HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Editorials
Unanswered Questions on First Anniversary of the Attack on the U.N. Base at Qana
By Virginia N. Sherry
The following article was published in al-Hayat, the London-based, Arabic-language daily, in two parts on April 16 and April 17
Last year, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) called the deadly
artillery barrage on the U.N. base at Qana an "unfortunate
incident." The IDF stated that it "has always directed its armed
forces that civilian targets are not to be attacked," and held fast
to the position that the attack was an accident due to mapping and
measuring errors. "Any attempt to claim that the extremely
unfortunate results of the Qana incident were anything but
accidental, as implied by the U.N. report, is totally unfounded,"
the IDF wrote in an official response dated May 9, 1996. Residents
of south Lebanon, who bore the brunt of Operation Accountability in
July 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in April 1996, view the
massacre at Qana as anything but accidental. For years, they have
endured indiscriminate attacks by Israeli aircraft, and Israeli and
South Lebanon Army (SLA) artillery, which have killed, maimed and
injured their children and neighbors.
Qana was not an exception to this pattern, and the only reason that
the world took notice was because it was the most horrific Israeli
attack to date. The enormous casualty toll, and the gruesome images
of charred and dismembered victims, many of them infants and
children, could not be easily ignored, nor could the fact that the
shells exploded—in broad daylight and clear weather—in the middle of
a U.N. base where over 800 civilians were openly being sheltered.
Evidence to support those who maintain that the artillery fire at
Qana was not an accident can be found not only in the U.N. report
that was so vigorously dismissed by Israel and the United States,
but also in events that took place elsewhere in south Lebanon. In
the days before the Qana base was transformed into a bloody tableau,
other attacks demonstrated that Israeli military forces were
operating in flagrant disregard of international humanitarian law,
the laws of war. The civilian deaths and injuries at Qana should be
viewed in this broader context.
On April 17, the day before the Qana debacle, there was a remarkably
similar but little-noticed artillery attack on the small U.N. base
in the front-line village of Majdal Zoun, where 60 civilians were
sheltered. There was massive destruction inside the base but,
miraculously, no loss of life. Was this, like Qana, also an
accident? On April 16, a clearly marked ambulance in the village of
Aabba, near Nabatiyeh, was blown to bits by Israeli aircraft. There
also was the destructive shelling of the Hospital of the South in
downtown Nabatiyeh on the morning of April 15, and the rocketing of
another well-marked ambulance as it was leaving the village of
Mansouri on April 13, which claimed the lives of four children and
two women. Accidents, or war crimes?
Consider these attacks, described in detail below, in light of the
words of then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres to the Israeli parliament:
"The government, in its instructions to the IDF on the operation,
ordered it not to harm civilians or civilian targets, and to
concentrate solely on Hizballah installations and on the terrorists
themselves." Either Peres was being less than honest, or Israeli
military commanders ignored not only the laws of war but also the
express instructions of their own government.
April 17, 1996, Majdal Zoun:
During the first week of Operation Grapes of Wrath, most of the
residents of the small front-line village of Majdal Zoun had fled in
fear. But some of them sought shelter in the U.N. base there, which
had been manned by Nepalese soldiers for 12 years. There were sixty
civilians inside the compound when it was shelled on April 17, and
it was sheer luck that no one was killed.
Commanding officer of the base, Lt. Col. Rana Dhoj Limbu, recounted
the events leading up to the attack. On April 14, there was "a lot
of shelling around the village, damaging houses and roads," he told
me. On April 15, journalists came to inspect the destruction,
travelling in a convoy of U.N. vehicles and private cars. The convoy
came under "close fire" from 155mm artillery. On April 16, the road
to Majdal Zoun was bombed about one kilometer northwest of the base,
cutting off access.
The next morning, a U.N. force of Polish engineers and Nepalese
soldiers attempted to clear the road, arriving in an armored
personnel carrier, a front-end loader, and a Toyota van. At about 11
am, after the peacekeepers had filled two bomb craters and cleared
debris from about 700 meters of the road, an Israeli fighter jet
dropped a bomb 150 meters north of them. They continued working for
another half-hour, but left when two rounds, fired by tanks or
artillery, exploded 200 meters in front of them.
