Warriors of God (57 page)

SIDDIQINE, south Lebanon
—The white minibus had coasted to a halt beside a metal garbage container on the side of the road overlooking a steep valley. The missile had struck the center of the tin roof, punching a gaping, jagged hole before exploding inside.

A man slouched to one side in his seat as if the drive had lulled him to sleep. But the top of his head was gone, leaving an empty skull and thick gouts of blood and brain matter dribbling down what was left of his face. His yellowing hand dangled nonchalantly out the glassless window. A dead woman sat beside him slumped over the seat in front, the back of her pale blue dress drenched in blood, scorched from the explosion, and pockmarked by shrapnel. The interior of the vehicle looked as though someone had flung in buckets of scarlet paint. Beside the dead man and covered in the contents of his skull, a woman sat upright staring blankly ahead, lost in shock. Her black dress was sodden with blood, her face a gory mask.

“Can you stand?” asked a Red Cross medic. The woman—I later discovered
her name was Ibtissam Shayto—moved her mouth slightly, but her words were unintelligible. Two of the medics clambered onto the roof of the minibus, struggling under the weight of their cumbersome orange flak jackets and white helmets. They carefully hauled Ibtissam through the hole in the roof, tied a bandage around her head, and gently lowered her into the waiting arms of their colleagues.

A few yards away, the other passengers lay on the ground, the more serious casualties groaning and writhing as medics tended to them. The driver of the minibus, a thin man with an unkempt beard, lay on his back, his hands over his eyes, crying out in anguish, “
Ya Allah! Ya Allah!
(Oh God! Oh God!)”

There were nineteen passengers, all of them from the village of At-Tiri near Bint Jbeil. They had squeezed themselves inside the minibus in a desperate attempt to escape the killing zone that south Lebanon had become over the past week. Ali Shayto, a pudgy twelve-year-old boy whose naked torso was speckled in blood, said that they had been instructed by the Israelis over the radio to leave the village. “Someone came for us and we drove with our cars out of the village,” he said. “We were trying to keep up with the others when we were hit.”

Like so many other civilian vehicles fleeing the south, they had trailed white sheets from the windows to signal to Israeli helicopters and drones that they were noncombatants. It had made no difference. The missile, probably fired from a drone, struck the minibus as it approached the village of Siddiqine. It was a miracle that only three people were killed in the densely packed vehicle; among them were Ibtissam's mother and brother-in-law. All the other passengers were wounded to varying degrees of severity. Ali's brother, Abbas, sobbed beside his supine mother, whose bandaged left arm was streaked with blood. She silently raised her right hand and held her son's arm in a consoling gesture.

This was our first trip out of the relative safety of Tyre since arriving in the port town five days earlier. We had planned to reach Tibnine and had shadowed an ambulance, hoping that the Red Cross emblem on the roof would provide some protection from the prowling missile-firing pilotless drones that had turned the narrow roads meandering through valleys and steep chalky hills east of Tyre into places of terror and death.

The journey to Tibnine was abandoned, however, when we came across the minibus just minutes after it was hit. The ambulance loaded as many casualties as it could hold, and we hurtled back to Tyre. A car was burning furiously on the road outside the Najem hospital on Tyre's outskirts, the result of yet another missile strike. The three occupants had managed to escape just before the vehicle was engulfed in orange flames.

“This is getting worse and worse by the day,” said Qassem Shaalan, a young Lebanese Red Cross volunteer. His unit had made twenty trips into the Tyre hinterland that morning alone to recover casualties. By midday, he told me, ten cars, including an ambulance belonging to a local charity, had been attacked in the vicinity of Tyre. That night, Shaalan was almost killed when a pair of missiles, believed fired from an Israeli drone, slammed into two parked ambulances in Qana during a transfer of wounded civilians.

At the Jabal Amil hospital in Tyre, the casualties continued to arrive along with more reports of targeted cars—two from At-Tiri, including the minibus, one from Qlayly, one from Aytit, and two from Jmayjme.

