Author: Sonia Verma
Publication: National Post
Date: August 5, 2006
URL: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=ae679beb-d2be-40a4-8e74-8e581c1bf1ca&k=16670
Loved by many, accused by others of sacrificing
civilians
When Dr. Fouad Fatah emerged bleary-eyed from
the ruins of his hospital during a pause in Israeli air strikes last week,
it felt like the first time in forever.
He counted himself as the last living soul
in the five-room clinic, the only hospital serving this devastated swath of
Lebanon's south. His surviving patients had already been evacuated.
The surgeon led a group of journalists over
what remained: mangled debris, shredded walls and a roof punched through by
an Israeli shell.
"Look what they did to this place,"
Dr. Fatah said, shaking his head. "Why in the world would the Israelis
target a hospital?"
The probable answer was found a few hours
later in a field nearby. Hidden in the tall grass were the burned remnants
of a rocket-launcher.
Confronted with the evidence, Dr. Fatah admitted
his hospital could have been used as a site from which to fire rockets into
Israel.
"What choice to we have? We need to fight
back from somewhere," he said, tapping his foot on the ground.
"This is Hezbollah's heartland."
The Shiites of southern Lebanon have seen
Hezbollah as their protectors ever since the group first emerged as an Iranian-backed
militia during the Lebanese civil war.
When Israeli forces withdrew from south Lebanon
in 2000, Hezbollah claimed victory.
Since then it has launched a steady stream
of rockets across the border into Israel, causing few casualties but keeping
the Israelis in a state of perpetual wariness.
Financed, armed and trained by Iran and supported
by Syria, Hezbollah was treated by the Lebanese government as a legitimate,
arm's-length force patrolling its southern border. Over the years, its social
arm has come to provide social services -- schools, medical clinics and charities.
But the United States, Canada and Israel consider
Hezbollah a powerful terrorist organization, in part because it launches violent
attacks against civilians. Its armed wing is responsible for countless terror
attacks.
Military experts say that over the past five
years, Hezbollah fighters have steadily stockpiled weapons funnelled from
Iran and Syria. They buried rockets in tunnels, houses and, according to Israeli
officials, in hospitals.
U.S. military experts believe Hezbollah has
rockets ranging in number from several thousand to tens of thousands.
"We've been preparing ourselves for this
fight for the last five years. We can fight this for much longer," said
Abu Ismail, a local Hezbollah leader near the village of Bint Jbeil who uses
a nom de guerre, like most of his fellow fighters.
Residents of the cluster of villages closest
to the Israeli border, Hezbollah's most loyal supporters, helped stow the
weapons away.
But as the conflict continues, there is an
undercurrent of anger among some residents.
"Hezbollah are using [us] as human shields,"
said Rima Khouri, gesturing overhead as Israeli warplanes sliced through the
sky.
The Lebanese Christian woman fled from her
village of Ain Abel to one of the swelling refugee shelters in the city of
Tyre.
She was one of few people to speak freely
about her anger at Hezbollah and their strategy of firing rockets into Israel
from civilian areas.
"Their protection comes with a heavy
price. We want nothing to do with them," she said.
Nasser Kareem shared her sentiments.
During a pitched battle in his village of
Bint Jbeil last Thursday, the 48-year-old dentist watched from his kitchen
window as Hezbollah fighters dragged a rocket launcher across the torn street
in front of his house.
A few minutes later, he heard four successive
blasts. Kareem barely managed to cover his four-year-old son's ears before
the rockets were fired. His own ears are still ringing.
"Five minutes after they fired the rockets,
the Israelis started bombing," he recalled from the safety of a shelter
in Beirut.
"They are making us magnets for the Israelis,"
he said.
As war rages on between Israel and Hezbollah,
civilian deaths are adding up on both sides of the border.
The conflict has taken its heaviest toll in
Lebanon, where the line separating a civilian from a fighter is murky, and
support for Hezbollah runs deeper than ever.
For its part, Israel says its military is
simply locking on targets from where rockets are launched.
Driving through the emptied towns of south
Lebanon, it's a charge that's nearly impossible to prove or disprove.
Most villagers bristle at the suggestion that
Israel has been targeting anybody but civilians.
Anger boiled over last week when a shelter
in Qana was hit, killing 29 people, most of them children.
"What have they done to deserve this?
Is this a military target?" wept Mohamad Chaloub, clutching the lifeless
body of his daughter.
Local officials said there were no weapons
or rockets in the house where the children slept in Qana, no warning before
the bomb fell.
But the next day, the same Lebanese Red Cross
team that dug out the children's bodies stumbled across the shreds of more
rocket launchers in a village nearby.
One was found deep inside a fruit orchard.
Another was found wedged between two houses.
In this part of Lebanon, Hezbollah still rules
the streets.
Armed with satellite phones, but no visible
weapons, they patrol the roads on mopeds.
Stop in any town to ask for directions and
the answer will likely come from Hezbollah, waving any cameras away with an
angry fist.
Military experts say Hezbollah cut back on
its full-time fighters in recent years, estimating there are now anywhere
from 300 to 1,200 full-time fighters and several thousand reserves.
Though many would argue Hezbollah caused the
current crisis -- some would say it intentionally precipitated it -- it seems
clear the terrorist organization's ranks are swelling with each Israeli bomb
that drops.
In a rare interview with Hezbollah fighters
near the village of Srifa last week, a local leader took a reporter behind
a stretch of barbed wire, inside an orange grove where a training camp for
new recruits was underway.
Almost all of the camouflaged men racing along
an obstacle course of flat tires and twisted metal said they had a relative
buried under the rubble.
One man dressed in a green shirt and pressed
pants said he still hadn't recovered the bodies of his eight brothers, buried
beneath the wreckage of his family home.
Another fighter -- a young man of 16 years
-- had pulled himself from under a car that had flipped over from the force
of a bomb blast. He said his father died next to him.
"Show me a man who has lost his mother,
his father, his sister, his brother, his child and I will show you Hezbollah,"
he said.