About ten minutes later, the U.N. base itself came under direct
fire, receiving eight incoming rounds. The mix of shells was similar
to what would explode the next day at Qana: half of them were
"proximity-fuzed" devices that explode in the air over a target
rather than on the ground. It was these air-burst shells that
exploded near the prefabricated buildings that housed the camp's
kitchen and dining room, causing extensive damage, and above roads
inside the base. The bathrooms, sentry tower, and water tank also
were damaged in the attack. "Many other rounds fell nearby, which we
did not report," the commanding officer added.
According to Lt. Col. Limbu, at the time of the attack, there had
been no guerrilla military actions in the area, no firing of
Katyushas. "Most of the resistance activity was in Yatar," he said,
another front-line village some 10 kilometers to the east. He also
noted that, in a departure from normal operating procedure, there
had been no shell warning from the Israeli side prior to the attack.
The next day, the Qana base did not receive a shell warning either.
"It could not have been a mistake," Lt. Col. Limbu told me as we
toured the compound. "They know this base. This is one of the U.N.
bases that is closest to the IDF positions. Maybe it happened
because we were sheltering civilians and they did not like this."
Col. Limbu pointed out that Yarin, "a main firing position" during
Operation Grapes of Wrath, was only five kilometers away, near the
Israeli border, and that another IDF position was less than a
kilometer from the base. He noted that the weather was clear when
the attack occurred and, after the first shell (a smoke bomb)
landed, the peacekeepers fired eight red flares. "This is normal
[procedure] when we are attacked. They can see the flares from
Yarin," he noted. The flares did not halt the attack, and shells
were fired into the base for five to seven minutes, he said. Unlike
the situation at Qana, where indirect fire was used, the nearby
artillery gunners had clear lines of sight to Majdal Zoun.
April 16, 1996, between Zahrani and the coastal highway:
In addition to organizing convoys for villagers who wanted to
evacuate, and sheltering some 5,000 civilians on its bases during
the conflict, U.N. peacekeeping soldiers distributed food and relief
supplies to residents throughout the south who were unable or
unwilling to flee. A U.N. official told me that UNIFIL, the UN's
peacekeeping operation in Lebanon, always informed the Israeli
military of the movements of its humanitarian convoys, and that the
IDF "told us officially that [the convoys] would not be impeded."
Despite this assurance, UNIFIL vehicles that carried out
humanitarian missions came under dangerously close Israeli fire on
many occasions. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
said that he went out in some 15 to 16 such convoys during Operation
Grapes of Wrath and experienced ten cases of close fire near the
vehicles he traveled in.
On the afternoon of April 16, six Finnish U.N. soldiers set out from
their base in an armored personnel carrier (APC) and a container
truck, on their way to Zahrani to collect humanitarian supplies.
When they reached Zahrani, the soldiers loaded the truck for about
ninety minutes. During this time—at about 3:30 pm—Israeli aircraft
began to bomb the road about one kilometer away. "They dropped at
least four or five bombs," recalled Capt. Ville Pouttu, who was in
the convoy. "They were trying to cut the road. It was the only road
leading to Nabatiyeh."
When the truck was loaded, the Finns travelled west, in the
direction of the coastal highway. They found the four-lane road
blocked by three enormous bomb craters "in a line," each about ten
meters in diameter and four meters deep. While the soldiers were
outside their vehicles, an Israeli jet swooped down and flew two
times over the APC. After the second overflight, as the men were
mounting the APC, a bomb was dropped into one of the craters on the
road in front of them, about 50 meters from their vehicle. The site
of the attack was an open area, with no buildings or trees
obstructing a view of the clearly marked vehicles. A second attack
followed. The drivers put the vehicles into reverse and drove about
300 to 400 meters toward a building with a driveway, where they
hoped to be able to turn around. Two more bombs were dropped, about
100 to 150 meters from the vehicles, according to an internal UNIFIL
report obtained by Human Rights Watch.