A UNIFIL officer told me that the Israelis had promised the peacekeeping force they would not hinder vehicles traveling north on the main roads. But the evidence suggested that cars were being attacked regardless of their occupants and the direction in which they were headed.

“They have been hitting civilian cars all over the place,” Peter Bouckart of Human Rights Watch told me. “I have been in many war zones, but this one is one of the most dangerous places I have ever seen.”

It had begun eleven days earlier on a bright sunny morning. I was scanning Lebanese and Israeli news websites as part of my morning routine when, shortly after 9:00
A.M.
, a one-line news flash popped up on the
Haaretz
ticker. Rockets fired from Lebanon had just struck the area of Shelomi in western Galilee. This was not an unusual occurrence. Every
few months, anonymous groups or individuals launched short-range 107 mm rockets across the Blue Line into Israel, but rarely causing damage or casualties. I telephoned Hussein Naboulsi, Hezbollah's foreign media spokesman, to try to find out what was happening. I expected him to say that Hezbollah had no information. Since May 2000, the only operations claimed by Hezbollah had all occurred in the Shebaa Farms, the tacitly accepted theater of conflict between the Islamic Resistance and the Israeli army. The Shebaa Farms was occupied Arab territory, which helped legitimize Hezbollah's military actions, but attacks across the border into Israel would be considered acts of war.

When Hussein picked up the phone, I jokingly asked if his “boys” were up to anything along the border. His reply made me sit up. “Yes, our fighters are in action,” Hussein said, “but I don't have any further details.”

If Hezbollah was admitting that it had launched an operation along the border with Israel, then it could only be something significant.

“Hussein, has Hezbollah kidnapped an Israeli soldier?”

Hussein hesitated before responding.

“I don't know,” he said. “The military people haven't told me anything yet.”

In fact, Hezbollah had abducted not one but two soldiers, snatching them from an army Humvee seconds after attacking it with rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The Humvee was one of two on a routine patrol of the border fence facing the western sector, close to the Hezbollah bastion of Aitta Shaab. The rear Humvee, traveling about a hundred yards behind the lead vehicle, was disabled by machine gun fire and RPGs, the three soldiers inside shot dead. Two of the four soldiers in the lead vehicle were wounded but escaped and hid in bushes. The remaining two, Sergeant Udi Goldwasser, the patrol's commander, and Eldad Regev, were grabbed by the Hezbollah fighters and driven away in civilian jeeps along a dirt track in the direction of Aitta Shaab.

The ambush site was well chosen. It fell into a “dead zone,” out of sight of nearby IDF compounds, at the bottom of a wadi between the Israeli border settlements of Zarit and Shetula. The IDF had planned to erect a surveillance camera in the wadi the following week. As the kidnappers
raced away, Hezbollah fire support teams staged a diversionary bombardment with mortars and Katyusha rockets against nearby Israeli outposts and the settlements of Zarit and Shetula. Hezbollah snipers shot out surveillance cameras along the border fence.

Some forty minutes later, the Israelis confirmed that two of their soldiers were missing. A Merkava tank and a platoon of troops in armored personnel carriers crossed the border in hot pursuit of the Hezbollah abductors. But the tank struck one of Hezbollah's belly charges, a massive IED consisting of an estimated five hundred pounds of explosive, one of many planted at potential breach points along the border. The huge blast tore the tank to pieces, killing all four crew members. Another soldier was killed in clashes with local Hezbollah men lying in wait. That brought the number of Israeli soldiers killed that morning to eight, the highest single day fatality toll for Israeli troops in Lebanon since the Ansariyah disaster in September 1997.

