Israeli Aerial Blitz Hardens Lebanese, Inflames Arab Opinion in Mideast
WHITE UN bulldozers tore at the twisted iron frames of two huts where most of the 101 Lebanese refugees were killed at the peacekeepers' base last Thursday.
Above an Israeli Apache helicopter gunship hung like a dragonfly to the west. Surrounding hills and valleys rumbled to the sound of incoming Israeli artillery shells. Hizbullah was continuing to fire Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. Another tragedy did not seem impossible.
The fighting entered an 11th day yesterday, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher shuttled across the Mideast trying to broker an elusive cease-fire.
Nearly two weeks of fighting have left more than 150 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians. Another 400,000 Lebanese civilians have been displaced. Some 50 Israelis have been wounded.
The ferocity of Israel's disproportionate response has inflamed Arab opinion across the region and endangered the already fragile peace process.
Militarily, Hizbullah - the Party of God, which is backed by Iran and Syria - has survived the onslaught virtually intact, its leaders boasting that new recruits are signing up by the day.
Most people in impoverished southern Lebanon view Hizbullah as courageous "freedom fighters" struggling to liberate a broad swath of territory there occupied by Israeli forces as a self-styled security zone in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 425.
At a school in Sidon crammed with refugees from Israel's free-fire zone, it was impossible to find anyone who blamed Hizbullah for their misery.
"When the Israelis fire rockets on our children, we must respond," says Khaled Hussein, whose niece was one of four girls killed when an Israeli helicopter fired a rocket into an ambulance packed with refugees on April 13. "It was clearly marked as a village ambulance."
Minr Shour, a laborer from Tyre, his gray-stubbled jaw quivering with anger, says: "It's a massacre." Four children clutched at his shabby jacket. "What is their future? We have nothing to eat and nowhere to go," he adds, his fingers twitching on a set of worry beads.
For the UN's spokesman in Tyre, Mikael Lindvall, Qana was "a disaster waiting to happen." He accused Israel of deliberately hampering the UN's mercy missions to some 6,000 civilians marooned by the fighting: "We are constantly issuing protests to the Israelis over the shelling of civilian areas. They keep boasting about the accuracy of their artillery radars. But they don't seem to be working too well.
For a third day yesterday, the delivery of food, medicine, and other needed humanitarian supplies for the people of southern Lebanon was held up because Israeli gunboats were shelling the main coastal road, just north of Sidon, an area where Hizbullah has no presence.
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