More on the Israeli atatck on the civilian convoy

This story from the The New York Times expands on the post yesterday: "Israelis slaughter Lebanese security forces"

Before Attack, Confusion Over Clearance for Convoy
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Karamallah Daher/Reuters
A convoy of refugees from several south Lebanese villages was attacked Friday night. The villagers believed they had been given clearance to pass.
HASBAYA, Lebanon, Aug. 12 — The cars set off down the narrow mountain road a few hours before sunset. They were trying to leave villages the Israeli Army occupied two days before, moving with what they thought was permission to pass.

But then the missiles came. Shortly after nightfall, Israeli aircraft fired into the convoy, containing more than a thousand Lebanese villagers. The military said in a statement that it had received a request for the convoy to move, but had denied it. It said it had suspected that cars in the area contained Hezbollah guerrillas carrying weapons, and only later discovered that the cars were part of the refugee convoy.

Six people were killed and more than 30 were wounded, according to witnesses and Red Cross officials. Among the dead were a Lebanese soldier, a baker, a Red Cross worker and the wife of a mayor of one of the villages.

What followed was a scene of panic under a large yellow moon. Drivers switched off their headlights, afraid of being shot, and frantically began turning around on the narrow road, which runs between two mountains near the winemaking village of Kefraya. An ambulance worker driving with the convoy was killed trying to get to the wounded, and it was an hour before nearby emergency workers could get in to pick up the bodies.

“We saw the light and the sound of the bomb,” said Ronitte Daher, a newspaper reporter from the village of Qlayah, who was traveling in the convoy with her sister. “I got out of the car and heard voices of people crying and shouting.”

She did not know what to do, and switched off her lights. Someone shouted to get out of the car and run for cover. Other cars were driving in reverse. She turned her car around.

“When I was turning, I saw a dead body,” she said. “I know that man. I saw his children crying and shouting, ‘Please help us! Please help us!’ ”

Israeli planes have been striking Lebanese civilians since the beginning of the war, hitting a truckload of fleeing farmers, a Lebanese photographer and a village during a funeral. Even so, Friday’s strike still came as a shock: the convoy was more than 500 cars long and included a town mayor, an entire Lebanese Army unit and its own ambulance.

The Israeli military said it had banned the movement of cars south of the Litani River, though the convoy was hit well north of it.

Crowding may have been part of the problem. The villagers had been waiting in Merj ’Uyun, a few miles south of here, since early Friday. Many had not been out of their houses since the Israelis came late last week, and they were desperate to leave.

Finally, around 4 p.m., they piled behind each other in a long bumper-to-bumper line and began moving out. The road was a mess, torn with large craters, and it took more than two hours to move several miles, according to the mayor of Merj ’Uyun , Fuad Hamra, who was in the convoy.

As soon as the cars were hit, all within about three minutes of one another, drivers farther back began hearing about it on their cellphones and many simply stopped in the dark. Some cars parked in areas that looked safe. Others, like Ms. Daher, drove to Jib Janine, a nearby town. Shortly after the attack, clumps of cars were idling in two parking lots south of Jib Jenine. People stood outside in the bright moonlight.

Ms. Daher stayed in the home of a family she had never met. They gave her water.

“I saw some people,” she said. “I asked it’s safe here? They said, yes, come.”

Ms. Daher, a reporter for Nahar Newspaper, one of Lebanon’s main newspapers, said that she tried to take photographs of the soldiers from the window of her house on Thursday, but that soldiers shot at the house when they saw her.

“They asked people not to look out the windows,” she said, speaking by telephone from Beirut, where she finally arrived Saturday afternoon.

She described a frozen town, in which Israeli soldiers and Lebanese civilians were terrified of one another.

“They are afraid of any movement in the houses, so we tried to keep calm,” she said. Israelis, according to Mr. Hamra and other residents, had destroyed some houses in the villages they occupied late last week, and residents did not feel safe inside their homes.

“They bombed some houses,” she said. “We don’t know why.”

Residents were similarly baffled about the convoy. The Israelis have warned several days ago that they would strike anyone driving south of the Litani River, and reiterated that warning the statement they released Saturday about the mistaken strike. But the convoy was hit far north of the river, after the convoy had passed out of active fighting.

“Something went wrong,” Mr. Hamra said by telephone from Beirut. “We were promised that we would have the clearance from Israelis and the road would be cleared. Neither happened.”

“Probably the clearance wasn’t cleared enough.”

What do you say to a man whose family is buried under the rubble?

