‘See dogs eating bodies in the rubble’

02 August 2006

A Red Cross man laid a blanket on the ground. Two of his colleagues cradled the corpses of the dead Shalhoub boys and then knelt and laid them down. They did this with great gentleness. Then each worker took a corner of the blanket and lifted the bundle. In this way the children were carried down the lane past the drying tobacco plants and the olive groves and fields where they had once played. When they had been loaded into the ambulances they were driven through the ruined town to the government hospital in Tyre. Here they were wrapped in polythene bags and placed in a refrigerated lorry with all the other new corpses of the war.

Within hours of the bombing Hezbollah was vowing revenge on Israel and inciting its supporters to even more hatred of the Jewish state (if that were possible). At a mass funeral for other war victims I heard a mullah tell some journalists that the civilian dead were ‘martyrs’. When I challenged him on Hezbollah’s responsibility for starting this latest war, he gave me a lecture on the history of the region. I felt as if I were back in Belfast being harangued by a Provo or a Loyalist. It reminded me of what my friend the poet Paul Durcan calls ‘the politics of the last atrocity/ the atrocity of the last politics’.

The Israelis went into their default mode of response. It was a ‘regrettable’ incident but all the other side’s fault for firing rockets from civilian areas. No blame here. In the immediate aftermath one Israeli official went so far as to suggest on Irish radio that explosives might have been stored in or near the house by Hezbollah. There wasn’t any evidence for this suggestion, but I can only guess it was meant to muddy the waters at a time when Jerusalem was under massive pressure.

Internet conspiracy theorists quickly followed up by suggesting that the state of the rubble did not indicate an air strike but rather a blast created by Hezbollah. Others posited that the condition of the corpses — some had rigor mortis — meant the bodies had been dead for longer than the time since the explosion had taken place. In other words it was all a giant Hezbollah hoax. The best word we have on all of this comes from the Israeli Defence Force, which has acknowledged the fact of the bombing. That should silence the conspiracy theories.

Given my experience of the last few weeks in south Lebanon, here is what I think may have happened. Hezbollah were firing rockets from around Qana and from near the village of Hosh down the road closer to Tyre. This had been happening throughout the conflict. The Israelis responded with air strikes. In my BBC reports I have pointed out that Hezbollah rocket attacks invariably produce a heavy Israeli response.