Report from the Mideast: A human drama
Israeli-occupied Lebanon
Scenes from the struggle to survive
"Nobody claimed that civilians were not killed here. Only that they were not killed on purpose. But if it's a matter of getting an Israeli soldier wounded or killing a civilian, I'd rather kill a civilian."
AABBASSIYE, Israeli Occupied Lebanon – At sunset, a speaker belches rock music over the heads of the Israeli troops. A chicken squawks as it flutters and scrambles up the sloping front of a halftrack.
A couple of soldiers have commandeered lawn chairs. They sit reading the Hebrew newspapers. Another pulls wheelies on the dirt and stones with a chopper-model bicycle found in a wrecked house.
The town is empty – destroyed.
All but a few of the houses that held 7,000 Lebanese Muslims have been damaged by shells or fires. Most are just hulks of broken cement with twisted walls held together by their steel reinforcing wires or low square shells holding the wreckage of their roofs and upper stories.
The Israeli army has put Aabbassiye off limits to the press. The soldiers here say they don't know why; maybe because there are hidden bombs or booby traps in the houses.
Hussein Ajami, one of 300 residents who remain, says it may be because of the 150 townspeople killed by bombs and machine-gun fire. That is, the 150 that he says he saw and helped bury. "More, maybe," says Ajami, 26, "but the rest are under the houses and we can't pick them. We have no machines."
The battle is over, everybody knows. The first United Nations troops have entered the south.
The battle is over, and yet...
Ajami will not pause in the street at the top of the hill. "Here, you are a target," he says.
A target for whom?
"Who knows?" Ajami says, and eases his car down the rutted, broken road.
The battle is over, and yet…
The sun has disappeared from the neat, terraced fields drawn up the hill past the first few houses, like a comforter on the feet of Aabbassiye. But the center of town, near the top of the hill, is still suffused in angry orange. It is fire devouring the house of a man who aided the Fatah guerrillas. The air is filled with crackles and booms as flames find the bullets and grenades inside.
The battle is over, and yet...
In the Israeli camp, the evening rings with the loud laughter of men who must employ either joy or fear against the gathering darkness in a strange and hostile place. There is swagger in their walks. These are the soldiers who conquered southern Lebanon in six days.
One soldier edges away from the group around his armored van. He peers in the window of a car.
"You're going back to Israel?" he asks. "Would you call my mother?"
Carefully, he writes down his name and phone number on a scrap of paper.
Another soldier sidles over to the car. Then another. Then two more. As they bend close to write clearly in the gloom, their faces in the window show that they are very young.
"Nineteen in five days," says the first, preparing for a birthday in an occupied land. "Don't forget. Mrs. Sharabi. Just tell her you have seen me and I am still all right...
