What’s happening in Lebanon: interview with former British Ambassador Craig Murray
11 December 2024 – 19:00

The current situation in Lebanon is more delicate than ever. Despite the entry into force of
the fragile cease-fire between Hezbollah and Israel, the Jewish state continues to violate the
terms of the agreement, claiming that it is only conducting defensive operations. At the same
time, in Syria, the opposition front to Assad has conquered Damascus, bringing down a
dynasty that lasted over half a century without its ally Hezbollah being able to do anything.
Against this backdrop of uncertainty, Craig Murray travelled to Beirut to report on what is
happening from the ground.

Craig Murray is a former British diplomat, writer and human rights activist. He served as
UK ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, exposing human rights abuses in that
country, and dedicated his post-diplomatic career to global justice issues. At the top of the
list was the Palestinian cause, for which – in the current climate of repression in the UK –
he was detained by the police, as has happened to other journalists.

I know you are currently in Lebanon: where exactly are you and what is the current situation in the
country?

Right now I am in the capital, Beirut. The city is relatively quiet, but there are Israeli drones flying
overhead all the time. They have not bombed Beirut since the agreement came into force, but there have
been many violations by Israel in the south of the country. I have been there three or four times since the
agreement was signed, and the situation is still very tense. A few days ago, Israel killed about six people,
including a shepherd, while other shepherds have disappeared. As these small-scale violations continue,
so does the bombing. The problem I think lies in the fact that the ceasefire agreement is extremely one-
sided. It stipulates that all Lebanese groups must cease all operations against Israel, while Israel must
cease only offensive operations against Lebanon: the qualification ‘offensive operation’ applies to only
one party to the agreement.

In southern Lebanon, the Israeli army is advancing and conquering more territory?

Yes. And, again, this is a problem with the agreement. The ceasefire establishes a demilitarised zone
extending from the Litani river southwards: both sides have to leave the area completely. During the
conflict, Israel had not managed to take any territory in the demilitarised zone. It only got as far as the
Litani river once, helicoptering troops there to take a few photo-ops and bringing them quickly back. In
short, Israel is exploiting the ceasefire agreement to claim the right to operate as far as the Litani river,
despite never having arrived there during the fighting. In addition, Israel is claiming that all its current
violations are only defensive in nature. Even when they shoot shepherds and kill people at funerals. The
fact is that Hezbollah is designated by the US and Israel as a terrorist organisation; for them, the Israeli
attacks therefore do not count as violations of the agreement because they are considered anti-terrorist
operations.

At present, what role does the United States play in this picture?

The United States is in charge of the ‘mechanism’ – as it is called – for monitoring compliance with the
agreement. The document introduces a distinction I have never seen in any agreement – something
extraordinary, indeed. It says that the UN will ‘host’ the monitoring committee, although that the US will
‘chair’ it. However, ‘hosting’ has no meaning in diplomatic or practical terms. What that comes down to is
this: the UN will be allowed to provide tea and biscuits, while the US will actually run the show, although
– and this is indeed extraordinary – they are one of the parties in the conflict, not an arbiter! The bombs
that fall in Lebanon are supplied and paid for by the US.

What about the rest of the Western powers? What interests of theirs are at stake?

UNIFIL, which is the only Western force on the ground, is to have a role in monitoring the ceasefire
agreement. France, the former colonial power, will also work with the US in monitoring the cease-fire.
Paris is very anxious to maintain its role here in Lebanon, and its status as the former colonial power is
very important to Macron. So much so that, in exchange for being included in the committee, Paris agreed
to reverse its position on the ICC and Netanyahu and announced that the Israeli prime minister could visit
the country without fear of being handed over to the ICC.

Given the composition of the monitoring committee and the continuous violations that we mentioned
earlier, what do you think is Israel’s ultimate goal?

I have no doubt that Israel’s ultimate goal is the annexation of southern Lebanon, which is part of the
expansion plan for Greater Israel. The Jewish state has a long history of Zionist propagandists claiming
the Litani river as its northern border, which would mean moving the country’s current border some 25
miles further north. And there are Zionists who believe it should go even further north. An interesting
story to better understand this point concerns one of the Israeli soldiers killed during the invasion. He was
a man wearing a full military uniform and carrying a weapon, but who turned out to be a 72-year-old
archaeologist: the Israeli army takes archaeologists along to look for signs of ancient Jewish settlements
and thus come up with an excuse for annexation. Moreover, it would seem that these objectives have been
coordinated with the rebel forces in Syria, supported by Israel and the US. It is no coincidence that the
rebel attack started on the day the ceasefire in Lebanon came into effect.

Speaking of Syria, how is the front line in Lebanon changing now that Damascus has fallen?

Hezbollah now finds itself caught in the middle. These Syrian rebels are the same people who were in al-
Qaeda and ISIS, and ISIS previously occupied the mountains above the Beqaa valley. They were defeated
by Hezbollah in the past, but they still want to regain the Beqaa Valley and northern Lebanon. Thus, what
Hezbollah is likely to face in the near future, is a simultaneous attack from the north and south, Israel
attacking Hezbollah’s southern flank. And Hezbolloah is not that big in size, so I don’t know if it would
be able to deal with such a double threat. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the Lebanese army
would fight against the Syrian rebels if they entered the Beqaa valley, because the Americans also support
the Syrian rebels – the Americans pay about 50 per cent of each soldier’s salary.

What about Palestine?