Some UNIFIL personnel told me that they viewed the "close fire"
incidents as deliberate attacks, aimed at impeding or discouraging
the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Lebanese civilians. "They
were not happy that we were bringing in aid. They knew that they
were cutting it close. The question is, who made the decision to
allow firing so close to our convoys?" a senior official remarked.
His question remains to be answered, but the frequency of such
incidents leaves no doubt that Israeli military forces did not
fulfill their duty under the laws of war to refrain from
indiscriminate attacks and to take precautions to ensure that only
legitimate military targets would come under fire.
April 16, 1996, Aabba:
The laws of war specifically protect hospitals, ambulances and
medical personnel from attack. Human Rights Watch documented that
Israeli military forces attacked clearly marked ambulances and
vehicles of relief organizations in July 1993 during Operation
Accountability. In a letter that we received in May 1994, the IDF
denied that ambulances had been targeted during that conflict. But
less than two years later, Israeli aircraft again attacked and
destroyed ambulances.
On April 16, Mustafa Ali Mansour, 25, a volunteer ambulance driver
during Operation Grapes of Wrath, drove from Nabatiyeh to the
village of Aabba, southwest of Nabatiyeh, responding to a call that
there were three wounded children in the village. Two other civil
defense volunteers accompanied him. Mustafa saw three types of
Israeli aircraft in the sky above the village: bombers, a drone
(pilotless aircraft), and helicopters, which were hovering close by.
He told me what happened: "We reached Aabba and found three kids who
had been injured in an Israeli raid. We parked the ambulance near
the house. I stayed in the ambulance and the others went into the
house to give first aid and bring out the wounded. While they were
doing this, two missiles exploded between the house and the
ambulance, creating a lot of smoke. I jumped from the ambulance,
called the hospital and said that we were hit, and then I ran."
Mustafa was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet, but was injured when
shrapnel cut through his right wrist as he ducked and protected his
head by lowering it and putting his hands behind his neck. Mustafa
saved his life by running away from the ambulance. About three
minutes after the first attack, there was a second one. "The planes
came back, hit the ambulance, and blew it to pieces," he said.
The ambulance, a white Mercedes station wagon, was parked in a
completely open area on the main road, with residential buildings on
both sides of the street, Mustafa said. It was equipped with a blue
beacon on the roof, was flying a flag of the Islamic Health Society,
and was clearly marked in red writing as a civil defense ambulance.
Mustafa sustained severe neurological damage to his right hand and
wrist, which was bandaged when I interviewed him. He had undergone
ten operations and said that doctors told him that his hand "will
never be the same" because "the nerves are dead." He was still in
need of another operation for reconstructive plastic surgery.
Mustafa had worked as a car painter in a small shop in Nabatiyeh
owned by his family, but has been unable to work since his injury.
April 15, 1996, Nabatiyeh:
At about 9:00 on the morning of April 15, the Hospital of the South
was hit by shells reportedly fired from Taibeh, an Israeli position
south of the city. The hospital, located on a busy main street in
downtown Nabatiyeh, is the largest Islamic hospital in south
Lebanon, with 30 beds. It is part of the Islamic Health Society, a
nationwide medical services network administered by Hizballah. The
hospital was hit during a ten-shell barrage. The first shells
slammed into a nearby seven-story office building southeast of the
hospital and another building just to the south, eyewitnesses told
me. Workers who were in the hospital at the time said that they
heard the shelling "getting closer and closer."
The four shells that hit the hospital damaged the southwest roof and
exterior walls of the building, and rooms on the first and second
floor of the southwest side. The obstetrics ward of the hospital, on
the second floor, sustained heavy damage, and two expensive
incubators and one fetal monitor were destroyed. I was given copies
of color photographs, taken at the time, that documented the damage.
On the floor below, another room was damaged, but it was empty of
patients. Casualties were minimized because there were only seven
patients in the hospital at the time of the attack. Others had been
moved earlier to a primary health care center located on the
basement level of a building near the hospital. Three hospital
workers were injured in the attack, one of them seriously.
