Thought ya'll might be interested in an update on Kevin Sites' reporting. You remember Kevin Sites, doncha?
Killings at Qana
But five children are still in one of the ambulances at the scene of the attack. A Red Cross worker opens the doors to reveal the bodies of five boys aged from five to fifteen. He pulls the blankets back to show the bruised and dusty corpses.
He picks up the body of the smallest one and holds it up for a second to show us. The boy is dressed in green shorts and white sleeveless t-shirt. Aside from the white dust that covers his body, there are no signs of the blast trauma and falling concrete that likely killed him. His eyes are closed and the only evidence of his violent death seems to be the slight gritting of his teeth.
By early afternoon a contingent of United Nations soldiers from China arrives in Qana with a large backhoe and together with a bulldozer from the Lebanese Army begins digging through the piles of concrete and twisted rebar.
It is a slow process. Two stories of the three-story building have collapsed, leaving a twisted mess that is not easily pulled apart. After two hours of digging there's still no sign of any more bodies.
This house was only one of many buildings bombed in Qana overnight, with no word on casualties from other locations. But in driving to the location I could see huge swaths of destruction which included everything from residences and a supermarket to a small mosque.
Under a pile of rubble at the mosque is a small sign of Qana's life before the bombing: a note handwritten on white lined paper. My translator reads portions of it aloud. It is a letter from a woman telling a man that she doesn't love him because he has not shown her respect. The letter and emotions conveyed in it, would, in another time, seem quite important, at least to the two people involved, but here in this dust-laced and possibly irreparably broken place, it is just another thing scattered on the streets.
I ask Abbas Kassab why the Israelis would strike Qana so severely — what tactical or strategic value it might have. But he is adamant that there is none — that Hezbollah, or the resistance, as the Lebanese call it, does not operate in the village.
"There's no resistance here. Israel is lying. There are no resistance fighters here. Children are playing; there are no resistance at all," he says. "There was a mother with a seven-month-old child that was killed. Was she a resistance fighter?"
Israel argues otherwise. Israeli officials were quick to voice their regret for the loss of civilian life but placed the blame on Hezbollah, saying that Hezbollah had been using positions around Qana, including near the buildings targeted, to launch rockets at Israel. Hezbollah has launched daily rocket barrages toward Israel during the current crisis, killing 18 Israeli civilians, according to news reports. It was Hezbollah's cross border raid into Israel on July 12 that sparked the current crisis.
The contradictory claims mirror other conflict scenes I have visited in the south of Lebanon this week, with people on the street arguing strenuously that Hezbollah had no presence in the area, and Israel claiming otherwise. On Wednesday, at the scene of a bombed apartment building in Tyre, I met a man who told me that the area had nothing to do with Hezbollah, but press reports said the building was the office of Hezbollah's southern Lebanon commander, Sheik Nabil Kaouk.
I ask Abbas Kassab who he blames for the bombing and death in Qana, and the answer I receive is similar to what I have heard elsewhere on the streets of Lebanon:
"America," he says. "Only America."
"Why?"
"America gave the green light for Israel to do this. Israel can't shoot one bullet without America's permission. America is responsible. There are not resistance fighters here. Only kids playing. Even if there were, why would they kill civilians? Let them fight in Bint Jbail where the resistance is. Let Israel go to Bint Jbail and see what they can do."
Meanwhile, five hours of digging has turned up no new bodies and both the Lebanese Army and the U.N. contingent know they're running out of time. There's only an hour of daylight left to dig.
Now villagers in Qana tell them there are only five people that are unaccounted for, not the 25 or 30 they originally thought. The excavation teams give up the dig at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday. A beautiful soft dusk falls over the surrounding hills and valleys, a sharp contrast to the death and destruction they have been knee-deep in for more than 12 hours.
Despite what has happened here, Ghazi Adibbi says he and the others that are left will likely stay in the village. What has happened has hardened his heart about the conflict.
"We are resisting. We don't want a cease-fire anymore," he says. "We want the resistance to bomb Israel every day."
Note: This dispatch has been amended to reflect the dispute over the location where Jesus is said to have performed his first miracle.
http://hotzone.yahoo.com/b/hotzone/blogs8012