Warriors of God (26 page)

He would not have long to wait. For the turning point in the Grapes of Wrath campaign came in the early afternoon of day eight, Thursday, April 18.

Three Apache helicopter gunships were strung out in a line south of the Tyre peninsula, facing inland and hovering just below the thick gray mantle of cloud. The beat of their rotor blades was barely audible above the breeze as the helicopters hung motionless in the air, like patient yet malevolent insects awaiting prey.

I was hoping to hitch a ride with the next UNIFIL relief convoy to visit the bombed villages south and east of the port town. While waiting for the latest convoy to return to base in Tyre, I passed the time by strolling over to the southern edge of the town, gazing southward along the coastline toward the gentle hills on the horizon that mark the border with Israel.

There was a faint scent of orange blossom on the breeze from the coastal orchards south of Tyre. The Grapes of Wrath operation coincided with the last days of the spring blooming. The tiny cream-colored flowers perfumed the coastal road that cut through the belt of orchards between Sidon and Tyre, momentarily diverting our attention from the fraught drive. Since then, the scent of orange blossom in the spring has become, in my mind, indelibly linked to April 1996, the aroma wafting from the orchards triggering an olfactory memory of the violence and carnage of Israel's onslaught against Lebanon that month.

A tiny high-pitched whine from far above, like a distant scooter struggling up a hill, pierced the sigh of the sea breeze. It was an Israeli UAV, a reconnaissance drone, an ineluctable and sinister presence in the skies over south Lebanon. Generally, drones flew too high to be spotted with the naked eye, but this one was clearly visible, its wide wingspan lending it the appearance of a crucifix silhouetted against the cloud. It buzzed purposefully over Tyre's high-rises and the Roman hippodrome and toward the low-lying hills to the southeast.

Two Apache helicopters hovering south of the peninsula slowly ascended until they disappeared into the cloud. The third and closest Apache began describing large, lazy circles that brought it even closer to Tyre. It turned 90 degrees until it faced the peninsula. We eyeballed each other across a one-mile expanse of steel-gray sea before it, too, slowly rose and was enveloped by the cloud.

As the last helicopter vanished from view, the soft crump of distant exploding artillery rounds rumbled across the silent city. To the southeast, tall columns of black smoke climbed into the sky from the foothills outside Tyre. The explosions appeared to be emanating from somewhere near Qana.

The headquarters of UNIFIL's Fijian battalion lay in the center of Qana village, a cluster of whitewashed one- and two-story buildings, some of them inscribed with “UN” painted in large black letters. The base had been there since UNIFIL's arrival in 1978. Residents from nearby villages had begun to arrive in Qana on the first day of Grapes of Wrath, seeking the protection of the UN against the shelling of their homes. By day eight, some eight hundred refugees were crammed inside the base, most of them housed in the Fijian officers' mess, a flimsy building consisting of a wooden frame and corrugated tin sheets, and the conference room, another simple prefabricated portacabin-style structure. The Fijian peacekeepers, tough soldiers but also gentle giants deeply committed to their Presbyterian faith, helped house and feed the refugees and played soccer with the children.

The shelling in the distant hills continued as I walked back to the
UNIFIL logistics base in Tyre. The UNIFIL convoy arrived minutes later, the heavy white-painted six-wheeled Finnish-built APCs lurching to a stop beside the gates. There was a sudden commotion as the peacekeepers, encased in light blue flak jackets and helmets, clambered out of the vehicles. Mike Lindvall, UNIFIL's Swedish press spokesman, hurriedly briefed a throng of reporters. The Fijian headquarters had been struck by Israeli shells, he told us, and an emergency armored convoy was leaving immediately for Qana. There was no room for us on the APCs, so most reporters ran to their cars and tagged on to the rear of the convoy for protection. The APCs charged through the abandoned city before heading inland, following the road that wound through the chalky hills. The news had spread that something terrible had happened in Qana. Cars carrying civilians raced alongside us. One Mercedes almost collided head-on with an ambulance hurtling in the opposite direction. The ambulance's windshield was smeared with the red earth of the south to prevent the sun from glinting on the glass and betraying its presence to Israeli jets and helicopters watching from the skies above.

Hameeda Deeb, twenty-eight, arrived in Qana from Rishkananiyah village on the fourth day of Grapes of Wrath. In the early afternoon of April 18, she was sheltering in the Fijian conference room along with her sister Sukaina, thirty-four, her sister-in-law Sadiyah, twenty-seven, her nephews Mohammed, seven, and Hamzi, six, and her niece Fatmeh, eight months, as well as five other relatives aged between five and twenty years.

“On that day in the early afternoon,” she recalls, “we were eating lunch in our building [the conference room]. It was very crowded, with maybe a hundred people inside. I remember feeling that something was wrong. The weather was dry but gloomy, and everyone was quieter than usual. It seemed as if something bad was going to happen but we did not want to admit it to each other.”
⁵

Shortly before two in the afternoon, the Fijians heard the hollow thump of outgoing mortar rounds fired from near the compound. The Fijians were among the most combat-experienced of all the battalions
serving with UNIFIL, and they knew that an Israeli counterbombardment would arrive within minutes. They pushed as many refugees as they could fit into the bomb shelters and instructed other civilians to return to their rooms.

As the UNIFIL convoy thundered into the narrow streets of Qana, a dense column of roiling black smoke marked the location of the Fijian battalion headquarters in the center of the village. Several headscarfed women stood on the side of the street, crying and wailing hysterically, their arms outstretched toward the passing UNIFIL vehicles.