Israelis slaughter Lebanese security forces and civilians who had earlier been under UN escort

The SMH reports that

the UN Security Council today unanimously called for an immediate end to a month of bloody fighting between Israel and Hezbollah even as the violence claimed more lives.

HOWEVER

Shortly before the long-awaited resolution was passed, at least seven people were killed when Israeli drones attacked a convoy of Lebanese security forces and civilians who had earlier been under UN escort.

The incident saw three Lebanese army vehicles hit and set ablaze, police said. The victims were mostly civilians. The convoy contained hundreds of Lebanese soldiers and civilians fleeing the Israeli bombardments.

More than four weeks of conflict in the region have left more than 1100 dead, mainly in Lebanon.

UN calls for immediate ceasefire - World - smh.com.au: "UN calls for immediate ceasefire"

Leunig Cartoon: Israels balanced Collective Punishment

Cartoons - theage.com.au
http://www.theage.com.au/ftimages/2006/08/09/1154802959949.html

Atrocities at Qana

Images care of the Sydney Morning Herald

Bodies recovered from under the rubble of a demolished building in the southern village of Qana near the port city of Tyre in Lebanon. The area was struck by Israeli war plane missiles on Sunday July 30, killing over 50 civilians including children. Photo: AP


A civil defense worker carries the body of a child recovered from the rubble. Photo: AP/Nasser Nasser


Children, one as young as 9 months, were removed from under a collapsed building on the outskirts of Qana. People had fled there for protection but the building was hit twice in the missile attack. Photo: Jeroen Kramer


A dead child...one of the many victims of the air strike. Photo: Jeroen Kramer

Pictures from: Atrocities at Qana - smh.com.au

Australia at the U.N

Cartoons - Cartoon - Opinion - theage.com.au:

Rape, Murder and State Terrorism

So many disturbing stories today, I'm just going to list them.

US Marines Rape / Murder Trial

First off we have the trial of those soldiers I mentioned a few months ago that raped a girl and then covered it up by killing her and her family. Nice.
Rape and murder described in military court

A United States military court heard graphic testimony yesterday on how US soldiers took turns to hold down and rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and murdered her and her family.

More from the BBC

From the Observer:
Soldiers 'hit golf balls before going out to kill family'

Aussie Government forcibly sends refugees home to their deaths

Next, it appears that Australia's Immigration Department has a case to answer for, again.

Aussies Rejected refugees sent home to die: families tell harrowing stories
NINE rejected asylum seekers forcibly repatriated by Australia to Afghanistan are believed to have been killed upon their return.

Israeli Terrorism Update

And finally, the Israelis are bombing blindly again, last night killing masses of civilians.
Bombing kills 40 in village and cuts relief artery to southern Lebanon

AN ISRAELI air raid killed more than 40 people in a Lebanese village and other strikes killed 19.

Israel widens targets to hit civilian sites

ISRAEL plans to ramp up its offensive in Lebanon by attacking the nation's strategic civilian infrastructure to make Beirut more amenable to ceasefire proposals acceptable to Jerusalem.

Bloody night in Beirut as Israel intensifies aerial bombardment

More die as US and France fail to strike a deal

Antony Loewenstein - My Israel Question and Australia's Israel lobby's attempt to silence contrarian voices

Antony Loewenstein is author of My Israel Question, and has just recently been launched.

Antony is a Sydney-based Journalist whos writings have appeared in both the Fairfax (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald) and in Murdoch's "The Australian".

He is also Jewish.

His book has caused controversy since it was announced as being written last year, with a federal member of parliament, Michael Danby, going on an attack saying that the book "was an attack on the mainstream Australian Jewish community."

Loewenstein said last year "incredibly disappointing" that Danby would try to "dictate policy" to a publisher. It's a matter of free speech, he said: "It should be acceptable for a Jew or anyone else to criticise Israel or any other country."

"The attitude is 'there's one line and one perspective (on the Israel/Palestine conflict) and if you dare to question it then look out'," said Loewenstein, "it's like 'this is a war and there's no room for dissent'."
In todays Australian Loewenstein writes:

There is an unfortunate tendency by the Zionist lobby in many countries to try to restrict robust debate on matters related to Israel, Judaism and the Holocaust. The strong implication is that our secular society isn't mature enough to withstand opinions some may find offensive or false. Alternative viewpoints and narratives should exist in a democracy, though when it comes to the Middle East, Arab or Palestinian perspectives are rarely offered the same column space or air time given to Israeli or Western sources. The present conflict should ensure we hear equally from Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel.

