And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (14 page)

The war started amid misconceptions on both sides. The
exasperated Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, asked an aide to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “What have you done?” Hezbollah played only a small role in the Lebanese government, holding 14 of the 128 seats in parliament and 2 of the 24 cabinet posts, but it had more military muscle than Lebanon’s armed forces. Siniora was assured that everything would calm down within a day or two. Nasrallah seemed to be gambling that Israel would settle for a prisoner swap. “We do not want to escalate things in the south,” he said. “We do not want to push the region into war.”

Israel, the warrior state, was for the first time being led by men, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who had no experience in military command. They relied on the advice of Dan Halutz, the first air force commander to become chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Halutz believed the war could be won from the air, perhaps without any ground operations. Peretz thought the conflict would last ten to fourteen days. Olmert figured Hezbollah would sue for peace after a few days of aerial pounding. Most starry-eyed was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who reportedly convinced herself that it would be over in twenty-four hours. They were all hopelessly and tragically wrong.

On the second day of the conflict, I did my stand-up on a hill overlooking Beirut’s airport, which was being bombed again by Israeli warplanes. Flashes of light and thudding explosions created a dramatic backdrop. Then came a surreal scene. As a line of a dozen TV reporters trained their cameras on the airport, a crowd of cheering Lebanese came out of nowhere, including a Christian couple—she in her wedding dress, he in a dark suit with a boutonniere—who wanted to take their wedding picture with the airport going up in smoke behind them. Celebrating the destruction of
their new airport by a foreign power showed how much some Lebanese hated Hezbollah, at least at the start of the hostilities.

The Lebanese people and their government were angry that Hezbollah had picked this fight just as the country was getting back on its feet after its civil war, a fifteen-year, multi-sectarian conflict that took 150,000 lives. The economy was booming, new roads were being paved, new bridges going up, and Lebanon was probably the most popular tourist destination for wealthy Arabs, and several Arab governments actually came to Israel’s defense. Particularly gratifying, from an Israeli perspective, was Saudi Arabia’s criticism of the “uncalculated adventures” that were exposing Arab states to “grave dangers.” Fellow Sunni stalwarts Egypt and Jordan followed the Saudis’ lead, making it a rare time that an important group of Arab states sided with the “Zionist foe” against other Arabs. The G8 leaders, meeting in St. Petersburg, blamed Hamas and Hezbollah for the crisis and said Israel had a right to defend itself. The United States cheered Israel on and ran diplomatic interference, which became increasingly important when Israel’s conduct of the war came under criticism.

Israel’s greatest military success was its first large operation, a thirty-four-minute air blitz in south Lebanon. The Israelis claimed to have knocked out fifty-nine stationary rocket launchers and two-thirds of Hezbollah’s medium-range rockets, most of them supplied by Iran and concealed in and around the homes of Hezbollah activists.

But the second day of hostilities showed Israel’s military intentions in a more disturbing light. Several miles to the east of my hotel in south Beirut, Israel dropped twenty-three tons of high explosives in the Dahiya neighborhood, on Hezbollah’s headquarters in the capital. The stated aim was to kill Nasrallah and his high command
in their underground bunker. The Israelis had dropped thousands of leaflets warning civilians to leave the area, and a good thing too: streets lined with apartment blocks were reduced to smoldering rubble. Hezbollah responded with an intensive rocket attack, for the first time hitting Haifa, twenty-five miles south of the border.

That evening, Nasrallah gave a live speech from his underground bunker in south Beirut. Accusing the Israelis of “changing the rules of the game,” he said, “You wanted an open war, an open war is what you will get.” An assistant handed him a note just as he was recalling that he had promised surprises during the war. He urged his listeners in Beirut to look out at the Mediterranean. “This is the first surprise. Right now, the Israeli warship at sea—look at it now, it’s burning.” An Israeli missile boat had been hit by an Iranian-made, radar-guided missile, disabling the vessel and killing four crew members.

Nasrallah was a savvy war leader, charismatic and smart. People in the Middle East sometimes made fun of him because he was pudgy and had a lisp, but he was well-spoken, even eloquent. When he made a threat, people believed it. Like Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, Nasrallah was a sayyid, a descendant of Mohammed. But Nasrallah had far greater gifts than Sadr. I always imagined that Nasrallah was the leader that Sadr dreamed of becoming.

