“ ... On April 11, 1996, a series of shock waves rumbled through the Muslim world as a result of Israel's massive bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon, which Israel had by then been occupying for fourteen years. Known as "Operation of Grapes of Wrath," it was the first time Israel had attacked Beirut since Ariel Sharon's ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. According to Israeli writer Israel Shahak, the real purpose of the attack was to capture as much Lebanese territory as possible.

"It is quite obvious," wrote Shahak, "that the first and most important Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes of Wrath' is to establish its sovereignty over Lebanon -- to be exercised in a comparable manner to its control over the Gaza Strip."

Two days after it began, on April 13, ambulance driver Abbas Jiha from the village of Mansouri was busy rushing patients wounded in the fighting to a hospital in the town of Sidon. On his return to Mansouri, panic had broken out and explosions were taking place. People began pleading for him to take them to Sidon. Jiha quickly squeezed four of his children into his ambulance along with ten other people, including a family, and began driving toward Sidon.

Suddenly, an Israeli helicopter began chasing his ambulance. Minutes later, two missiles were fired, one of which exploded through the rear door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it sixty feet through the air. Thrown clear, Abbas Jiha began running toward the flaming heap of twisted metal. "My God, my God," he screamed, shaking his fist at the sky, "my family has gone." In all, six people were killed, including Jiha's nine year-old daughter and his wife.

Israeli officials later admitted the ambulance had been targeted but claimed, falsely, that the vehicle was owned by Hezbollah and was transporting one of the group's fighters. Jiha had no connection with terrorist groups, and the thought that Israel could target an ambulance packed with innocent people, including many children, outraged Muslims throughout the Middle East.

On April 18, one week into Operation Grapes of Wrath, a reporter for London's newspaper The Independent was traveling in southern Lebanon with a United Nations convoy. Robert Fisk, Britain's most highly decorated foreign correspondent, spent a quarter of a century covering the Middle East and was the recipient of the British International Journalist of the Year Award seven times, including for 1996. As the vehicles were approaching the small village of Qana, Fisk could hear the sound of artillery, he recalled.

The convoy had stopped at Qana that morning and noticed it was crowded with about eight hundred refugees. They had been transported there for their safety by armored UN vehicles from nearby villages that had come under Israeli bombardment. When the convoy finally arrived in Qana shortly after two in the afternoon, fire was everywhere and proximity shells were bursting in the air. Antipersonnel weapons designed to explode about two dozen feet above ground, they would shower down razor-sharp shrapnel, butchering anyone beneath.

"It was a massacre," wrote Fisk in a front-page story. "Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive -- 206 by last night --- has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 -- the youngest was a four-day-old baby -- when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home."

The Israeli government later claimed the attack on the UN refugee camp at Qana was a mistake. But a formal, top-level United Nations investigation came to a different conclusion. "It is unlikely" that Israeli gunners simply erred, said the report, and demanded that Israel pay $1.7 million in damages. "Contrary to repeated denials," said the report, "two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling." Amnesty International also conducted an investigation of the massacre, and they concluded "that the IDF [Israeli Defense Force} intentionally attacked the UN compound."

Arieh Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, noted: "How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We did not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification, because this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on." And the international edition of Time magazine noted, "Around the Middle East... Qana is already a byword for martydom. The southern Lebanese village figures as a shrine drawing up to 1,000 pilgrims a day: busloads of schoolchildren, Cabinet ministers from Beirut, even a daughter of Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Black banners overlooking rows of graves decry the 'barbarity' of Israel."

While largely ignored by the American press, the massacre at Qana was front-page news in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle East, where the story continued for days. Already burning with hatred for America and Israel, the pictures of headless Arab babies and other grisly photographs that appeared throughout the media were likely the final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli - United States alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center on a Tuesday morning five years later....”

Let's face it, Isreal is as much a terrorist "state" as any other you had labeled as terrorist! (The Washington Note)

and ten years later ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5228224.stm
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/...535658,00.html


http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...ace+propaganda

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