My Israel Question Book Review in The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19907559-5003900,00.html

Sounds like a good read.

A Melbourne visitor enjoys its Murders

Stumbled across an interesting artcile on Melbourne written by a visitor who I guess is Indian as the article is in "The Hindu".
The Hindu : An Australian murder

While some observations weren't quite right - for example the generalisation that you need a million dollars to buy a house in a far-away suburb (you only need $400,000 for that), some of his other comments were spot on, or amusing.

Here are some snippets that I enjoyed:

AUSTRALIA is a wonderful country, especially for murders. I believe a good murder unites the people of this vast, sparsely populated country more than any sport.

and

Melbournites have become an impatient people. If they have to wait for a traffic light to change twice, they consider it a major traffic jam. With such a bounty and the vast landscape, its no wonder that Australia has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the world.

and

The city feels American... Melbourne is filling with tycoons, moguls, magnates, billionaires and mere millionaires. The newspapers keep a daily scorecard of rising property prices, on their front pages.

and

What I admire about the Australians is that despite such bloated prices, they do preserve their heritage.

Regarding the King / Society murders which occurred during the visit:

My wait for a good murder also ended. I knew that Australia wouldn't fail me. The "society" murders hit the front pages and TV News screens a week after I arrived....Strangely, little was written about Mr. King. Mrs. King had the money, so she was given the closest attention. Even in death, the money mattered most.

And his final summation:

Australia's a beautiful country, and always lays on a good murder for entertainment.

Visit the author at www.timerimurari.com

The reason America appears this way - Greg Proops - Montreal Comedy Festival 2005

Just cleaning up files on my notebook, and came across this transcript a made for a routine by U.S comic Greg Proops from the Montreal Comedy festival last year. Classic.

I know that often America seems like kind of a I don’t know a red neck, dick head, pecker wood, bohunky, hog, gun toten, psycho-Christian, anti-choice, homophobic, truck driving, dog in the back, gimme, cap wearing, tyou know, the jury’s still out on evolution, giant belt buckle with your name on it that you wear upside down so you can go “oh shit, that’s me name” kind of place, but my point is this….

The reason America appears this way is clearly England’s fault. Now, convoluted logic, but follow along and you’ll find rich rewards.

Once upon a time the English sent people all over the world; to this country you got the Scottish, in our country we got the pilgrims. And they still celebrate thanks-giving in England by the way – it’s called “FUCK OFF PURITAN!…Day”.

The pilgrims were asked to leave England. England was never funner than when the pilgrims split. The English got a little tired of these dour right wing black clad conservative gun-totting bible-thumping psycho-Christians running around scaring everyone, confusing people by wearing buckles on their hats!

“Is that tight enough for ya cotton?”
“yea verily … I canst but hardly think”

until finally some one went:

“I’ve got an idea, why don’t your little religious weirdos get in a leaky rickety little boat and GET THE FUCK OFF THE ISLAND. HAH! Sail around the world until you hit the new world. When you get their, commit genocide of the indigenous people have a groovy time, knock your-selves out, have a witch trial, let us know how that works out for ya.

We’ll be back in England having the Renaissance in case anyone needs us.”

They send over this group with guns and bibles and no farming implements – how
English is that –

“oh surely there’ll be a shop open….”.

Greg Proops
Montreal Comedy Festival 2005

You go a bit crazy when you see little body after little body coming up out of the ground

Excellent article printed in the Guardian, reporting on the children killed or affected by the Israeli attack on Lebanon.


A man screams for help as he carries the body of a young girl after Israeli air strikes on the southern Lebanese village of Qana. Photograph: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images



Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Wednesday August 2, 2006

Guardian

Three days ago, next to the gutted and destroyed house in Qana, seven bodies lay covered with bedsheets, a blanket and a prayer mat. One small arm stretched out from under the sheets; thin, the arm of a little girl, a piece of cloth like a bracelet wrapped around the wrist. As bodies were loaded on the stretcher, I saw another dead girl; she was dressed in a black shirt with a coloured scarf wrapped loosely around her head. Her face was swollen.

In some ways I was relieved. The rumour we had heard in the hotel in Tyre was that at least 40 people, half of them children, had been in the house in Qana when it was bombed by Israeli planes, and here I was an hour later, with Red Cross workers and others running up and down, and all I could see was the bodies of two girls and five adults.

It's weird, the things that make you feel better in the south of Lebanon, but seven dead instead of 40 gave me a sense of relief.

