http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2000-05/fisk060500.shtml
Israel redirects Hellfire missiles "after US
advice"
By Robert Fisk in Bsalim, Lebanon
6 May 2000
Plans to target Syrian military inside Lebanon are
shelved after ambassador's intervention to keep fragile peace process
alive
Did the American ambassador to Israel decide the target of
Israel's bombardment of Lebanon yesterday? Incredible as it seems,
Martin Indyck's intervention appears to have done just that. By
urging Israel to suspend a plan to attack Syrian facilities in
Lebanon during its latest attack on the country's civilian
infrastructure, the plea led to the bombing raids - with
American-made missiles - on Lebanese power stations.
In the rubble of this smouldering Lebanese electricity plant
yesterday, I found the remains of the American-made rockets that
destroyed at least $2m of transformers, installed only four years ago
by the French government. Fired by the Israelis a few hours earlier,
they were Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, made by Boeing-Lockheed at
its plants in Georgia and Florida.
Even more extraordinary, however, is the report that the US
ambassador to Tel Aviv intervened on the targeting. Impeccable
diplomatic sources have told The Independent that the Israelis
originally intended to retaliate for Thursday's Hizbollah rocket
attacks across the border by hitting installations belonging to
Syria's 21,000 troops in Lebanon.
But hours before the air assaults were to begin, these sources
say, Martin Indyck, the US ambassador to Israel, appealed to the
Israelis to spare Syrian targets - on the basis that their
destruction might make a reopening of SyrianIsraeli peace talks
impossible. As a result, the Israeli air force instead targeted
Lebanese civilian objectives, including the Bsalim power station.
The report of Mr Indyck's intervention - and the diplomatic source
is connected to the highest authorities - is remarkable. That a US
ambassador can, in effect, decide the target of Israel's bombs is one
thing. But Mr Indyck also happens to be the former head of Aipac, the
most powerfulJewish-Israeli lobby group in the United States. He has
frequently intervened in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks but never -
so far as has been recorded - in Israel's military adventures in
Lebanon.
Nor is there any doubt about the American missiles. The Israelis
admit they fired five rockets at the Bsalim switching station in the
mountains above Beirut. I tore the manufacturers' computer coding off
one missile fuselage, whose Lot number was MGP976801. The "M" shows
it was once sold by the Boeing company to the US Marine Corps;
indeed, it appears to be part of a batch given to Israel in 1991 as a
quid pro quo for not joining in the Gulf War against Iraq. One of the
same set of Hellfire 114C missiles - with similar manufacturers'
codes - was fired by the Israelis into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996,
killing four children and two women.
The Israelis destroyed four of the nine electrical transformers at
Bsalim. "They are leaving the others for later," a young power worker
muttered with fury. "They can hit what they want here. How can we
possibly retaliate?" Clouds of toxic smoke drifted down from the
burnt-out equipment, its power lines dangling impotently, its heavy
iron punctured by rocket holes.
It is in the cynical and preposterous nature of the war in Lebanon
that dates and details become confused - often deliberately - by the
protagonists. It is therefore important to remember that the staff at
the Bsalim switching station - which converts 110 into 220 volts
after receiving power from the Lebanese national grid - saw Israeli
troops stealing maps of the facility from their offices at Bsalim
during Israel's 1982 siege of Beirut. Fourteen years later, these
maps were put to use when the Israelis staged their first bombing
attack on Bsalim after six Israeli occupation soldiers were killed in
southern Leban-on. France rebuilt the station with Italian
equipment.
Yesterday's early-morning raid followed the Katyusha attacks on
the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona, which killed an Israeli soldier
and wounded at least 16 civilians. But these Hizbollah attacks were
retaliation for two earlier Israeli assaults on Lebanese civilians.
In the first of these, 16 Lebanese civilians were wounded and in the
second two Lebanese Christian women - one of them 80 years old - were
killed by an Israeli shell. Their corpses were found at dawn on
Thursday.
With the single exception of the dead Israeli soldier, the targets
of both the Hizbollah and the Israelis were civilian. And the Bsalim
power station was in a Christian area of Lebanon. It is believed to
be the first time that Muslim Hizbollah guerrillas have retaliated
for the deaths of Christian civilians in Lebanon, traditionally
sympathetic to Israel.
Israel also badly damaged an electricity switching station at
Badawi outside the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli and attacked the
village of Britel in the Bekaa Valley.
When a flurry of Katyushas were again fired over the border
yesterday morning, the Israelis air-raided two villages just outside
the United Nations area of operations in southern Lebanon. All in
all, a dangerous, expensive 24 hours of warfare. Millions of dollars
of damage have been caused to Lebanon's infrastructure, much of the
country is without power - and Israel's chances of a peaceful
withdrawal from southern Lebanon this spring are further away than
ever.