There had been no Hizballah military activity in the area prior to
the attack, Dr. Adil Oclaik, the hospital director, told me, nor
were any fighters present in the hospital or the immediate area. "We
do not allow any military around this hospital. It is our policy,
and everyone in the area knows this," he said. He noted that there
have been no Islamic Resistance offices in Nabatiyeh ever since a
military target in the town was attacked by Israeli forces in 1992.
The doctor believed that the hospital was deliberately targeted, in
order to encourage residents to flee Nabatiyeh, which was one of the
towns ordered evacuated on April 12 [double ck]. "One of the reasons
people did not leave was because they felt secure, knowing that
medical assistance was available, if they needed it." Rocketing
ambulances and shelling a hospital helped shatter this security by
sending an unmistakable message to residents of the south that
civilian objects were not immune from attack.
April 13, 1996, Mansouri:
Two days before the Hospital of the South was shelled, an Israeli
helicopter rocketed an ambulance leaving the village of Mansouri,
killing four children and two women. With words that mocked the
internationally recognized laws of war, the initial reaction of the
Israeli government was to blame the victims. "We gave the residents
advanced warning to clear out so as not to get hurt," said
government spokesman Uri Dromi. "All those who remain there do so at
their own risk because we assume they're connected with Hizballah,"
he told the Reuter news agency after the attack was reported. Top
brass in the Israeli military later in the day provided additional
information that was never substantiated. "We hit a car in which a
Hizballah activist was travelling. The car was travelling in the
exact area...where Katyushas were fired only a few hours earlier,"
IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. Amnon Shahak said. The head of
the IDF's Northern Command, Maj. Gen. Amiram Levine, told reporters:
"The vehicle was sighted by the Israeli army and the terrorist was
killed....If children were killed I regret that but repeat and
stress they were in an area from which the Hizballah fires Katyushas
and they were warned not to be there. We will continue hitting
anyone who goes around in the places from which Hizballah fires."
I visited Mansouri four months later, looking for information about
the circumstances surrounding this attack. The clearly marked Volvo
station wagon, it turned out, was part of a caravan of vehicles
assembled on the afternoon of April 13 to carry civilians who were
evacuating Mansouri and surrounding villages, in the wake of radio
warnings by Israel's proxy South Lebanon Army that residents of the
area who did not evacuate would be risking their lives. Some of the
vehicles used in the evacuation, including the ambulance, had
gathered in an empty football field on a hill in village. Overhead,
two Israeli helicopters were "watching," a resident said. "They
would take turns. Two would come, and two would leave. The
helicopters saw the ambulance being loaded, watched people getting
in," he said. Abbas Ali Jiha was behind the wheel of the ambulance.
Abbas' wife Mona Shuweik, 27, was inside, along with their children
Zeinab, 10, Haneen, 5, and Maryam, a 2-month-old infant—the woman
and her children would be killed a short time later. Neighbors also
piled into the ambulance, including Hudu' al-Khalid, 12, her two
sisters, and her grandmother—Hudu' and her grandmother would also be
killed, and her two sisters injured.
"The helicopters watched the convoy moving from the village. The
whole road was full of cars leaving. The helicopters followed us to
the Fijian checkpoint, where there was a traffic jam," a villager
who was an eyewitness told me. According to his account, there was a
school bus on the road in front of the ambulance, and the
slow-moving tractor, towing a flat bed that was packed with 70
people, including 40 to 45 children, was at the rear of the convoy.
After the ambulance passed the U.N. checkpoint at the entrance to
the village, about 10 meters down the road, it was hit. "I saw the
two helicopters. One dove down and fired, and the other was above,
protecting it. The ambulance went flying into a house on the left
side of the road," he said. "I saw it disappear in a huge cloud of
smoke followed by a powerful blast, just 20 meters from where I
stood at the checkpoint," wrote Reuter reporter Najla Abu Jahjah.
"It was hurled 20 meters off the road, through a garden and into the
front room of a house, destroying the room in an avalanche of stone
and rubble." The house has since been repaired, but residents of
Mansouri are left with memories of an attack that one of them
described as "barbaric."