But even as I stood there registering that emotion, hellish scenes were unfolding. Four medics carried a little boy by on an orange stretcher: he was perhaps 12 years old, dressed in black shorts and a white T-shirt with a coloured motorcycle on it. His arms were stretched behind his head, but apart from the bruises on his face and the swollen lips, he looked OK. For half a second I told myself, as I tell myself every time I see death, that he was just sleeping, and that he would be fine. But he was dead.

Then came two more boys in the arms of the rescuers. One of them, the younger, around eight years old, had his arms close to his chest, his nose and mouth covered with blood. The elder, around 10, had dirt and debris in his mouth. Their slight bodies were put on a blanket, the head of the younger boy left resting on the shoulder of the elder, then four men carried the blanket off, stopping twice to rest as they took them away. The bodies of the boys were piled with other corpses in the back of an ambulance.

Two more small dead boys followed them. The medics were running out of stretchers, so they piled the corpses of the boys on one orange stretcher. One of the kids was slightly chubby; he was wearing a red T-shirt and shorts. His head rested on the lap of the younger, who was about six years old; both had the same exploding lips, covered with blood and dirt. It was obvious to everyone that these boys were not sleeping.

Then another child was pulled from under the rubble, and another followed, and then another. You go a little crazy when you see little body after little body coming up out of the ground. I looked around me and all I could see in the house was the detritus of their short lives - big plastic bags filled with clothes, milk cans, plastic toys and a baby carriage.

By three in the afternoon, when the corpse of a one-year-old boy was pulled from the rubble, he looked more like a mud statue than a child. The medics held him high above their heads, clear of the rubble. The faces of the rescue workers said everything that needed to be said.

What is obvious to everyone covering this conflict is that children are bearing the brunt of it. The few official figures collated so far seem to support this. Unicef says that 37 of the 60 dead in Qana on Sunday were children, and everywhere you go, it seems that it is the children who are being killed, injured and displaced. Yesterday the Lebanese government said that of the 828 of its civilians killed in the conflict so far, around 35% have been children - that's around 290. Unicef also estimates that about a third of the dead have been children, although it bases that figure on the fact that an estimated 30% of Lebanon's population are children, rather than any actual count of the dead. There are no official figures yet for the number of wounded children, but they will certainly exceed the number killed; as for those displaced, Unicef says that 45% of the estimated 900,000 Lebanese to have fled their homes are children.

Aid agencies believe that the reason children are suffering so much in this conflict is because of the big families that are traditional in south Lebanon. "You are not talking about nuclear families, you are talking about families huddling together with four, five or six children. Inevitably, a high percentage of children are killed," says Anis Salem, a Unicef spokesman. "We estimate that before Qana, 30% of the deaths were children, but it is a very fluid situation and that figure can quickly become redundant."

It is not just a matter of many children huddled together, of course: with numbers come all sorts of problems. If an air raid is coming, and you are running, how many children can you pick up and carry with you? How many do you have to leave behind?

Children often suffer most in wars like this - wars in which civilians suffer heavy casualties. They are weaker, they may be too small to run or walk, they may suffer more on long journeys by foot. And as Amelia Bookstein, head of humanitarian policy at Save the Children, points out: "Children who are wounded, separated from their families, or traumatised, may be too frightened or unable to flee their homes."

There are the official statistics, and then there are the children, who seem to be everywhere in the heart of this conflict, all with their own, painful, awful stories. A week ago I met Abbas Sha'ito, a chubby 12-year-old boy in a bright orange T-shirt who was sitting on the side of a road south of Tyre, blood covering his face, his T-shirt torn by the bomb that had hit the minivan he had been in. He and 17 others had been inside; his mother, brother and aunt were all injured, moaning and in agony a few feet away. Inside the minivan remained the headless corpse of his uncle, and the bodies of his grandmother and another man who had been fleeing with them.

Abbas was weeping, and had an arm round his mother, who seemed to be fading fast: she was injured in the chest and head, and one of her arms was almost severed at the bicep. "Don't leave me, mother," the boy wept. "Don't go, don't go."

It was clear that his mother believed herself to be close to death. "Take care of your brothers and sisters," she said to Abbas.

"Don't leave me," Abbas kept saying.

"My purse is under me. There is money, take care of it," his mother said; as she did, her head began drooping, and Abbas screamed, and a medic rushed in: "Don't cry, don't cry, she will be OK. Just keep talking to her," the medic said.

As it is, Abbas's mother is still alive, although still in intensive care, but Abbas was not to know this then. He buried his face in his hands and wept, while his brother Ali stood nearby, one hand bandaged and his eyes on the horizon.

