British writer Robert Fisk wrote on Friday that “when the world heard that Shimon Peres had died, it shouted “Peacemaker!” But when I heard that Peres was dead, I thought of blood and fire and slaughter.”
“I saw the results: babies torn apart, shrieking refugees, smouldering bodies. It was a place called Qana and most of the 106 bodies – half of them children – now lie beneath the UN camp where they were torn to pieces by Israeli shells in 1996. I had been on a UN aid convoy just outside the south Lebanese village. Those shells swished right over our heads and into the refugees packed below us. It lasted for 17 minutes,” Fisk wrote in The Independent newspaper.
“Shimon Peres, standing for election as Israel’s prime minister – a post he inherited when his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated – decided to increase his military credentials before polling day by assaulting Lebanon. The joint Nobel Peace Prize holder used as an excuse the firing of Katyusha rockets over the Lebanese border by the Hezbollah,” he continued.
Fisk recalled that during that time “Peres announced that “we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”,” stressing “It was a lie.”
“The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees,” the British author elaborated.
“This was Peres’s contribution to Lebanese peace. He lost the election and probably never thought much more about Qana. But I never forgot it,” Fisk said while trying to portray some scenes of Qana massacre that he witnessed in 1996.
“Now we must call him a “peacemaker”. And count, if you can, how often the word “peace” is used in the Peres obituaries over the next few days. Then count how many times the word Qana appears,” Fisk ended up writing.
Source: The Independent