In the first two days of the fighting, 73 Lebanese were killed and 200 wounded; 12 Israelis died and 150 were wounded. The Israelis imposed a total land, sea, and air blockade on Lebanon. To tighten its pinch, they attacked fuel depots, radar stations, ports and jetties, and even the new lighthouse near the Corniche. They blew up roads and bridges, as well as a power plant that supplied the electricity to most of south Lebanon. Hezbollah’s rocket attacks only killed two Israelis, but they forced
220,000 people to seek refuge in shelters that were hot, unhygienic, and cramped after years of government neglect—the kind of indignity that proud Israelis thought was only suffered by the Arab side.

On July 16, a mere four days after the soldiers were kidnapped, I said on the
Nightly News
that parts of Lebanon were beginning to look like Baghdad. Israeli airstrikes were becoming increasingly indiscriminate, often with no apparent military purpose. I managed to get an interview with Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora, whose dismay at Hezbollah at the start of the war had turned to anger at Israel: “They talk about terror? They do terror every day.” Siniora proposed a cease-fire, followed by a prisoner exchange, with Lebanese and UN troops replacing Hezbollah along the border. Nasrallah wasn’t buying. The war, he said, was “just beginning.”

With Hezbollah firing 150 to 180 short-range Katyusha rockets a day, Israel knew that its bombing campaign would not be enough to win the war and that ground action, perhaps even a full-scale invasion, would be needed to subdue the militants. But the Israelis were in for a rude shock. On July 19, eighteen men from the elite Maglan reconnaissance unit ventured less than a mile into Lebanon near a small village called Maroun al-Ras. They suspected that Hezbollah was using underground bunkers, but had no idea how sophisticated or numerous they were.

As they reached a summit next to the village, the Israelis found themselves surrounded by Hezbollah fighters. Two Maglan soldiers were killed and nine wounded, and after fierce fighting the Israelis killed five militants. An elite unit of paratroopers arrived in tanks to evacuate the Maglan soldiers only to get snared in another ambush. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Israelis got lucky: they captured a personal communication system from a Hezbollah fighter and, by listening to the militants’ moves
inside the village, were able to ambush and kill a number of Hezbollah fighters, sometimes at point-blank range. “We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs—that was the intelligence we were given,” said one soldier. “Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of tunnels.”

By the end of the first week, fifty-five thousand Lebanese had taken refuge in schools and one hundred thousand had crossed into Syria. British and French nationals, along with twenty-five thousand Americans, were being evacuated from Beirut by sea.

After reporting from Beirut for a week, I wanted to get to the southern part of the country to see the damage. Twice we turned back because the Israelis were targeting any vehicle on the roads, and we were virtually the only people driving. Bridges were out, highways were cut, and even a lot of side roads were impassable.

We finally made it to southern Lebanon on July 23. Our goal was to reach a town called Nabataea. Relentless Israeli airstrikes and shelling had turned it into a ghost town. Six square blocks had been reduced to rubble. Once there had been pharmacies and clothing stores, but only broken mannequins remained. At Nabataea’s hospital, 115 residents had been treated for burns and shrapnel wounds.

The next day, following a trail of destruction toward the front line, we reached Tyre, the ancient Phoenician city a dozen or so miles up the coast from the Israeli border. Tyre was relatively safe, never carpet-bombed like south Beirut or the four-mile strip along the border, but dangerous enough that eighty thousand of its one hundred thousand inhabitants had fled. Along with other television journalists, we placed our camera at the Rest House hotel, which offered unobstructed views of the coastline.

I reported from there that US intelligence officials had told
me that Israel had flown fifteen hundred combat sorties since the beginning of the war and fired more than twenty thousand rounds of artillery into south Lebanon. It was now estimated that seven hundred thousand people had fled their homes.