END OF PART ONE
PART TWO:
On the afternoon of April 18, 1996, Israeli artillery guns
positioned on the Lebanese-Israeli border fired a deadly mix of
shells into the sprawling U.N. base in the large town of Qana,
killing over 100 children, women and men who had sheltered there.
Some of the survivors sustained horrible injuries, and arrived at
local hospitals with missing limbs, their bodies burned and riddled
with shrapnel. The staggering casualty toll was due in part to the
type of shells that were used in the barrage—about two-thirds of the
total were air-burst shells with proximity fuzes. These
high-explosive devices are anti-personnel weapons, designed to
explode above the ground and spread shrapnel across a wide area, in
order to maximize casualties on the ground. The residents of Shaqra,
a village east of Qana on the front line in south Lebanon, could
easily have said: "We told you so."
Eight months before the massacre at Qana, I visited Shaqra. Although
the village was quiet on August 18, 1995, families there have
suffered more than their share of death, injury and property damage
from Israeli artillery as the occupation of Lebanese territory
continues and the military conflict grinds on. Angry residents told
me that Israeli artillery gunners had begun to fire a new type of
shell earlier that year. "At first, people did not know what was
happening," one man explained. "We were looking for the places where
the shells hit the ground. Then we realized that these shells
explode in the air, and the shrapnel rains down over a large area,"
he said. Villagers used the term "spreading-out shells" to describe
the weapons, and said that they were used in an attack that injured
five civilians in Shaqra on the morning of June 14, 1995. Shrapnel
ripped into the abdomen of Fatima Zein, a woman of about sixty,
while she was standing in front of her house. Also wounded were
Mahmoud Allan (shrapnel near his heart), his wife Souad, and their
sons Ahmed, nine, and Muhamed, three.
A week later, in Tyre, I discussed what the villagers had told me
with Timor Goksel, the senior political adviser of UNIFIL, the U.N.
peacekeeping operation in Lebanon. He confirmed that "air burst"
shells, fitted with proximity fuzes, had been fired into Shaqra, and
said these weapons were a new concern of the peacekeepers.
The concern was clearly justified, and one can certainly make an
argument that, at minimum, Qana was an incident bound to happen.
Maj. Gen. Franklin Van Kappen, the Dutch military adviser to then-UN
Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali, wrote in his May 1, 1996
report about the Qana attack that "there was substantial evidence of
multiple proximity-fused artillery ammunition detonating directly
above the compound, covering a large portion of its area. While the
exact number cannot be determined, the available evidence suggests
that eight such projectiles detonated over the compound and one just
outside it."
The anger and passion in Lebanon about the attack on Qana have not
diminished. And attempts by Israeli government and military
officials to explain the disaster left a number of conflicting
statements and unanswered questions.
First, why did Israeli officials cling with such consistency to the
line that the IDF did not know that hundreds of civilians were
sheltered in the Qana base, unless it was somehow to place blame on
and discredit the U.N. peacekeepers? "We had no knowledge that there
were civilians there," government spokesman Uri Dromi said on May 8,
1996. "I think it was a scandal that they were permitted into the
camp without [the UN] letting us know about it," then-Prime Minister
Peres said in a television interview the day before. Given the close
Israeli aerial reconnaissance over Lebanon during Operation Grapes
of Wrath, and internationally televised boasts by military officials
that pilots were able to pinpoint precisely and fire accurately at
individual Hizballah fighters on the ground or in buildings, it is
difficult to believe that the presence of hundreds of civilians at
Qana went unnoticed.
A Lebanese UNIFIL employee who worked at the Qana base said that he
brought his family there on April 12, the second day of the war.
"The gates were closed. There were 300 people outside who wanted to
come in. Over the next few days, civilians were allowed to enter the
camp, and their number soon reached over 800," he told me. But the
IDF maintained that "aerial photographs of the camp from previous
days showed no signs of a massive civilian presence in the camp." At
least one high-ranking Israeli military official, however, admitted
that the IDF did in fact know that civilians were sheltered at U.N.
bases throughout the south. Maj. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, the head of
army intelligence, raised perhaps one of the most important
questions about the entire incident: "The fact that civilians are
evacuated from the villages into U.N. facilities was known to us
from the second day of the operation. In the intelligence wing there
was no discussion of whether there were two or six hundred civilians
in Qana....The relevant question is, was it correct to open fire in
such circumstances?"
