Warriors of God (27 page)

Amid the horror and shock, there was rage. Three young men ran into the compound. One of them screamed abuse at a cameraman and drew a pistol from beneath his shirt. His two colleagues restrained him. Another man knocked a camera aside and threatened to kill anyone who took more pictures. Gradually, the Fijians began to restore some order, marshaling themselves into a line clutching their M-16 rifles to block access to the bloody interior of their headquarters.

One shocked Fijian soldier told me, “Hezbollah fired some mortars near the camp and then the Israelis shelled us.”

Another, staring blankly into the distance, simply said, “I can't speak. I'm too moved. They just have to find peace now.”

To this day, no one knows exactly how many people died in the slaughter at the Fijian headquarters on April 18, 1996. Estimates vary between 102 and 109, with more than two hundred others wounded.

The massacre in Qana received instant and worldwide condemnation. In an abrupt reversal of his earlier indifference toward the fighting, Clinton called for an “immediate cease-fire” and dispatched Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, to the region. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary general, said he was “shocked and outraged” by the
massacre and sent to Lebanon Major General Franklin van Kappen, his Dutch military adviser, to launch an investigation.

Israel's initial response was defiant. Peres blamed Hezbollah for launching rockets and mortars close to the Fijian battalion headquarters and said that the offensive would continue.

In Beirut, Hezbollah issued a statement denying it had fired from near the Fijian base. But as the UN's van Kappen subsequently revealed in his report, fifteen minutes before the Israeli shelling, Hezbollah had fired between five and eight 120 mm mortar rounds from beside a cemetery two hundred yards southwest of the Fijian base.
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A unit of the still-classified Egoz commandos had been spotted by Hezbollah planting IEDs just north of the occupation zone. The first mortar rounds fell about a hundred yards from the commandos, then they inched closer, guided onto target by Hezbollah's forward observers. The Israelis said they initiated a rescue fire mission by shelling the location of the Hezbollah mortar. Some of the shells had overshot their target, the Israelis told van Kappen, and “regrettably” had hit the Fijian base.

But van Kappen's team was unconvinced. From an examination of the ground, they found evidence of thirty-six shell impacts and discerned that the rounds fell into two distinct concentrations. One was centered on a group of buildings close to the cemetery where the Hezbollah mortar team was located. The second impact site was in the middle of the Fijian headquarters. Witnesses said that there had been a perceptible shift in the weight of fire during the seventeen-minute bombardment, from the first location to the UNIFIL base. In other words, at some point during the shelling, the Israeli gunners had switched targets from near the cemetery to the Fijian base itself.

When van Kappen was dispatched to Lebanon, he initially believed that the slaughter was caused by a technical or operational error. A tragic accident, but an accident nonetheless.

“When I arrived in Lebanon at the Fijian headquarters, the first thing I did was stand on the roof of the main building and look at the fall of shot, and then I got an uncanny feeling … I thought, my God, this is not an accident,” van Kappen recalls.

Van Kappen's team also discovered that the majority of the shells that struck the Fijian headquarters were fitted with proximity fuses, designed to explode a few feet above the ground to maximize the shrapnel spray. Shells fitted with proximity fuses are typically employed against troop formations and soft-skinned vehicles rather than hardened positions such as buildings.

The Israeli explanation for the bombardment of Qana was looking increasingly suspect as van Kappen and his team probed deeper. The Israelis claimed that they were unaware that Lebanese civilians had been sheltering at the Fijian headquarters. However, UNIFIL had informed Israel that some nine thousand civilians were staying in UN facilities, a statistic that had also been widely reported in the media.

Then there was the discrepancy over the presence of helicopters and a drone above Qana. The Israelis repeatedly told van Kappen they had had no aerial assets over Qana “before, during, or after the shelling.”