Obviously the situation for the Palestinians is already disastrous, but what is happening in Syria makes it
even worse, because it removes the corridor connecting Iran to Lebanon and Hezbollah and eliminates the
possibility of opening a northern front against Israel. Now the Israelis will no longer have to fear an attack
by Hezbollah when they decide to proceed with their ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank –
because, you see, I believe that the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza have effectively already been
accomplished. The Israelis still have some extermination to do, they will kill many more people, but their
plans for annexation are now quite public. The West Bank, on the other hand, is still under the control of a
subservient Palestinian authority. The Israelis have yet to complete this process, because what remains of
the Palestinian population is still hanging on: but the plan is extermination, ethnic cleansing, or expulsion
The regime change in Syria saves Israel from the risk of a northern front while they are at it.

In a recent article, you raised the prospect of a final solution in the Middle East, which would consist
of the creation of two blocs: Greater Israel and, to all effects, a Sunni caliphate. Wouldn’t this go
against what has been US policy so far, namely to preserve and play on the Sunni-Shia conflict?
Eliminating the Shias would eliminate the conflict, and there would no longer be any leverage to
counter a future Sunni rebel government in Syria or parts of Lebanon.

I agree. In the Sunni-Shia divide, the balance would end up tilting decisively in favour of the Sunnis,
potentially eliminating the Shia minorities in Lebanon and Syria. I now believe that the US is prioritising
the elimination of that threat to Israel, at the expense of maintaining the divisions, thus taking a short-term
view. I think this is an example of the fact that, when it comes to formulating its Middle East policy, the
US cares more about Israel than they do about themselves. For example, when they eliminated Saddam,
they probably did not fully realise that the consequence would be a Shia-majority regime in Iraq, and
therefore an Iraq close to Iran. For now the US thinks the balance is too much in favour of Iran and
Russia and that, to a certain extent, it should be rebalanced by helping the Israelis. However, this is
terribly short-sighted; indeed, I believe it is a disastrous miscalculation: true, these groups are subordinate
to the US but only for the time being; as happened with Al-Qaeda, as well as with the Taliban, and with
all these organisations that the US supports in the short term, there will be a backlash. Before long, once
they have consolidated their power, these groups will attack the US.

A final question, perhaps the most trivial and at the same time due to be asked in this turbulent context.
What is the future of the Middle East? Can there be a peaceful future for the region?

Right now, the future of the Middle East looks very bleak. Syria looks like it will regress into a failed
state, as happened with Libya. Should the Turks increase their repression of the Kurds and deprive them
of their territories, it will be the US and Turkey who will run the oil fields there, exactly as happened in
Iraq. The rest of Syria will see a continued attempt by the Salafists to impose very strict legislation, which
will increase in intensity in this culturally diverse country. All I see with the fall of the Assad dictatorship
is the lack of control from the centre, and this could lead to massacres and repression. For the
Palestinians, of course, the situation at the moment is just as bleak.

However, I do not think that Israel can survive for long. I think Israel has now proven itself to be
essentially a fascist, racial supremacist, and genocidal entity. People around the world are forming an ever
stronger idea of what is Israel is: a pariah state, an illegitimate entity. Eventually, through moral suasion,
Israel will disappear because people will want to have nothing to do with it, and a large part of the world
will promote an enormous economic boycott.

What are the possible repercussions in the Western world?

Senior politicians in Western countries, if they do not change, will share a similar fate, because people
will, at last, find a way to get rid of them. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the situation in the Middle
East has made the people around the world realise that politicians do not serve the interests of their
electorates and do not respond to their needs. One way or another, the Middle East scenario will help
trigger a revolutionary change in the West. The consequences of what the Israeli genocide will have
brought about, should be fascinating for future historians. Its effects will be seen in the decades to come.
The probable end result will be the abolition of the State of Israel, leading to a radical political change in
our so-called ‘democratic systems’ here in the West.

[by Dario Lucisano translation Patrick Boylan].

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After six weeks in Beirut, duing which I witnessed a substantial swing in the balance of power in the Middle East in favour of the Greater Israel project, it is time to take stock.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
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You have probably noticed my frenetic and uncharacteristic appeals for donations across social media. This has been an experiment as to whether genuinely independent reporting from a colonialist war zone is possible, and the answer may be “No”. I want to explain the costs to you.

Leaving aside for a paragraph or two the costs of cinematographer Niels Ladefoged and myself getting here and living here, let me tell you about the cost just of the 5-minute piece I did from the Syrian/Lebanese border.

After obtaining our general permits to report from the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Defence and other sources, we cannot just go and film anywhere. Almost everywhere we might want to film (including everywhere we have filmed so far) requires specific individual permission and clearance from both the same and other authorities, at both the national and local level.

It is just not practical to get these permissions ourselves. They require a network of contacts we just do not have, the ability to get heard in a very bureaucratic system, and at a basic level, language skills. If we tried to do it ourselves it would take weeks to do one day’s shooting.

A highly evolved system of “fixers” has grown up in Lebanon, of people who set these things up for visiting news teams. They are a world in themselves with a definite hierarchy. They also generally work for organisations like the New York Times or the BBC who are not really counting the pennies. Foreigners like us cannot avoid it. Perhaps if we were here for a couple of years we could bypass this system, but we learnt quickly and painfully that we cannot at present.

Other essentials that you need for a shoot like that one at the border – vehicle, driver, and interpreter – come as part of a package from the fixers. It is not really possible to separate this package out, as the driver is an essential cog in the functioning of the system of permissions – he knows who has the list that you are on locally.