We halted behind an APC that was blocking the entrance to the Fijian camp. Reporters, UNIFIL soldiers, and civilians squeezed past the APC and hurried into the base. As I climbed out of the car, I momentarily stopped dead in astonishment. The air was thick with the musty reek of freshly spilled blood. It smelled like a butcher's yard.

“My family were all around me, my sons were sitting in a row in front of me,” recalls Saadallah Balhas, fifty-six, a tobacco farmer from neighboring Siddiqine village who was sheltering in Qana with twenty-two members of his extended family.

Fatmeh Balhas, twenty-five, a thin, sallow-faced mother of three children, was in line for food when the shell warning was announced. She returned to the officers' mess—the same building that housed Saadallah
Balhas and his family. Fatmeh sat down holding her sons, Hussein, three, and Hassan, two, while Qassem, her husband, cradled the infant Mohammed, who was only seventeen days old.

“When the first shell landed, everybody started screaming and panicking,” she recalls. “Then the second shell exploded and for a moment there was silence. The room was full of smoke and I could see nothing. I was dazed and numbed from the impact. It was only minutes later that I realized my children were dead and my husband as well. I was on my own.”

A naked severed leg lay on the ground, ripped off at the hip and blasted out of the ruins of the officers' mess. The sheets of corrugated iron that comprised the walls and roof of the building had been blown away and lay on the ground, warped and twisted like autumn leaves. Only a knee-high cement wall and the wooden frame of the one-room building remained standing. The air was filled with the urgent shouts of rescue workers and the terrible screams of anguish and shock from the survivors frantically searching for their loved ones.

“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” wailed one man staring into the officers' mess, his hands gripping the sides of his head.

Mounira Taqi, forty-two, a tall woman with tired, melancholy eyes, was sitting beside the entrance of the officers' mess when the shelling began. Standing next to Mounira were her husband, Ibrahim, forty-three, and her two daughters, Dunia, eight, and Lina, seven. In her arms she held her seven-month-old baby boy, Ali.

“I was sitting next to the door with my husband, Ibrahim, when the second explosion occurred. A piece of shrapnel from the explosion slashed his throat open, and the last sound I heard him make was the rush of air emptying from his lungs as he collapsed. I also had Ali in my arms, but God helped him survive. I could not see my daughter [Dunia] because of the smoke. But as the smoke cleared, I was only able to recognize her from a piece of her pajamas. She had been blown to pieces and there was nothing else left.”

•   •   •

The body of Ibrahim Taqi was lying at the entrance of the ruined officers' mess. His corpse was partially hidden by a woolen blanket thrown over him by one of the Fijian soldiers. A flap of flesh at the back of his neck was all that connected his head to his torso. His head was stretched back at an absurd angle, exposing the ghastly wound.

The officers' mess was a charnel house. The Fijian soldiers tried to lend the dead some dignity by covering the torn corpses with blankets. But the shrouds could not hide the horror. There were dozens of bodies, wrapped, embraced, and coiled together in the cold intimacy of death. They covered the entire floor of the officers' mess. Some had been blown into the corner, like a pile of swept leaves. Bewildered Fijian soldiers stood silently, wide-eyed with shock, staring at the corpses, momentarily unsure what to do next. Many of the corpses had lost heads, arms, and legs. Pieces of human meat had been blasted onto the low surrounding wall and the wooden support columns. Thick gouts of dark red blood smeared the floor and soaked the blankets. There was so much blood, streams of the stuff ran down the cement steps and collected in dark congealing pools in the dust. It stuck to our shoes. I later noticed that I had minced human flesh wedged into the rubber treads of my boots. Stunned camera crews and photographers raised the corners of blankets and gazed fearfully at what lay beneath, some of them openly sobbing as they mechanically recorded the horror in relentless and clinical detail.

A Fijian soldier, wearing rubber gloves and grasping a black trash bag, muttered prayers to himself as he stooped to pick up scraps of flesh from the ground outside the building.

A civil defense worker wearing a helmet and flak jacket raised the corpse of a tiny child. The top of the infant's head was gone. Its tiny arms and legs flopped lifelessly like a rag doll's as the civil defense worker, his face stricken, held the child aloft in front of the cameras. The infant was seventeen-day-old Mohammed Balhas, Fatmeh's youngest son.

•   •   •

Hameeda Deeb, who had felt a sense of impending doom all day, was beside the Fijian battalion's conference room when the first shells struck.

Three Fijian peacekeepers directed a feeble trickle of water over the smoldering remains of the conference room. Pools of pink diluted blood collected at their feet. The shell that tore the flimsy structure apart also turned it into an inferno. The mangled remains of the conference room contained a congealed, smoking, stinking mass of incinerated plastic chairs, tables, clothing, blankets, tinned food, and—as the eyes adjusted to the amorphous shapes—corpses, burned and blackened beyond any semblance of human form. Lying beside the conference room were yet more bodies dragged from the flames. One carbonized corpse was so hot when it was dragged out of the blaze that it had charred the blanket in which it was wrapped.

Nearby, a woman wailed over the dismembered corpse of her brother. With her arms raised and her face frozen with shock, she babbled a near-incoherent stream of grief. She tugged on her brother's lifeless arm. His other arm was missing, as were his legs. The shrapnel had cut him in half at the waist. A blanket covered the lower half of his body to conceal the terrible wounds. The brother's blood-smeared face wore an expression of placid indifference as his sister keened over him.

The clatter of approaching helicopters drew nervous glances skyward, but it was UNIFIL's Italian air wing arriving to evacuate the wounded. Even as the dead were gathered and the wounded taken away, Israel continued its relentless artillery barrage of the area, with shells exploding less than a mile away.