That same day, twenty miles to the southeast, Israel Special Forces launched an attack on Bint Jbeil, a town of twenty thousand. After a massive artillery barrage, Israeli troops made an inauspicious advance from the east. Five soldiers were wounded by friendly fire, and the two tanks sent to evacuate them were disabled by Hezbollah defenders—the first when struck by a missile, the second when it went over a remote-controlled mine. Then an armor-plated bulldozer attempting to rescue the tank casualties was repulsed after being hit by a missile. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and eighteen were wounded, and another two died when their attack helicopter, assigned to fly support for the ground forces, crashed on the Israeli side of the border.

The Israelis continued to get their noses bloodied in four days of fierce fighting at Bint Jbeil. They inflicted heavy casualties on Hezbollah, but the militiamen reportedly held four IDF divisions at bay with a company-size force of 100 to 140 men. The Winograd Commission, which at the behest of the Israeli government analyzed Israel’s poor showing and the resilience of Hezbollah, said the failure to capture Bint Jbeil was “a symbol of the unsuccessful action of the Israel Defense Forces throughout the fighting.”

The battles of  Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jbiel revealed the massive failure of Israeli intelligence before the war. The IDF was unaware that southern Lebanon was catacombed with fortified bunkers and rocket launchers, “nature reserves” in the slang of Israeli soldiers. The Israeli air force needed only ninety seconds to pinpoint the spot from which an incoming missile was launched, but
well-trained Hezbollah firing teams needed less than a minute to fire rockets, lower the launching platforms back into the ground, and cover them with fire-retardant blankets to conceal their heat signatures.

All in all, it was a dismaying performance by the IDF, one of the world’s most respected militaries: squabbling generals, senior officers who hunkered down in bunkers while their troops fought in Lebanon, lack of discipline even among well-trained regulars, reservists so unprepared for battle that commanders chose to hold them back. In a footnote of venality, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who was briefly hospitalized during the war, apparently due to stress, later admitted to selling $28,000 worth of his equities three hours after Hezbollah kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers.

Then came Qana. This small village in southern Lebanon is psychologically located at the intersection of Palestinian dreams and Israeli power. During the IDF’s “Grapes of Wrath” offensive in 1996—a sixteen-day campaign aimed at stopping Hezbollah’s shelling of northern Israel—the Israelis fired artillery shells at a UN compound in Qana, killing 106 Lebanese civilians and wounding 116 more.

On July 30, 2006, I was in Tyre with a bunch of other journalists when word came of another incident in Qana. My NBC crew was packed up and ready to leave, so we quickly headed for Qana, only eight miles away as the crow flies, arriving within a half hour.

We found a scene of anguish unlike any other I had seen in a war zone. Usually the victims of a bombing attack are mangled, too grisly to show on television. But in Qana, the victims were apparently killed by the percussive force of Israel’s three-thousand-pound bombs or after suffocating in the wreckage. Twenty-eight people were killed, including sixteen children. I described the grim aftermath on
Meet the Press
:

“When we arrived, we saw this destroyed building. It was a three-story home under construction. There’d been dozens of people in the basement of this house, mostly women and children it appears. I counted eleven bodies of small boys, perhaps aged eight to ten. They were being carried out, some on stretchers; some being carried out wrapped in blankets, one body on top of the other. The bodies were intact, but had bled from their ears and from their noses. Then we went to the morgue and saw about twenty-two bodies lined up on the floor. They were wrapped in plastic, tied shut in packaging tape.”

On the
Nightly News
, I reported that the “conflict may have reached a turning point with this single deadly attack.” The war dragged on but international public opinion had turned sharply against the Israelis, shortening the time they had to achieve their war objectives. Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, accused the Israelis of war crimes and asked, “Why, we wonder, did they choose Qana yet again?” The UN Security Council, following an emergency session, expressed “extreme shock and distress” at the bombing. Violent protests took place at UN offices in Beirut and Gaza, and thousands demonstrated in Israel, most of them in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm but also in Tel Aviv and Haifa. The international reaction was harshly critical.

At first, Israel said it hit the building in Qana because Hezbollah was using it to fire Katyusha rockets across the border less than eight miles to the south, with villagers acting as “human shields,” in the words of IDF chief Dan Halutz. Journalists and international observers emphatically disputed the claim, saying that Hezbollah was firing rockets from unpopulated areas off-limits to civilians.