And what were the circumstances? Col. Wahme, the Fijian commander of
the Qana base, told me that he was in his office when a call came in
that six rounds of mortar had been fired at 1:55 pm by the Islamic
Resistance, Hizballah's military wing. The firing was from a
cemetery 220 meters southwest of the center of the base, U.N.
investigators later determined. The mortar, according to other
UNIFIL officials, had an eight-kilometer range, too short to land
inside the "security zone" occupied by Israeli and SLA forces. By
the IDF's official account of what happened that afternoon, the
mortar fire had placed an Israeli force on the ground in a
"life-threatening"situation. According to Maj. Gen. Matan Vilnai,
the IDF deputy chief of general staff: "The mortars began falling
100 meters from the force, then 30 or 40 meters, with shrapnel
falling right beside our soldiers. We acted in a matter of minutes
to extricate the unit. In that time we had to understand what was
going on, to relay orders and to stop the enemy fire." An "artillery
emergency rescue fire mission" thus was launched, the IDF reported.
Although the IDF did not specifically say so, it is reasonable to
conclude that the Israeli force that came under Hizballah fire was
located north of the so-called security zone, an aspect of the
sequence of events at Qana that has been largely overlooked.
UNIFIL mentioned in a July 1996 public report that Israeli ground
forces had been operating in Lebanon north of the occupied zone, and
that on at least two occasions during Operation Grapes of Wrath
these units had "planted mines and booby-traps." There were also
reports at the time that a secret Israeli death squad was operating
in Lebanese territory, targeting Hizballah. There was also one story
in The Observer, a British weekly, on May 19, 1996, but it was not
confirmed. In December 1996, seven months later, the IDF revealed
publicly the existence of a special forces unit, code-named Egoz,
that operated within and beyond the occupied zone in Lebanon.
Composed of several dozen volunteers from the elite Golani brigade,
the unit was formed in February 1995 and began operations in Lebanon
in July 1995, according to Maj. Gen. Amiram Levine, head of the
army's Northern Command. Denying that Egoz was a death squad, Gen.
Levine said: "We needed at least one unit concentrated on and
emphasizing special anti-guerrilla warfare....Wherever Hizballah are
acting or living, we are trying to go after them." Explaining why
the IDF finally decided to disclose the existence of the special
unit, Gen. Levine said: "We felt the time has come to give the
soldiers the credit they deserve and let the public know that our
soldiers serving in southern Lebanon are not sitting idle, but
taking the war to the enemy." Army officers said that Egoz had
killed 16 Hizballah members, had lost two of its own men, and was
active during the April 1996 military conflict.
At the time of Operation Grapes of Wrath, the Israeli public had not
been told that any of its troops were operating on the ground north
of the Israeli-occupied zone. As Maj. Gen. Herzl Bodinger,
then-commander of the Israeli Air Force, pointed out later: "Another
Ron Arad is the last thing we need[ed] in this country," a reference
to the pilot who is still missing after his plane was shot down over
Sidon in 1986. According to the IDF's official report about Qana,
the massive artillery barrage occurred after it was "decided to
initiate rescue fire procedures...to enable the IDF force to extract
itself from its predicament." Perhaps because an elite secret unit
deep inside Lebanon had come under fire, and perhaps because the
last thing that Israel wanted was to have Egoz operatives killed or
taken prisoners of war by Hizballah, the cryptic comments made by
Maj. Gen. Vilnai in an interview in June 1996 are now more
understandable. Referring to the Qana attack, he said that the IDF
"had to adopt very strange and unusual procedures, which involve
reacting with very short warning times." It had long been standard
operating procedure in south Lebanon that "shell warnings" of
imminent Israeli attacks were communicated to UNIFIL forces by the
IDF. It remains to be explained if the "strange and unusual
procedures" employed on April 18 were the reason why there were no
shell warnings before the big Israeli artillery guns fired toward
Qana.
