‘See dogs eating bodies in the rubble’

Fergal Keane

02 August 2006

The bad news for Mr Bush and Mr Blair is that the people of the ruined villages rail against them too. There was bitter ironic laughter when the American ambassador appeared on television donating humanitar-ian aid for the refugees. It did not escape the notice of the Lebanese that at the very same time the Americans were sending, via Britain, fresh supplies of bombs to be dropped on them by Israel.

No phrase in recent memory has caused so much offence in Lebanon as Condi Rice’s ‘new Middle East’. I have had it thrown in my face by elderly refugees trudging around the massive craters in the roads that lead from the town of Bint Jebiel, a place bombed into the stone age during fighting between the Israelis and Hezbollah.

‘Let them look at the dogs eating bodies in the rubble,’ one man in Qana screamed at me. This war has been bad for almost everybody. It has been disastrous for the Lebanese civilians because it is they who have suffered most; but awful too for the innocent civilians in Israel deliberately cut down by Hezbollah and for others forced to leave the northern region. Three weeks into this war, the Israeli government is wondering how it can get out of the Lebanese mire and still protect its people from the rockets of Hezbollah. And it has been bad for Britain and America, whose support for Israel’s bombing campaign has alienated one of the most pro-Western governments in the region. Who has benefited? Hezbollah may have been militarily weakened but politically it could reap huge benefits from the anger of the population. There will be pleasure, too, in Tehran and Damascus. Both have interfered and manipulated in Lebanon for years to suit their own political and ideological interests. These two regimes under pressure from the international community will revel in the damage inflicted on Israel and America if this war ends without the decisive defeat of Hezbollah promised by Jerusalem. Right now, that defeat looks a very distant prospect.

Fergal Keane reported from south Lebanon for BBC News.