So to get out to the border and do that shoot cost us about $700 plus consumables – petrol, food etc. I do think it was worth it:

We have produced a stream of such short reports, plus written articles, as well as a constant social media output on X/Twitter. We have been receiving millions of views even for some individual videos.

We are also producing mini-documentaries. We have done three so far. These not only involve more than one day shooting – each about $700 – but also proper editing and post-production, with sound, colour grading etc. For that we are using a local post-production studio. The upside is of course that all these costs represent employment for local people.

A beautifully made, thoughtful and very moving film from Craig Murray and his team. The BBC ought to have made this and I wish they had. https://t.co/zeo0wNuzbJ

— Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) December 7, 2024

I haven’t got the bill for that one yet, but post-production on our first mini-documentary on refugees is in the region of $7,000. If the BBC had made the above item, their overall costs would have been ten times this or more.

In addition to which we have the costs of just being here, with all our equipment. We stayed in a hotel, then in two Airbnbs. This is a rough breakdown of everything so far:

Airfares $2,860 (we have expensive open returns in case of having to get out quickly!)
Hotel $2,320
Airbnb 1 $2,140
Airbnb 2 $1,280 (paid till 18 Dec)

Subsistence 43 days x $50 each $4,300
Locally purchased equipment $280
Casual Transport $420
Casual interpretation $160

“Fixer” services $4,800
including transport, interpretation and permits

Post-production costs (estimate) $15,000

Actual spend so far: USD 33,560
That is about £26,400

This is without adding any actual income for Niels. And assuming the blog subscriptions give me just my normal income for doing this work (but see below).

Against this we have received so far approximately £21,500. I had diversified the fundraising streams specifically for this trip, though partly in response to long term demands from readers for more options.

We have received £14,849 from the GoFundMe we set up (which finally GoFundMe have agreed to release to us), and about £6,700 in total from other donation options in this period. There are also new subscriptions to my work which will bring in about £4,000 a year so long as they are maintained, but obviously this is longer-term income.

So at the moment we are about £5,000 out of pocket. I had hoped that this would improve but, contrary to expectations, the more work we have produced, the less donations have been coming in.

Many people producing “independent journalism” from war zones are in fact receiving some benefit from a party – it may be accommodation or transport or logistics. We are genuinely independent. Nor do we have any backing from any apparently benign foundation or fund.

Perhaps this is a foolish, Quixotic quest and it is not possible to do alternative media with my approach from a war zone. In which case we will have to give up and come home. That would be a pity. The genocide in Gaza is not stopping and even this moment Israeli drones circle above us here – the USA and Israel are plunging this region further into chaos.

I am not asking those who have so kindly supported to give more. I very, very definitely do not want anybody to support if it causes them the slightest financial hardship, and I know things are difficult. But if you have not done so, and you can help, or if you can bring this to the attention of others who might help, I should be grateful.

Thank you.

———————————

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

PayPal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

A truly seismic change in the Middle East appears to be happening very fast. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.

This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities, as witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women in Aleppo now.

Yesterday US Warthog air-to-ground jets attacked and severely depleted reinforcements which were, at the invitation of the Syrian government, en route to Syria from Iraq. Constant, daily Israeli airstrikes on Syria’s military infrastructure for months have been a major factor in the demoralisation and reduced capacity of the Syrian government’s Syrian Arab Army, which has simply evaporated in Aleppo and Hama.

It is very difficult to see the tide turning in Syria. The Russians now have either to massively reinforce their Syrian bases with ground troops or to evacuate them. Faced with the exigencies of Ukraine, they may do the latter, and it is reported that the Russian navy has already set sail from Tartus.

The speed of collapse of Syria has taken everybody by surprise. If the situation does not stabilise, Damascus could be besieged and ISIS back on the hills above the Bekaa valley within a week, given the speed of their advance and the short distances involved.

A renewed Israeli attack on Southern Lebanon to coincide with a Salafist invasion of the Bekaa Valley would then seem inevitable, as the Israelis would obviously wish their border with their new Taliban-style Greater Syrian neighbour to be as far North as possible. It could be a race for Beirut, unless the Americans have already organised who gets it.

It is no coincidence that the attack on Syria started the day of the Lebanon/Israel ceasefire. The jihadist forces do not want to be seen to be fighting alongside Israel, even though they are fighting forces which have been relentlessly bombed by Israel, and in the case of Hezbollah are exhausted from fighting Israel.

The Times of Israel has no compunction about saying the quiet part out loud, unlike the British media:

In fact Israeli media is giving a lot more truth about the Syrian rebel forces than British and American media just now. This is another article from the Times of Israel:

While HTS officially seceded from Al Qaeda in 2016, it remains a Salafi jihadi organization designated as a terror organization in the US, the EU and other countries, with tens of thousands of fighters.

Its sudden surge raises concerns that a potential takeover of Syria could transform it into an Islamist, Taliban-like regime – with repercussions for Israel at its south-western border. Others, however, see the offensive as a positive development for Israel and a further blow to the Iranian axis in the region.

Contrast this to the UK media, which from the Telegraph and Express to the Guardian has promoted the official narrative that not just the same organisations, but the same people responsible for mass torture and executions of non-Sunnis, including Western journalists, are now cuddly liberals.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the case of Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, sometimes spelt Al-Julani or Al-Golani, who is now being boosted throughout western media as a moderate leader. He was the deputy leader of ISIS, and the CIA actually has a $10 million bounty on his head! Yes, that is the same CIA which is funding and equipping him and giving him air support.