But the Dutch general had evidence from thirty-five eyewitnesses including UNIFIL peacekeepers, Lebanese soldiers, and civilians, all of whom testified to seeing a UAV and helicopters in the vicinity of Qana at the time of the shelling. Additionally, he had in his possession a videotape shot by a Norwegian UNIFIL soldier on a hilltop opposite Qana that clearly showed a drone flying above the village during the bombardment.

Israeli officials also claimed that the Hezbollah mortar team had sought protection from the shelling by running into the Fijian base. The allegation raised the obvious question of how the Israelis could have known that Hezbollah men were fleeing into the base unless they had a drone overhead relaying real-time video footage to Israel. Van Kappen suspected that the Israeli artillery gunners switched from targeting the mortar site to the Fijian headquarters because footage from the passing drone had shown Hezbollah men entering the camp. Indeed, Brigadier General Amiram Levine, the fiery-tempered head of the IDF Northern Command, inadvertently admitted as much to van Kappen. In a meeting between the two, Levine angrily denounced the investigation, accusing
the UN of bias against Israel and blaming Hezbollah for consistently firing rockets and mortars from near the Fijian battalion headquarters.

“Then he said, ‘But we got five or six of the bastards that fled into the camp.' I said, ‘How do you know?' Then he realized he had made a mistake and tried to gloss it over.… That, for me, was a clear indication that Levine knew what had happened.”

While Israeli officials had responded to the massacre with somber-toned expressions of sorrow and regret, there were no such indications of remorse and soul-searching from the gunners who had fired the shells into Qana. In an extraordinary article published by the Israeli
Kol Ha'ir
weekly newspaper, several of the soldiers openly expressed indifference about the slaughter. According to one member of the artillery battery, the captain commanding the unit told his soldiers minutes after the fatal shelling that “It was war. ‘Come on, the bastards fire at you, what can you do?' He told us that we were firing well and we should keep it up, and that Arabs, you know, there are millions of them.”

Another soldier said, “No one spoke about it as if it was a mistake. We did our job and we are at peace with that. Even S [the captain] told us that we were great and that they were just Arabushes.”
Arabushes
is Hebrew slang for “Arab rats.”

Van Kappen met with the same artillery unit during his probe. The officers and soldiers were “extremely nervous … and very careful in what they said to me,” he says. “Also, they had this attitude of ‘What the hell are you doing here? We are in a war. Who are these peace doves and what is all this humanitarian crap?' ”

The hostility toward van Kappen and his team was not confined to a few scowling Israeli soldiers. Despite coordinating with the IDF, the convoy carrying the UN investigation team along the coastal highway from Beirut to Naqoura came under repeated shell fire from Israeli navy ships. Even during his investigation on the ground, which occurred
while Grapes of Wrath was still in progress, van Kappen and his team were dogged by near misses from artillery guns and air strikes.

On May 5, Israel concluded its own investigation into the shelling and shared its findings with van Kappen. The probe was headed by Brigadier General Dan Harel, the commander of the Israeli army's artillery section, which one UNIFIL officer later told me was like “asking a murderer to investigate his own crime.” Harel said that the Fijian compound had been marked with a pin on a map that erroneously placed the base a hundred meters farther north than its actual position. His explanation earned guffaws of derision from UNIFIL headquarters.

The “pin-in-the-map” excuse was the “biggest, sickest joke I have heard in my life,” Goksel said. The Israelis had extensive, highly detailed maps and aerial photographs covering all of south Lebanon. The idea that the Israelis had misplaced by a hundred meters a clearly visible, well-known UN compound of whitewashed buildings emblazoned with “UN” in large black letters that had been there for eighteen years was inconceivable, as far as UNIFIL officers were concerned.

