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"The Ones
Who Are Buried Alive Are Usually Safe From the Dogs"
The
Total Destruction of Srifa: Mangled Bodies in the Wake of Israeli
Bombs and Missiles
By LARA MARLOWE
Srifa, Lebanon.
It was an unseemly end for 80- year-old
Manaheel Jabr, flung over a bloodstained walll, grey hair falling
around her shrunken black face, a collapsed ceiling pinning her
down at the waist.
"It's the grandmother,"
one of the onlookers gasped when the civil defense bulldozer
finally pierced a hole in the rubble of what was until two weeks
ago a three-storey house.
Mrs Jabr's corpse presented
a terrible dilemma to the Lebanese Red Cross yesterday. Should
they cut her in two, put the pieces in a body bag and take her
to the hospital morgue, or leave her behind, in the hope that
more powerful equipment could lift the concrete slab from her
back and would reach her before the dogs did?
It was late afternoon and the
48-hour "pause" in aerial bombardment promised by Israel
was drawing to a close. The Red Cross's plan to retrieve 89 bodies
across the war zone was about to end in failure. The Israelis,
with whom the Lebanese Red Cross communicates via the International
Red Cross, granted safe passage to only two of the six villages
that the rescue workers wanted to visit yesterday, Srifa and
Bint Jbail. And the convoy bound for Bint Jbail had to turn around
because of bombing.
That left only Srifa, the site
of the most dramatic devastation I have seen in this war. The
entire Hay el-Birki neighbourhood - 18 buildings by some accounts
- was flattened at 2 am on July 19. "The F-16s [ fighter
bombers] came from the west, the Apaches [ attack helicopters
from the east," said a local Hizbullah official who identified
himself as Abu Hadi.
It seemed amazing that bombs
and missiles could chop buildings into so many million of grey
concrete pieces, a bed of rubble many meters deep, with only
the occasional slipper or coffee pot to remind one that human
beings lived here.
The field of ruins stretched
to the horizon, reminding me of images of second World War bombings.
Thirty of the 89 names on the
Red Cross list were in Srifa, eight in the house where we found
Manaheel Jabr. Yet after battering away for four hours in the
hot sun, the Red Cross and civil defense volunteers found only
three corpses - one of them Mrs Jabr's - and a crushed skull.
It took the Israel airforce
minutes to flatten Hay el -Birki but it could be weeks or months
before their victims are dug out. The technology used to destroy
the neighbourhood was the most sophisticated in the world. The
means to dig them out derisory. At about 1pm, a resting Caterpillar
bulldozer clamoured down the main street of Srifa belching black
smoke and chewing up the tarmac. The driver stopped to put a
white sheet with a Red Cross emblem on the roof of the cabin,
in the hope of sparing it from bombardment. For the past two
days, Israeli forces have battled with Hizbullah at Taib and
at Adayseh, just 19 kilometres from Srifa. All afternoon we heard
explosions, some frighteningly close.
"Israeli forces are trying
to push in on the ground," explained Abu Hadi, the Hizbullah
man.
"Hizbullah is protecting
Lebanon - mortars, RPGs and even suicide missions if necessary.
We will not let them in. We are protecting the border of Lebanon."
The bulldozer was joined with
a digging machine with a scooped shovel. "Stop, stop!"
an upset Hizbullah man with a walky-talky insisted as the bulldozer
began pushing pieces of the former house down the hillside. "This
is not the way to do it. You will crush the bodies. The Lebanese
army has better machines. We must wait for them."
The Red Cross moved briefly
to another address where civilians were known to have died. A
medic in an orange jumpsuit placed a mattress over two black
shrunken legs which stuck out from heavy rubble in the bomb crater.
"In Islam, we must respect
a body," said the Hizbullah official objecting to the Red
Cross operation. "Either we wait for the Lebanese army machines,
or we wait until the war is over and do it ourselves, even if
there are only bones left."
With infinite tact, the Red
Cross persuaded Hizbullah to allow them to continue work on the
Jabr house.
The gruesome task had been
easier on Monday, the first day of the mythical truce, when volunteers
collected 20 bodies from cars and the streets of seven villages.
"Some are only bones and some are teeming with maggots",
said Muhammad Makke head of the Red Cross in southern Lebanon.
"Some of their identities
are known and some are not."
Red Cross volunteer Kassem
Shalaan (28) lost 60 per cent of hearing in one ear when the
Israelis fired on ambulances in Qana on July 25th. A man in the
ambulance had a leg amputated by the missile, and his seven-year-old
son, who had already suffered shrapnel wounds, is still in a
coma, after the missile strike slashed his head open.
Shalaan took part in the body
retrieval missions of the past few days. Is it true that dogs
are eating corpses? "Yes," Shalaan said, turning his
head to hide the tears. "Especially people in the streets
and cars. The ones who are buried alive are usually safe from
the dogs."
Whatever the outcome of this
war, atrocities such as Srifa will poison Lebanese-Israeli relations
for decades or even centuries.
Mahmoud Jabr (56) lost six
relatives in the bombing of Srifa; among them his brother who
owned the house that was partially excavated yesterday. "There
is not even a bullet in this village," Jabr said.
"Israel forced the people
to be Hizbullah with their barbaric behavior."
Mahmoud Nejbi ( 66) keeps returning
to the rubble of another house, at the far end of the devastated
neighbourhood. "My 27-year-old son was smoking the narguileh
and drinking tea with his friends when the airstrike happened,"
he said.
"He was a mechanic in
Dubai and he brought his wife home to have their baby . . . I
would like to make a suicide attack on the Israelis . . . either
the Israelis kill us or we kill them."
Lara Marlowe writes for the Irish Times,
where this piece first appeared. There's nothing to stop US reporters
from going to Srifa -- except doctrinal demands.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
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Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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