Last Wednesday, in a hospital in Tyre, I met Samah Shihab, a seven-year-old girl with beautiful long eyelashes from the hamlet of Mlooka near Tyre. She was in the yard of her house with her two brothers, aged four and nine, and her 14-year-old sister, when a shell fell. "I was playing with my sister and brothers when the rocket came," said Samah. "They started screaming and crying. There was pressure in my ears and my hands and legs were all in blood. I was scared. My brother was screaming and I was scared." According to her doctors, Samah, who was badly burned and needs skin grafts on her legs, is unlikely to walk again.

On Monday I met Ali (he didn't give me a second name), who is nine and had been hiding in the basement of his house, along with his aunts, his grandmother and an uncle with learning difficulties, for 20 days in the village of Bint Jbeil. While the family hid below, war raged above: the village has suffered the heaviest shelling of anywhere in the south of Lebanon, as well as intense street battles between Israeli soldiers and Hizbullah fighters. When Ali emerged from the basement on Monday, during a brief halt to the aerial bombardment, he was visibly frightened and shocked, and seemed unable to recognise his surroundings.

As he made his first steps on the big chunks of rubble and concrete strewn everywhere, clutching a bottle of water in one arm and a blue bag in the other, he began shaking and crying. His grandfather, who was leading him through the rubble, collapsed in the shade of a doorway, and Ali and other family members continued their walk to the Red Cross vehicles - parked a kilometre away, at the edge of the village, beyond the edge of the vast and almost impassable rubble field - without him. I walked with them.

As we walked, jumping from one boulder to the other, Ali said: "My father and mother went with my other brothers and sisters to another town. They said they will come and get me when the bombs stop."

In the scorching sunshine above, Israeli jets were flying, their sound mixed with that of the drones. Suddenly a thud came from the hills and Ali froze. "They are going to bomb again!" He started to cry. "Why are the Israelis hitting us? Do they hate us? My cousin Mahmoud called me on the phone and he told me that the nuclear bombs are really big. Are they as big as these rockets?" It's hard to convey quite how shocked, perhaps quite literally shell-shocked - this little boy was. He was almost delusional.

We reached the town square. There was a large, deep crater on one side of it, and a half-destroyed petrol station on the other. Burnt-out cars lay flipped over on to their sides. A few hundred metres later we had to stop for a rest. Ali opened his blue bag and got out a small green bottle of mineral water. It had only a few centimetres left, but he sipped some and passed it to me. I was about to throw the bottle away when he said, "No, no, this is my charm - it's green, the colour of Imam Hussein." (Imam Hussein was the grandson of the prophet Muhammad; he is central to the Shia faith, and a great symbol of martyrdom.)

A few hundred metres further on we reached the Red Cross ambulances. Ali squeezed in with his aunts and other women and children; they were to be taken to the displacement centres in Sidon and Beirut. Ali, it turned out, was fortunate. As I left town, I saw, all along the road, children and their families who had been forced to walk to safety. One father was pushing a wheelbarrow with four young children inside.

In another hospital in Tyre, which has seen 120 injured and 35 dead so far, I meet the young son of the head of the hospital. Muhammad Najem, 11, spends his days inside where it's safe, because a week ago a car was hit by a missile on the road directly outside the hospital. Muhammad draws on a computer: his latest drawing is of Hizbullah fighter. Next to the fighter is a star of David stabbed with a dagger - blood drips down into a vat full of blood marked "Hell".

His elder brother Ali Najem, a fourth-year medical student in his 20s, is rueful. "The Israelis are planting very bad hatred in the children against Israel," he says. Ali has spent the past three weeks documenting the stories of the children who have passed injured or with their injured families through his father's hospital. He particularly remembers one boy, aged about seven, who was caught in a convoy that was hit in the first days of the bombing. This boy described to him, quite calmly, "as if it were a cartoon", how a baby from the car in front of them was ejected out of the window when the vehicle was hit. The boy's father had been killed at the scene.

Ali also talks about the impact on women delivering babies in the midst of conflict. In the first week of the war one of them named her new son Intisar, which means victory. In the past week, two new names have been given to newborns at this hospital: "Wahid, which means 'the lonely', and Dayaa, which means 'the lost'." The woman who gave birth to Dayaa did so alone, having been separated from her husband somewhere in the Bekaa Valley. Ali says that she became disturbed, and called out to her husband: "If you don't come and take me out of this place, I will put myself under these bombs and kill myself and the baby." For newborns, as well as for the older children, the scars of this war are going to take a long time to fade.