Supporters of the Syrian rebels still attempt to deny that they have Israeli and US support – despite the fact that almost a decade ago there was open Congressional testimony in the USA that, to that point, over half a billion dollars had been spent on assistance to Syrian rebel forces, and the Israelis have openly been providing medical and other services to the jihadists and effective air support.

One interesting consequence of this joint NATO/Israel support for the jihadist groups in Syria is a further perversion of domestic rule of law. To take the UK as an example, under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act it is illegal to state an opinion that supports, or may lead somebody else to support, a proscribed organisation.

The abuse of this provision by British police to persecute Palestinian supporters for allegedly encouraging support for proscribed organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is notorious, with even tangential alleged references leading to arrest. Sarah Wilkinson, Richard Medhurst, Asa Winstanley, Richard Barnard and myself are all notable victims, and the persecution has been greatly intensified by Keir Starmer.

Yet Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) is also a proscribed group in the UK. But both British mainstream media and British Muslim outlets have been openly promoting and praising HTS for a week – frankly much more openly than I have ever witnessed anyone in the UK support Hamas and Hezbollah – and not a single person has been arrested or even warned by UK police.

That in itself is the strongest of indications that western security services are fully behind the current attack on Syria.

For the record, I think it is an appalling law, and nobody should be prosecuted for expressing an opinion either way. But the politically biased application of the law is undeniable.

When the entire corporate and state media in the West puts out a unified narrative that Syrians are overjoyed to be released by HTS from the tyranny of the Assad regime – and says nothing whatsoever of the accompanying torture and execution of Shias, and destruction of Christmas decorations and icons – it ought to be obvious to everybody where this is coming from.

Yet – and this is another UK domestic repercussion – a very substantial number of Muslims in the UK support HTS and the Syrian rebels, because of the funding pumped into UK mosques from Saudi and Emirate Salafist sources. This is allied to the UK security service influence also wielded through the mosques, both by sponsorship programmes and “think tanks” benefiting approved religious leaders, and by the execrable coercive Prevent programme.

UK Muslim outlets that have been ostensibly pro-Palestinian – like Middle East Eye and 5 Pillars – enthusiastically back Israel’s Syrian allies in ensuring the destruction of resistance to the genocide of the Palestinians. Al Jazeera alternates between items detailing dreadful massacre in Palestine, and items extolling the Syrian rebels bringing Israel-allied rule to Syria.

Among the mechanisms they employ to reconcile this is a refusal to acknowledge the vital role of Syria in enabling the supply of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah. Which supply the jihadists have now cut off, to the absolute delight of Israel, and in conjunction with both Israeli and US air strikes.

In the final analysis, for many Sunni Muslims both in the Middle East and in the West, the pull seems to be stronger of sectarian hatred of the Shia and the imposition of Salafism, than preventing the ultimate destruction of the Palestinian nation.

I am not a Muslim. My Muslim friends happen to be almost entirely Sunni. I personally regard the continuing division over the leadership of the religion over a millennium ago as deeply unhelpful and a source of unnecessary continued hate.

But as a historian I do know that the western colonial powers have consciously and explicitly used the Sunni/Shia split for centuries to divide and rule. In the 1830’s, Alexander Burnes was writing reports on how to use the division in Sind between Shia rulers and Sunni populations to aid British colonial expansion.

On 12 May 1838, in his letter from Simla setting out his decision to launch the first British invasion of Afghanistan, British Governor General Lord Auckland included plans to exploit Shia/Sunni division in both Sind and Afghanistan to aid the British military attack.

The colonial powers have been doing it for centuries, Muslim communities keep falling for it, and the British and Americans are doing it right now to further their remodelling of the Middle East.

Simply put, many Sunni Muslims have been brainwashed into hating Shia Muslims more than they hate those currently committing genocide of an overwhelmingly Sunni population in Gaza.

I refer to the UK because I witnessed this first hand during the election campaign in Blackburn. But the same is true all over the Muslim world. Not one Sunni Muslim-led state has lifted a single finger to prevent the genocide of the Palestinians.

Their leadership is using anti-Shia sectarianism to maintain popular support for a de facto alliance with Israel against the only groups – Iran, Houthi and Hezbollah – which actually did attempt to give the Palestinians practical support in resistance. And against the Syrian government which facilitated supply.

The unspoken but very real bargain is this. The Sunni powers will accept the wiping out of the entire Palestinian nation and formation of Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia communities in Syria and Lebanon by Israel and forces backed by NATO (including Turkey).

There are, of course, contradictions in this grand alliance. The United States’ Kurdish allies in Iraq are unlikely to be happy with Turkey’s destruction of Kurdish groups in Syria, which is what Erdoğan gains from Turkey’s very active military role in toppling Syria – in addition to extending Turkish control of oilfields.

The Iran-friendly Iraqi government will have further difficulty with reconciling US continuing occupation of swathes of its country, as they realise they are the next target.

The Lebanese army is under control of the USA, and Hezbollah must have been greatly weakened to have agreed the disastrous ceasefire with Israel. Christian fascist militias traditionally allied to Israel are increasingly visible in parts of Beirut, though whether they would be stupid enough to make common cause with jihadists from the North may be open to question. But should Syria fall entirely to jihadist rule – which may happen fast – I do not rule out Lebanon following very quickly indeed, and being integrated into a Salafist Greater Syria.

How the Palestinians of Jordan would react to this disastrous turn of events, it is hard to be sure. The British puppet Hashemite Kingdom is the designated destination for ethnically cleansed West Bank Palestinians under the Greater Israel plan.

What this all potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism. An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.