The Israeli excuse that a map error had caused the tragedy in Qana also left van Kappen unpersuaded. Indeed, the accumulated evidence uncovered by van Kappen's team was damning, compounded by Israel's contradictory and unconvincing explanations. Van Kappen's findings were verified by artillery specialists attached to the UN. Back in New York, he showed his evidence to serving U.S. army officers for a second opinion. “They came back to me and said ‘We can't officially support you, but you are absolutely right. Just don't quote us.' ”

Van Kappen was left with a troubling conclusion: the cold, stark evidence suggested strongly that, even if the motivation was unclear, the Israelis had deliberately shelled the Fijian base. “While the possibility cannot be ruled out completely,” van Kappen wrote in a carefully phrased conclusion to his report, “it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors.”

Yet there were powerful political interests that had no desire to see such disturbing findings released to the public. The Dutch general came under pressure from numerous officials both inside and outside the UN
to tone down his report. He was told that accusing Israel of shelling the Fijian camp would be detrimental to Peres's election campaign and would embarrass the Clinton administration in a presidential election year. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN secretary general, was also urged to quash the report. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, warned Boutros-Ghali that its publication would complicate Middle East peace efforts. She allegedly told him that it would open deep wounds in Israeli society, to which the UN chief bitingly retorted that Israel's artillery shells had opened even deeper wounds among the refugees in Qana.
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“Madeleine Albright didn't like the report at all,” van Kappen says. “She told me several times that I had no proof, etcetera. I said that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to count holes in the ground.”

The option of a cover-up was dashed, however, when some of the key findings were leaked to
Foreign Report
, a British publication specializing in international security and intelligence matters. UN headquarters in New York never discovered the source of the leak. However, I learned, it was released on the personal initiative of a UN official who was incensed by the massacre in Qana and worried that Boutros-Ghali would buckle under the pressure to quash the report. The leak was quickly picked up by the news wires, and once the story was in the public domain, there could be no question of suppressing van Kappen's findings. The report was published in full on May 8, to the irritation of Washington and the outrage of Israel.

Almost a decade and a half later, van Kappen's analysis of the circumstances behind the Qana massacre has not changed. “I think it was a deliberate act. It was a war crime,” he says. “That is what I believe, although I refused to believe it for a long time. The evidence was so strong that there was no other way, as a professional soldier, you could come to any other conclusion.”

In his view, the UAV above Qana relayed pictures of Hezbollah men running into the compound, and “somewhere in the line of command, somebody decided they had had enough of Hezbollah.… Someone in the chain of command broke the [moral] code and did it. When I look at all the evidence, this is the most logical [explanation].”

The Qana massacre sealed the lid on Israel's Grapes of Wrath campaign. The United States realized that the fighting was spinning out of control and turning into a fiasco for its Israeli ally. Instead of neutralizing Hezbollah, Israel's disproportionate use of military muscle was deepening Arab sympathy for the Lebanese resistance and threatening to further undermine Washington's credibility as the neutral referee of the Middle East peace process.

Warren Christopher arrived in the region two days after the massacre and met with Hafez al-Assad in Damascus. Not for the first time, fortune had favored Assad's cool patience as the world turned once more to Damascus. Assad endorsed the French proposal, telling Christopher that he recommended a written reaffirmation of the July 1993 understanding that would safeguard civilians on both sides of the border but permit Hezbollah to continue resisting the occupation.

The Israelis insisted they wanted the United States, not France, to broker a deal, but Christopher found that he had little choice but to adopt the French proposal. Even then, Assad gave little ground, boldly refusing to meet the hapless American secretary of state on April 23, his third visit to Damascus in four days.

Shimon Peres, too, realized that his margin for maneuver had narrowed significantly since the attack on Qana. Christopher's earlier goal of reaching a detailed agreement signed by Lebanon, Syria, and Israel was scaled back to a simple one-page unsigned memorandum. The document was drafted and shown to Assad, who carefully scrutinized “every line, every word, every comma,” according to a U.S. official accompanying Christopher.

On April 26, it was announced that an understanding had been reached to end the fighting. Hezbollah was prohibited from carrying out any attacks against northern Israel; Israel could not attack civilians or civilian targets; and both sides undertook not to launch attacks from populated areas or other civilian sites.