http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2000-02/fisk120200.shtml
Death comes calling again on a Crusader castle
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, 12 February 2000
We were just across the valley from Beaufort Castle when the mortar round
landed.
The 12th-century keep lay partly in shadow, the early spring mist
rising around it, and there was just a low rumble of sound that spread
across the hills. In southern Lebanon these days, that is just a heartbeat.
So we were sitting in the little frontline village of Braadchit when the first
Israeli jets flew over, a whisper, then a crash of sound that had the scraggy
goats running across the road and the chickens squawking and old Ibrahim Basil
looking up intently at the pale blue sky. "When we go out to our fields," he
said, "we take our coffins with us."
If his fear seemed over-imaginative, it was given substance by the little red
flash on my mobile phone. Yes, mobile phones are part of modern warfare. The
Israeli soldiers across the valley use them to order hot food from their side
of the border - or to detonate their roadside booby-traps. The Hizbollah use
them to bring their guerrillas into the wadis - and, like the Israelis, to
explode their roadside bombs. And we reporters, of course, use them too.
"Watch out Robert," read the message box from a colleague in Beirut. "One
Israeli dead at Beaufort Castle, one wounded. Israelis bombing near you."
The ground shook. The air pressure - how familiar it all becomes after so many
years in this sad, beautiful land - changed imperceptibly, just a slight
flattening of the wind. On the road beside us an old BMW with smoked-glass
windows and a staring, bearded driver at the wheel turned the corner into the
village so fast that the wheels spat stones into the chicken coop owned by the
Farhat family near the mosque. I told Ibrahim Basil that an Israeli was dead
and he shrugged his shoulders. "I left here when they bombed the power stations
this week," he said. "I came back today to feed my donkeys and cows. Now I shall
have to leave again."
Above Braadchit loomed the massive Israeli gun-platform which has dominated this Shia
Muslim-Christian village for more than 20 years, its artillery silent for the past four hours,
another fortress built by conquerors - crusaders from a different age but who, like the old French
warriors of Beaufort, were losing their war in Lebanon. The Hizbollah claimed a direct hit on the
castle and the Israelis, after trying to keep the news secret in their own country though military
censorship, acknowledged their dead and wounded.
The seventh Israeli occupation soldier to die in Lebanon in just over two weeks.
We all knew what that would mean. The UN radios up the road were crackling with
"sitreps" and "alpha-ones" and map collaterals. "Some air activity," said a
voice, possibly Irish. We couldn't see the jets in the high, bright sun but we
felt the distant concussion of their bombs around the Zahrani river. The Hizbollah
would have fired their mortar from the wadis there and the Israelis were trying -
vainly as usual - to strike at their tormentors.
Across the ravines to the west of Braadchit another drama was now being played
out. The five-power monitoring committee had gathered a few hours earlier at the
UN's headquarters at Naqqoura, on the Mediterranean coast, to discuss the events
of the past week.
Under the terms of the 1996 Understanding which created the committee, Israelis
and Hizbollah can kill each other inside Lebanon. But neither side is allowed to
fire at civilian targets or shoot across the border.
And since the Hizbollah had attacked only Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon and
the Israelis had dropped their bombs on three massive civilian targets - Lebanese
power stations - it promised to be an interesting meeting. Yet when the Syrian,
Lebanese, French and American delegations turned up for the conference, they
found the Israelis still closeted in their committee room. First the Americans
went to ask them to join the meeting. Then the French. And then, as news arrived
two hours later of the soldier's death at Beaufort, Brigadier-General Dany Arditi
stood up and told the Americans: "I'm leaving."
So the Israelis walked out. Later Ephraim Sneh, the Israeli deputy defence minister,
said that there was "no point" in talking when the Hizbollah were "busy breaking the
rules". But of course the Hizbollah were - tragically for Israel - well within the
rules of the April 1996 ceasefire, as the French were among the first, privately, to
admit. It was the Israelis who had changed the rules. And it was Mr Sneh and the
Israeli army chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Shaul Mofaz, who said on Thursday
that the "rules of war" in Lebanon were being changed.
So where is the next target in soft old Lebanon? We drove back yesterday evening
through orchards that shone gold with oranges and glowed with almond blossom.
Could the road bridge north of Tyre now be a target? The oil terminal at Zahrani,
perhaps, with its ramshackle California-style villas above the tanks? Or the new
motorway south of Beirut? The list seemed endless. Just like the list of Israeli
casualties inside its occupation zone. As for Beaufort, it has seen it all before.
Its inhabitants were massacred long ago. And a man once lay siege to it whose name
was to become the terror of all invaders. Saladin.
The US blamed Hizbollah for the collapse of yesterday's truce meeting and said that Syria
must do more to tame the guerrillas. James Rubin, the State Department spokesman, said:
"Unfortunately the meeting was deliberately disrupted by the casualties Israel suffered."
(Reuters)