Unlike many readers, I have never been a fan of the Assad regime or blind to its human rights violations. But what it did undeniably do was maintain a pluralist state where the most amazing historical religious and community traditions – including Sunni (and many Sunni do support Assad), Shia, Alaouites, descendants of the first Christians, and speakers of Aramaic, the language of Jesus – were all able to co-exist.

The same is true of Lebanon.

What we are witnessing is the destruction of that and imposition of a Saudi-style rule. All the little cultural things that indicate pluralism – from Christmas trees to language classes to winemaking to women going unveiled – have just been destroyed in Aleppo and could be destroyed from Damascus to Beirut.

I do not pretend that there are not genuine liberal democrats among the opposition to Assad. But they have negligible military significance, and the idea that they would be influential in a new government is delusion.

In Israel, which pretended to be a pluralist state, the mask is off. The Muslim call to prayer has just been banned. Arab minority members of the Knesset have been suspended for criticising Netanyahu and genocide. More walls and gates are built every day, not just in unlawfully occupied territories but in the “state of Israel” itself, to enforce apartheid.

I confess I once had the impression that Hezbollah was itself a religio-supremacist organisation; the dress and style of its leadership look theocratic. Then I came here and visited places like Tyre, which has been under Hezbollah elected local government for decades, and found that swimwear and alcohol are allowed on the beach and the veil is optional, while there are completely unmolested Christian communities there.

I will never now see Gaza, but wonder if I might have been similarly surprised by Hamas rule.

It is the United States which is promoting the cause of religious extremism and of the end, all over the Middle East, of a societal pluralism similar to Western norms. That is of course a direct consequence of the United States being allied to both the two religio-supremacist centres of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It is the USA which is destroying pluralism, and it is Iran and its allies which defend pluralism. I would not have seen this clearly had I not come here. But once seen, it is blindingly obvious.

Beirut 6 December 2024

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

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This mini-documentary gives much more extensive coverage of our visit to Baalbek just before the ceasefire. The day before we went, sixty civilians had been killed in Israeli bombings throughout the small city. This video captures something of the terror with which the inhabitants had been living for months, and their extraordinary resilience.

With thanks to Niels Ladefoged for the filming and editing.

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Only Israel has opened fire since the start of the “ceasefire”, and Israel has done so repeatedly. Nobody has fired back.

Israel has for three days in a row attacked alleged Hezbollah rocket sites with bombs or missiles, killing at least four people and probably more. Israel has opened fire on journalists. It has critically wounded two mourners at a funeral. There are numerous reports of Lebanese civilians returning to their homes in the South coming under fire from Israeli troops.

This video shows the two people shot by snipers at a funeral. The man is saying that they had permission for the funeral from UNIFIL and from the Lebanese Army.

Israel has also used the “ceasefire” to advance its forces including tanks into towns and villages from which they had been repulsed and which Israel could not take by fighting. It has entrenched positions in Southern Lebanon, issued orders to Lebanese civilians not to return to over sixty villages in South Lebanon – none of which it had managed to permanently occupy in the fighting – and is reinforcing, re-arming and re-equipping.

South Lebanon | ambulance smashed

Israeli soldiers of the 7th brigade deliberately runs over a Lebanese ambulance as published today on their private social media accounts pic.twitter.com/NXo8Xw15D2

— Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) November 29, 2024

Israel in fact is treating the “ceasefire” as unconditional surrender. All of this was entirely predictable, not only from Israel’s past and normal behaviour, but also on the face of the “ceasefire” document itself, which is a wildly unbalanced document.

It offends my own sensibilities as a former diplomat that the Lebanese foreign ministry signed up to such an abject and undisguised document of submission.

Let us start by analysing paragraph 2 of this document:

2. From 4am, November 27, 2024 forward, the Government of Lebanon will prevent Hezbollah and all other armed groups in the territory of Lebanon from carrying out any operations against Israel, and Israel will not carry out any offensive military operations against Lebanese targets, including civilian, military or other state targets, in the territory of Lebanon by land, air or sea.

You see the imbalance immediately.

Lebanese armed groups will be stopped from carrying out “any operations against Israel” whereas Israel will not carry out “any offensive military operations.”

There is no way that Lebanon should ever have accepted that the term “offensive” is inserted for one side only. There is no possible way of parsing this, other than that Israel is still allowed to fire, and nobody else can. Israel has in fact fired, killed and wounded with abandon since the ceasefire came into force, and of course characterises this as “defensive” military action.

The Lebanese government have recorded 51 breaches of the ceasefire by Israel in three days.

The United States and its allies have designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation – a FTO in US legal parlance. The USA – which is set up as the arbiter of the ceasefire – therefore views any military action by Israel against anyone or anything deemed “Hezbollah”, anywhere and anytime, as a legitimate counter-terrorism operation.

The USA therefore simply takes the view – and the UK will take the same view – that each and every attack by Israel is not a violation of the ceasefire, but legitimate counter-terrorism.

There is no doubt of this whatsoever.

Lebanon can do nothing to monitor or prevent the reinforcement of Israeli positions in Southern Lebanon (spoiler – Israel has no intention of ever withdrawing) because the ceasefire stipulates not only that the Israeli army has sixty days’ leisure to leave Southern Lebanon, but that in that sixty days the Lebanese armed forces cannot enter the areas Israel is occupying: including not taking control of their own Southern border and thus they cannot check what troops and weapons Israel is moving across unopposed.