I was well on the way to south Lebanon by the time it was publicly confirmed that two Israeli soldiers had been kidnapped. The clashes around Aitta Shaab had spread. The Israelis were bombing bridges in a forlorn attempt to prevent the kidnappers from taking the two hostages farther north. The bridge spanning the limpid green waters of the Litani River on the coastal road just north of Tyre had already been destroyed by Israeli jets by the time I arrived there. A Lebanese soldier and two civilians were killed in the air strike. Soldiers blocked the road at a checkpoint a mile from the collapsed bridge and yelled at southbound motorists to turn around. I headed east through rolling chalky hills toward Nabatiyah, trying to find another way across the river. In the dusty hilltop villages, convoys of cars with yellow Hezbollah flags streaming in the wind drove through the streets honking horns at the news of the capture of the two soldiers. Hezbollah supporters stood in the center of roads handing out sweets to passing motorists in celebration.

From Marjayoun, the crump of artillery fire echoed across the valley to the east as round after round exploded at the foot of the Shebaa Farms. The roar of a low-flying jet signaled an air strike was about to commence. A loud blast was followed moments later by a tall column of dust and smoke that climbed into the deep blue sky beyond Khiam.

Within minutes of Hezbollah commanders learning of the success of the kidnapping operation, the call went out to hundreds of fighters living in the south to move to frontline positions in expectation of an Israeli counterattack. Among those receiving call-up orders was Abu Khalil, the veteran Hezbollah fighter who used to load Katyusha rockets for launching in the 1990s. He was at home when he received a call instructing him to report to a position in the Marjayoun area. Abu Khalil left his mobile phone behind, said farewell to his family without telling them where he was going, and rendezvoused with a Renault van that carried him to his destination. There were two other passengers in the vehicle besides the driver. None of them spoke. They listened to Koranic verses playing on the Renault's CD player and contemplated what lay ahead. Abu Khalil thought of his two young daughters and his wife and parents and wondered if God would make him a martyr in the coming conflict. By midday, he was in position near Marjayoun, listening intently to his orders from a Hezbollah commander.

Another fighter, Hajj Ali, a slightly built, gaunt-faced fifty-year-old veteran of more than two decades' service with Hezbollah who today trains new recruits at camps in Iran, was sent to the southern Bekaa Valley at the start of the war to join a crew firing long-range rockets into Israel. “In 2000, when the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon many people [in Hezbollah] were upset because the line we follow is jihad and it had ended,” he said. “Don't misunderstand me—we don't like war. We don't treat it as a hobby. But when war came in 2006, many of us smiled because it was chance for us to once more follow the path of jihad.”

Nasrallah gave a press conference at 5:00
A.M.
that was covered live on television. I watched it in a café in Marjayoun as I wrote my first dispatch for the day. The Hezbollah chief said that the Israeli soldiers were abducted to secure the release of the last remaining detainees in Israel, especially Samir Kuntar. And the only way the soldiers would return
home was through indirect negotiations. “Any military operation,” he said, “will not result in rescuing these prisoners.”

Even as he spoke, the Israelis had taken out two more bridges across the Litani River and were dropping aerial bombs on main roads, rendering them impassable. Hezbollah observation posts and security pockets were coming under air attack and shell fire.

Nasrallah was not looking for a serious confrontation with Israel. He was gambling that a new, untested, and civilian-heavy Israeli cabinet would balk at launching a war against Hezbollah and instead would opt for prisoner swap negotiations as previous governments had done. Yet was there just a sense of unease in his voice as he warned Israel about the folly of overreacting to the abductions? Did Nasrallah, the master tactician, at that moment begin to wonder if he had miscalculated how the Israelis might react?

“We do not want to escalate things in the south,” he said. “We do not want to push Israel into war. We do not want to push the region into war.”

Senior Israeli military officials were already threatening that the “period of quiet is over” and that if the abducted soldiers were not released “we'll turn Lebanon's clock back twenty years.”

Responding to the threats, Nasrallah cautioned that the Lebanon of today was “different from the Lebanon of twenty years ago. If they choose confrontation, then they should expect surprises.”

The ministers belonging to the Western-backed March 14 parliamentary bloc in Lebanon's coalition government were furious at the kidnapping operation, especially as Nasrallah had previously provided assurances that Hezbollah would not embark upon any military adventures during the summer months that could jeopardize the lucrative tourist season.