After the mortar rounds were fired, the Qana base filed an "incident
report" with UNIFIL Operations, and issued a warning over the public
address system for U.N. soldiers to don their flak jackets, Col.
Wahme told me. He said that the first incoming shells began to land
near the mortar site about eight to ten minutes after the
loudspeaker warning, at approximately 2:08 or 2:10 pm. Then the base
itself came under fire. The first shell landed at the perimeter of
the compound, near the main entrance, and destroyed two
prefabricated buildings. The first three rounds knocked out
electricity and communications. "Our positions in the hills were
relaying to us what was happening. We were here waiting for death.
There was nothing that we could do," Col. Wahme recalled. "There was
a lot of screaming, buildings were burning....We could not believe
that our base was being attacked. The sound of the incoming shells,
followed by the explosions, the sight of those killed, was beyond
imagination. There were body parts everywhere," he said.
A UNIFIL civilian employee who was present during the attack, but
did not wish to be named, told me that the displaced families were
concentrated in eight locations on the base. The shelling totally
destroyed three prefabricated buildings that housed about 240
people—all that remained at the time of my visit was a huge
rectangular crater. "There were another 126 people inside Vanua
house, over which a proximity shell exploded, killing about 52
people," he said.
Maj. Gen. Vilnai blamed the peacekeepers for the continuation of the
slaughter. "They never told us that the shells were falling inside
the camp," he was quoted as saying. But contemporaneous accounts by
journalists who heard radio communications, and testimony from
UNIFIL officers, contradict the general's claim. "Our operations
officer pressed the speed button [on his telephone] and told the
Israelis about the attack," a high-ranking UNIFIL official told me.
"The shelling was continuing. Then they called back, and gave us a
shell warning... while the shelling was in progress! We said that we
knew there was shelling. We told them to stop the shelling," he
said. Lt. Gen. Amnon Shahak, IDF chief of general staff, claimed on
April 18 that "the U.N. was informed as quickly as possible" about
the shelling. This still leaves an unanswered question: why did the
IDF not adjust or cease its fire after the Northern Command was
notified that the U.N. base was under direct attack?
The Israelis also repeatedly charged that Hizballah fighters had
access to the Qana base and had shielded themselves there after
firing the mortar. "It is very strange that UNIFIL allowed shots to
be fired from 150 meters away from the camp, and that it allowed
Hizballah members and their families to hide within the camp," Prime
Minister Peres told reporters on May 9. UNIFIL personnel at Qana
vigorously disputed both charges. "Every time there is a shelling,
civilians come to the gate and want to come in....Never were armed
people inside. It's well known that we do not allow this. Hizballah
knows this very well," Col. Wahme told me. While the base was packed
with civilians, soldiers controlled access. "The men needed a piece
of paper from the military police to go out, if they wanted to leave
and check their houses. The women were allowed to come and go
freely," a UNIFIL employee said in a separate interview.
Col. Wahme added that as soon as the Israeli shelling started on
April 18, "we locked the gates." It was not until the attack was
over that the front and rear gates were opened, he said. U.N.
soldiers from nearby battalions, journalists, relief workers and
others came streaming in. Among them were one or two uniformed
Hizballah guerrillas, who arrived to check on their families. They
were seen screaming and crying in grief when they saw the carnage.
These men were identified by Fijian soldiers as among those who had
earlier fired the mortar rounds from the cemetery.
The colonel also pointed out that UNIFIL peacekeepers had risked
their lives when they asked Hizballah guerrillas to move further
away from U.N. positions. On the afternoon of April 15, 1996, a
Fijian officer who served as assistant operations officer at the
base visited guerrillas at a site about 600 meters to the east,
where Katyushas had been fired earlier that day and on previous
days. According to Col. Wahme, the officer was summarily told to
leave and then, without further discussion, was shot in the chest at
close range with a 9mm pistol, wounding but not killing him. Two
days later, two Nepalese soldiers on a similar mission were injured
when guerrillas threw a grenade at them in the village of Kafra.