12. Upon the commencement of the cessation of hostilities according to paragraph one, Israel will withdraw its forces in a phased manner south of the Blue Line, and in parallel the LAF will deploy to positions in the Southern Litani Area shown in the attached LAF Deployment Plan, and will commence the implementation of its obligations under the commitments, including the dismantling of unauthorised sites and infrastructure and confiscating unauthorised arms and related materiel. The Mechanism will co-ordinate execution by the Israel Defence Forces and LAF of the specific and detailed plan for the phased withdrawal and deployment in these areas, which should not exceed 60 days.

“The mechanism” comprises the United States, France and the United Nations through the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). But it is plainly the United States which is calling the shots. The United Nations “hosts” the mechanism, while the United States “chairs” it.

This distinction between “hosting” and “chairing” is a new one on me. It appears to mean that the United Nations will be permitted to make the tea.

At para 11 the Agreement states that the Lebanese Armed Forces will “upon the commencement of the cessation of hostilities” deploy troops to control all border crossings, but this is immediately negated by para 12 which stipulates the LAF will only enter the Israeli-controlled area – including the border – in a phased manner over sixty days.

What the LAF will do instead is set up a new Southern Lebanese border along the Litani river. That is the practical meaning of para 11. It is in effect a new border, and the Israelis control to the South of it

In addition, the LAF will deploy forces, set road blocks and checkpoints on all the roads and bridges along the line delineating the Southern Litani Area.

This is why the day before the ceasefire, the Israelis flew in a platoon of special forces for a few seconds of photo opportunity on the Litani River, so they could claim their armed forces had reached to there.

The United States holds all of the cards. The Lebanese Armed Forces are the only army I can think of in modern history which “remained neutral” when their country was invaded. The Lebanese Armed Forces are literally in the pay of the United States.

This is a complex country. The truth is that the majority of the soldiers of the Lebanese Army would in fact defend their country against Israel given half a chance, while their leadership has other ideas entirely and has US-backed political ambitions.

The United States is a party to the conflict. The bombs falling on Lebanese heads are American bombs, dropping from American planes. The United States is put in charge of the “peace” by this Agreement. The current US imperial hegemon is having its coat carried by the former colonial power France, in exchange for which honour France granted immunity to Netanyahu for war crimes.

People in Lebanon are desperate for peace. It is at United States insistence that Lebanon has no air defences – historically the USA insisted on removal of those given by Syria, and the USA has ensured they were never replaced. The USA is holding Lebanon down for Israel to violate.

The United States wants to see Lebanon divided, weak and at the mercy of Israel, and wants to see a reduction of the Shia population. The second-largest US Embassy in the world is being built here as a hub of regional influence, and on the day the ceasefire came into force the USA and Israel activated the attack on Aleppo by their proxy army in Syria.

Hezbollah is not officially a party to the Ceasefire Agreement, which is between states, but is the largest political party in the Lebanese parliament and a member of Lebanon’s coalition government. Hezbollah must therefore have agreed to the ceasefire deal. They have been desperate to portray this agreement as a victory, the confirmation that they fought off the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon.

We should not forget that well within living memory Israel occupied and held Beirut, with US and French support. So I fully understand that preventing that from happening again is an achievement. It is still more of an achievement given Hezbollah’s major losses in assassinated leadership, and crippled personnel from the terrorist pager attacks.

But this ceasefire agreement gives away any good result from the fighting.

Israel has shown that it has both the ability and the will to devastate Lebanon from the air, just as it has devastated Gaza. It has shown it will attack the same life-sustaining infrastructure and commit widespread acts of brutality without compunction. Lebanon has seen that, like Gaza, it has no defences and that the international community will do nothing to stop the slaughter in the short term.

Israel has spent 72 hours blatantly violating the ceasefire without a word of protest from the Western powers. The moment anybody fires back a single shot, the USA and its satellites will voice outrage, heavy bombing of Beirut will recommence and Israel will start trying to advance again from its new upgraded Southern bases within Lebanon.

I see this happening sooner rather than later. Peace deals which entirely favour one side never last, barring effective extermination of the injured party, and that has not happened.

Yet. Here is a reminder of Israel’s capacity for morality.

———————————

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Beirut Residents Return to the Devastated Suburbs

On Thursday evening news came through that we had at long last gained the full list of approvals required to travel to report outside Beirut; we were cleared by the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Defence, and the local authorities.

Laith Marouf of Free Palestine TV called me and suggested we go down together on Friday to the southern capital of Nabatieh, which has been enduring heavy bombing.

I asked Laith to give me half an hour, and did some quick research. Nabatieh is about 12 miles from the Israeli border and has been devastated by Israeli bombing attacks. In the South of the country some 70,000 homes have been destroyed. Following the Gaza model, hospitals, schools, mosques, waterworks, churches, bakeries have all been systematically taken out. In brief occupations Israel has demolished entire villages.

Israel has also deliberately destroyed the crops and livestock.

I read this brilliant article by Hanna Davis for Middle East Eye ten days earlier, which describes Nabatieh in apocalyptic terms. It is centred on interviews with the heroic civil defence workers, who are especially targeted by Israel.

Back at the hilltop, Fakih’s colleagues also spoke about the immense stress and psychological pressure they were under.

“Mentally, we are all struggling,” Hussein Jaber, 30, from Nabatieh’s civil defence, told MEE.

“We are struggling with the lack of stability. We are always on the move, can’t sleep well, and are being put in intense situations,” he said.

“We have to pull out the dead bodies of people we love, friends and families we know, neighbours, people from our own area.”

Since then, the situation had deteriorated even further. 100 people had been reported dead in Nabatieh in a fresh wave of airstrikes the day before.

