A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child. The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area, a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. Shortly afterwards, three Israeli jets dropped bombs only 250 meters from a UN convoy on which I was traveling, blasting a house 30 feet into the air in front of my eyes. Traveling back to Beirut to file my report on the Qana massacre to the Independent last night, I found two Israeli gunboats firing at the civilian cars on the river bridge north of Sidon.
Every foreign army comes to grief in Lebanon.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinians by Israel's militia allies in 1982 doomed Israel's 1982 invasion. Now the Israelis are stained again by the bloodbath at Qana, the scruffy little Lebanese hill town where the Lebanese believe Jesus turned water into wine. . . . A French UN trooper muttered oaths to himself as he opened a bag in which he was dropping feet, fingers, pieces of people's arms. And as we walked through this obscenity, a swarm of people burst into the compound. We had suddenly become not UN troops and journalists but Westerners, Israel's allies, an object of hatred and venom.