The most contentious issue regarding Qana is whether the Israeli
attack was accidental or deliberate, and whether the shells that
landed inside the base were stray shells—known as artillery
scatter—from the barrage launched toward the Hizballah mortar site,
or whether these shells were part of a separate firing. Here, the
unofficial views of UNIFIL personnel who serve on the ground in
south Lebanon are of great interest. Col. Wahme showed me a large,
carefully marked, color aerial photograph of the compound, which
indicated where and in what sequence the shells exploded on April
18. Although he did not make an argument that the attack was
deliberate, he was convinced that the shells that fell inside his
base were not the result of artillery scatter, as the IDF has
claimed. "The shell impacts were too close together to have been
fired from one gun. The cemetery [meaning, the Israeli artillery
barrage that hit the cemetery from which the Hizballah mortar was
fired] was a totally different attack," he said. He pointed out on
his photograph that the location of the shells that fell inside the
base illustrated the artillery firing principle known as
"bracketing"—firing first at the approximate perimeters of a target
and then converging on the target itself, in this case the center of
the base.
Another senior UNIFIL official also was convinced that the Qana
attack was not a case of artillery scatter. "It was target
switching. There is no doubt that the target had switched," he told
me. He too did not argue that the base was deliberately targeted,
but said that he found the Israeli shelling negligent: "They knew
that they were firing near a U.N. base. The real threat was the
mortar, and it was a case of not caring. It was a Northern Command
decision to fire into a built-up area. There is a fine line between
a lack of care and negligence, and deliberate killing in an
intentional attack."
Because it launched rockets and mortar from sites close to
civilians, the Islamic Resistance, Hizballah's military wing, also
bears responsibility for the Qana massacre and other Lebanese
civilian casualties caused by Israeli retaliatory fire. The
internationally recognized laws of war, codified in the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 and subsequent Protocols, impose strict
requirements on all sides during a military conflict. Violations of
these laws by one side do not give license to the other side to
disregard their own responsibilities under the same rules.
Israeli forces are bound to take "constant care" in order "to spare
the civilian population" during the conduct of military operations.
Israeli military officials who plan and decide upon attacks are
further bound to "take all feasible precautions in the choice of
means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any
event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to
civilians and damage to civilian objects." The norms set by these
and other laws of war also apply to Hizballah's conduct of military
operations. For Hizballah, the most relevant rule in the context of
the fighting in south Lebanon is perhaps the one that requires its
forces "to the maximum extent feasible...avoid locating military
objectives within or near densely populated areas." This rule
clearly encompasses the positioning of mortars and Katyusha rocket
launchers. The burden is on Hizballah to answer this question: what
military necessity required its forces to carry out military
operations in such close proximity to civilians.
So what happened? The answers are in Israel. We will never know for
certain unless the Israeli cabinet establishes an independent
commission of inquiry, as it did in September 1982 following the
massacre of civilians at Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut, or until
Israeli military commanders and officers who were involved either
speak to the press or publish their memoirs. Several things are
certain. There had been a pattern of harassment and interdiction of
UNIFIL's relief work during the conflict, and a similar attack on
the UNIFIL base at Majdal Zoun the day before. But at Qana there was
an immediate tactical reason for the shelling—to stop Hizballah
mortar fire at Israeli ground forces and extricate the
soldiers—which went beyond the IDF's concerted actions elsewhere to
hamper UNIFIL operations. These distinct operational goals may have
converged at Qana, where the line between targeting Hizballah and
harassing UNIFIL had grown exceptionally thin. The Israeli claim
that UNIFIL sheltered Hizballah fighters and their families may also
have contributed to a decision to risk massive civilian casualties
at the packed base in response to the mortar attack. Under the
circumstances prevailing at the time, the Israeli artillery barrage
toward Qana was, at minimum, a reckless and negligent attack.
Virginia N. Sherry, associate director of Human Rights
Watch/Middle East, investigated laws of war violations in south
Lebanon in August 1995 and August 1996. She is the principal author
of "Needless Deaths in the Gulf War," published by Human Rights
Watch in 1991.