It had not been exactly safe in Beirut since I had arrived, but now Laith had faced me with the inevitable question. Did I really have the courage to do what I had come to Lebanon in order to do? That is why I had asked for half an hour to research and think it over.

Well, I phoned Laith back and asked him what time we could start.

Laith is good company. A lifelong activist, he has been hounded and demonised by Zionists his entire career, which has centred on attempting to establish independent broadcasting platforms. He is currently trying to grow FreePalestineTV into a serious operation, and is full of cheerful facts about the relative reach of online and broadcast media. I do hope he succeeds.

The next morning Niels gathered his equipment and I took a spare jacket and tie, in case my suit got dusty. Laith arrived with his cinematographer, the debonair and intrepid Hadi Hotait, driving. Hadi’s car is a capacious SUV from which all signs of branding fell off many years ago, along with many other superfluous pieces. He appeared to have an entire film studio packed in the back. I should not have been surprised if, on arrival, a couple of extras had appeared from under the unfathomable mound.

Hadi navigated his way through the backstreets of Beirut between cars triple-parked so badly it seemed a physical impossibility to get between them. Hadi overcame this by the simple expedient of going very fast. I think his old car, like the DeLorean in Back to the Future, enters a different dimension at sufficient speed. I cannot imagine how else he did it.

While I was contemplating that the Israelis might not be as likely to kill me as Hadi’s driving, Laith blithely announced we were not going to Nabatieh after all. The bombing there was so intense this morning that the army had closed the road. We were therefore going to Baalbek instead.

I knew that 60 people had been killed in bombing the day before there. I hated to think what was happening in Nabatieh if it is more dangerous than Baalbek. But on the other hand I had long wanted to go to Baalbek and to see the famed Bekaa Valley, so I was quite pleased.

We chatted away as we climbed the steep ascent of the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Hadi’s ancient car was somehow texting warning messages to his phone: “transmission overheating”, “check fluid levels”. At one stage an old Scotsman popped his head out of all the equipment in the back and said “Captain, the warp drive is not stable.” Although I may have nodded off and dreamt that.

Hadi emerged as a driver of incredible speed and skill, though whether it was an entirely appropriate way to proceed when not on a racetrack might be open to debate. Anyway, we managed only to crash once before we reached the top of the pass and the Bekaa Valley spread out below us like a beautifully worked carpet.

What surprised me was how close it all is. We were only 30 minutes outside of Beirut, and there to my right I could see the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. Straight ahead were the mountain ranges where Hezbollah had defeated Isis. We were on the spot of the defining 1982 battle where the Syrian Army and Iranian-reinforced Palestinians heroically blocked the Israeli advance. Heading to our left, you could be in Damascus by lunch.

I was also surprised that we had not been stopped once, by any kind of security checkpoint. We had passed through a patchwork quilt of different communities, with drifts of posters in the central reservation supporting various factions, changing from Muslim to Christian symbolism and back again with bewildering frequency as we drove along.

We went down into the valley. The land is highly cultivated and I went to look at the soil. At the entrance to the valley it is rich and organic but also red with iron oxide. Further to the South it turns a deep black and becomes rich and pasty in consistency. It smells good.

We made a rendezvous with a convoy of journalists outside a hospital. I will not name it because the fact it was the meeting point might give a crazed Israeli or his AI a “reason” to attack it. The convoy of journalists was being assembled to be taken around the ruins of the previous day’s destruction.

A local official talked to Hadi, and it was clear that I was being singled out in some way. I was at first slightly concerned by this, but then Hadi explained that I was being granted an interview with the Mayor of Baalbek, whose authority covered the whole of the north of the Valley.

We headed into Baalbek itself, about a further fifteen minutes’ drive. It was a lovely sunny day and I was struck by the beauty of the valley. It is not densely populated, but it is extensively populated. Homes are more frequent amongst the farmland than in most rural communities. Baalbek itself has no tall buildings that I saw.

It looks both distinctive and pleasant. Many houses are obviously centuries old. Ancient mosques nestle by ancient churches. The rows of single-storey shops were surprisingly Western in names and goods proffered. We passed a Pizza Hut. But horribly, incongruously, every few minutes we would pass a home or homes that had been massively bombed into rubble.

Like missing teeth in a beautiful smile.

We stopped near the centre of town and met a man and a woman from the local authority. They explained that the Mayor would be coming to meet us in the Temple of Bacchus, because it was felt unlikely the Israelis would bomb there.

Only two days earlier, all four of us journalists had been at the site of an Israeli missile strike in Central Beirut, where the district Mayor had been killed at a community centre providing aid parcels for refugees. Four other people had also been killed, and fifteen seriously injured. Israel has made a point of targeting elected local leaders throughout its invasion, killing a number of mayors in the South.

I thought it ironic to see all the Western politicians repeating the Zionist line that Netanyahu should not be arrested by the International Criminal Court because he is an elected leader, when Netanyahu is killing elected leaders all over Lebanon.

We were, however, told that there would be a delay, because of intense Israeli drone activity over the city. In particular there was one drone circling low right over our heads, and had been for a while. We were to proceed to the ruins and wait.

When we re-entered the vehicle, Hadi, the most light-hearted of company, became suddenly very serious:

Sometimes the drones do miss. They really do. If they fire at us and miss, just get the door open and get as far from the vehicle as you can.

As we drew near, the quality and the extent of the ruins was breathtaking. It is on the scale of the Forum in Rome. What has been excavated is not as extensive as Ephesus but much more is complete. Just what we could see from the road was wonderful, and then the Temple of Venus opened before us on the other side as we drove along. And Pizza Hut.

