washington, reportedly refused the papers serving the lawsuit. [source Winkipedia]

The blood of Qana still cries out for justice.