South Lebanon, August, 1999. 

Young Zeinab Hamzi pulls on the cord of her pajama to reveal a thin purple scar that runs down three inches from her belly button. She smiles and looks around nervously. "Does it still hurt?" whispers Reem Haddad, a reporter from the Beirut based English newspaper The Daily Star. Beside her Nicholas Blanford, the Star’s special correspondent on South Lebanon, scribbles notes into his pad. Zeinab is being questioned about the wound she suffered from a mortar round fired by Israeli soldiers. "Not any more," answers the seven year old.

Zeinab lives in the village of Yohmor, which lies down a barren stretch of road from the Israeli occupied village of Arnoun. The Israelis took Arnoun to protect their position at Beaufort castle, a 12th century Crusader fortress that looks over the two villages from its nest in the hill. A South Lebanon Army (SLA) militia bunker sits squarely behind the fence that cuts Arnoun out of the Lebanese countryside, and their machine gun points down on the cars driving along the fence towards Yohmor.  On our way to Yohmor we are stopped by the last Lebanese Army check point and have to get permission from the local post commander before we can proceed any further towards the Israeli positions. The barren road from the last Lebanese post runs right up to Arnoun with Beaufort castle looming over us, and then we make a sharp right turn, running alongside the fence for a few meters to curve around the hill base and head towards Yohmor.

The entire drive lasts only a few minutes but, as Nick points out, the SLA has been known to open fire on suspicious looking vehicles on this road. "Make sure all your cameras are out of sight," he warns, "They are watching you right now, and they don’t like being photographed." 

The IDF may be on its way out, but it is certainly not loosening its grip on the region until that order to fall back rings through. Its militia, mostly Phalange Christian fighters of the SLA, are also not quite ready to lay down their arms.

After the Israelis and the SLA took Arnoun, the Lebanese resistance groups, dominated by the Hizbollah, started using the approach up the hill from Yohmor to attack the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) positions. In response, the IDF have taken to conducting covert night patrols of the area, and often open fire when startled by village folk. Though part of the hill hides most of Beaufort castle from sight, its twin towers peek over the top, and the machine gun posts look down right into Shawki Nasr’s front yard. This is where his two sons and their friends spend all of their time playing in the evenings.

Nasr, a schoolteacher, explains that as Yohmor is a farming community, growing olives and tobacco, the village folk leave home early in the morning when there is little light, and are often fired at by nervous Israeli troops.

"In the dark they will shoot at anything and everything," he complains as he offers us an assortment of shrapnel and bullet casings he claims to have picked up around his house. Nick picks through the metal shards, trying to identify the weapon they were fired from. "Sometimes it gets so bad we have to take the children to the other end of the village to sleep," says Nasr, "We have been here only ten months and already it is taking a toll. Sometimes we are shelled and shot at for hours. My wife has lost her nerve, and often shakes uncontrollably from shell shock."

We are joined by another visitor, Hassan Alleik, an 18 year-old-boy who claims the Israelis shot him thrice, once in his left arm and once in both legs, after he startled their night patrol three months back. "I was walking out from my aunt’s house, and it was dark, and they shot me as soon as I stepped under a street lamp," he claims, "There was no warning. All I remember is stepping under the light and feeling the impact of the bullets." Hassan’s younger brother Hussein, 17, was also shot in the leg. The Israeli patrol, probably realizing they had shot civilians, withdrew from the area and went back to the castle.

Stories like this abound in South Lebanon. Promises of peace and the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers and their militia have come and gone many times over since the Israeli invasion of 1978. The latest promise made by the new Israeli premier, Ehud Barak, has, indeed, spread excitement in the developed communities. In Beirut the words to live by are ‘liberalization,’ ‘globalization’ and ‘opportunity.’ These optimistic lingo-symbols of the new-world order mean nothing in the south where the most often heard words are ‘resistance,’ ‘martyrs’ and ‘victims.’

"We will keep attacking IDF positions till such time the Israelis occupy even an inch of Lebanese soil," asserts Ibrahim Mussawi, Spokesperson for the Hizbollah.  The Shia of the south and Baalbek, who organized themselves as a fundamentalist force in 1982, are at the forefront of the resistance operations against the Israelis and are notorious for their roadside bombs, car bombs and sneak guerrilla attacks on Israeli and SLA soldiers. Their steady chipping away at Israeli offensive positions over the years has made the occupation of South Lebanon a politically difficult proposition for Israeli leadership. The emotional cost of occupying Lebanon is largely the reason why Ehud Barak was able to defeat Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu in the July elections by promising a complete withdrawal of IDF from Lebanon.

Next Page

From a personal interview with Ibrahim Mussawi, Beirut, July 1999.