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href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/shimon-peres-dies-israel-qana-massacre-never-forget-no-peacemaker-robert-fisk-a7334656.html">http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/shimon-peres-dies-israel-qana-massacre-never-forget-no-peacemaker-robert-fisk-a7334656.html</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never
forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Robert Fisk - September
28, 2016<br>
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<p>When the world heard that <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/shimon-peres-dead-israel-president-tel-aviv-a7334186.html">Shimon
Peres had died</a>, it shouted “Peacemaker!” But when
I heard that <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/shimon-peres">Peres</a>
was dead, I thought of blood and fire and slaughter. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/UnitedNations">UN</a>
camp where they were torn to pieces by <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Israel">Israeli</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/shimon-peres-dead-israel-president-tel-aviv-a7334186.html">joint
Nobel Peace Prize holder</a> used as an excuse the
firing of Katyusha rockets over the Lebanese border by
the <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Hezbollah">Hezbollah</a>.
In fact, their rockets were retaliation for the killing
of a small Lebanese boy by a booby-trap bomb they
suspected had been left by an Israeli patrol. It
mattered not.</p>
<p>A few days later, Israeli troops inside <a
href="http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Lebanon">Lebanon</a>
came under attack close to Qana and retaliated by
opening fire into the village. Their first shells hit a
cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into
the UN Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were
sheltering. Peres announced that “we did not know that
several hundred people were concentrated in that camp.
It came to us as a bitter surprise.”</p>
<div class="dnd-widget-wrapper
context-sdl_editor_representation type-video">
<p class="dnd-caption-wrapper">Israel’s Shimon Peres
dies aged 93: Tributes from around the world</p>
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<p>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 <em>The Independent</em>. The UN
had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with
refugees.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through
them in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our
shoes and stuck to them like glue. There were legs and
arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without
bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces in a
burning tree. What was left of him was on fire. </p>
<p>On the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man
with grey hair, her arm round his shoulder, rocking the
corpse back and forth in her arms. His eyes were staring
at her. She was keening and weeping and crying, over and
over: “My father, my father.” If she is still alive –
and there was to be another Qana massacre in the years
to come, this time from the Israeli air force – I doubt
if the word “peacemaker” will be crossing her lips.</p>
<p>There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way
that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident.
The UN report was accused of being anti-Semitic. Much
later, a brave Israeli magazine published an interview
with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An
officer had referred to the villagers as “just a bunch
of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die,
there is no harm in that,” he was quoted as saying.
Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: “I
don’t know any other rules of the game, either for the
[Israeli] army or for civilians…”</p>
<p>Peres called his Lebanese invasion “Operation Grapes of
Wrath”, which – if it wasn’t inspired by John Steinbeck
– must have come from the <em>Book of Deuteronomy</em>.
“The sword without and terror within,” it says in
Chapter 32, “shall destroy both the young man and the
virgin, the suckling also with the man of grey hairs.”
Could there be a better description of those 17 minutes
at Qana?</p>
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data-scald-gallery="3739921">
<h2 class="gallery-title"><span
class="media-prefix icon-gallery"></span>Remembering
the Israel-Gaza conflict</h2>
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<p>Yes, of course, Peres changed in later years. They
claimed that Ariel Sharon – whose soldiers watched the
massacre at Sabra and Chatila camps in 1982 by their
Lebanese Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker” when
he died. At least he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize. </p>
<p>Peres later became an advocate of a “two state
solution”, even as the Jewish colonies on Palestinian
land – which he once so fervently supported – continued
to grow.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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