I had grown rather blasé about drones. I have had Israeli drones buzzing low overhead pretty much the entire month I have now been in Beirut, and while I know that they are missile- as well as surveillance-equipped, and highly lethal, I find it best just to ignore them. But the people with us were extremely concerned that this one had moved along with us as we drove.

It was clearly visible and they pointed out to me that we were right at the centre of its circle. My own sense of geometry rather disintegrates when I tilt my head right back and gaze at an object in a featureless sky, but I took their word for it. They had been living with this lethal threat for months, and their lives depended on understanding it. They even could even tell various actions of the drone by the change in tone of the engines.

Without the mayor, we did not have permission to enter the archaeological complex, so we stood outside the gate. At some stage the atmosphere changed and it became obvious that our hosts were really, really worried. They explained that they were quite sure that the drone had focused on us, specifically. Obviously it would not be safe for the mayor to come in these circumstances.

So the meeting was cancelled.

Instead they were awaiting permission for us to look around the temple complex, but in the meantime we could do nothing but stay where we were. They felt that leaving now might provoke a missile strike. So we just stood there.

I find it hard to describe it to you. It was a lovely sunny day. The soldier inside the locked temple gate was explaining to the local authority people that he had no instructions that would allow our entry. The drone buzzed menacingly right overhead, observing us constantly.

A ginger cat came through the temple railings, and I crouched down, holding out my balled fist so she could rub her head against it. She purred and went back and forth rubbing my fist several times, before lying down to be stroked. I found myself pondering a most unlooked-for dilemma; was I putting the cat in danger by keeping it next to me? Should I chase it away?

The surreal nature of life endured in Baalbek became more evident as two men in donkey jackets strolled by smoking, saying their salaams as they came by, without a hint of concern for the drone above us. Vehicles went up and down the road slowly, as though nothing were wrong.

Then three boys arrived, about eight years old, one on a bicycle. They thought it great fun to see strangers in town in current times and they came up to us and asked lots of questions in Arabic. One showed us tricks on the bike. Strangely, he was wearing a Welsh Rugby Union hoodie. I was acutely aware that the presence of the boys would not in any way deter the Israelis from striking; they would probably enjoy killing them.

I felt a huge anger that this threat is being constantly visited on children by Israel. Almost certainly these children would know some of the sixty people killed the day before. Yet there they were, exactly as friendly and cheeky as children ought to be.

Eventually, the gates were opened and we were allowed in to the temple complex. It is an incredible place and should be much more widely known; it deserves to be as famous as the Pyramids or Petra. Originally the temple of the Canaanite God Baal and his consort Astarte, successive Phoenician, Greek and Roman temple complexes were built, with most of the current buildings being Roman, but constructed on the foundations of the original.

And those foundations are astonishing. The largest blocks of stone I have ever seen used for construction, with some of them weighing 500 tonnes. By comparison, the largest stones in the Pyramids are 80 tonnes and the largest at Stonehenge 50 tonnes. The transport and construction theories for those monuments just can’t be scaled up to 500-tonnes.

Once you tear your gaze around from the Canaanite foundations, the Roman superstructure is intoxicating. It is massive, and there is a finesse and delicacy to the carving not characteristic of Roman work.

Baalbek was conquered by Alexander and he renamed it Heliopolis, its name throughout the Classical era.

Archaeology is contentious in the Middle East. Two days before our visit, an Israeli archaeologist had been killed by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. At least, that was the media framing. The truth is somewhat more complex.

Zeev Erlich was, despite being in his 70s, armed and in full military uniform. A retired Major in the Israeli Defence Force reserve, Erlich was with a group of soldiers when killed. A Sergeant was killed alongside him and a General wounded.

The Israeli army brought an archaeologist along on its invasion of Southern Lebanon to look for evidence of ancient Hebrew occupation – to justify annexation. At the time of his death he was at the site of the shrine of the Prophet Shamoun Al-Safa, who Christians know as Simon Peter, the first Pope. Very few Christians realise he features positively in the Koran.

It is a reflection of the madness of Zionist ideology that an armed invasion is accompanied by archaeologists to justify it. It is highly probable that thousands of years ago there were Hebrews in Southern Lebanon. The idea that this justifies annexation is so lunatic I find it hard to describe.

In the same time period, Switzerland was occupied by the Celts. This is not in academic dispute; the La Tène culture is one of a number of Celtic cultures that were established in Switzerland in the Classical period. Eventually the Celtic people and their culture moved on, as peoples do over millennia. Such migrations had push and pull factors, but broadly the arrival of more aggressive and militarily capable peoples from the East was a main cause.

But if I said to you “I am a Celt” and demanded the right to move to Geneva, take somebody’s house and throw them onto the street today, you would think I am a complete lunatic. Nobody would accept a Scots or Irish claim to land in Switzerland. And rightly so. Yet that really is the premise of Zionism. And astonishingly, Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, David Lammy, Donald Trump, Ursula von der Leyen, and most of the population of states like Germany and the USA, actually subscribe to this utterly ludicrous, mystical, medievalist nonsense.

So we have fake archaeologists travelling with invading Israeli armies. I do try to avoid comparing Israelis to Nazis because of the Holocaust, but the comparison is compelling. The Nazis loved to justify their crackpot racial theories with fake archaeology, as parodied in the Indiana Jones series.

Zeev Erlich was indeed a dangerous crackpot. He was a founder of the illegal West Bank settlement of Ofra and he wrote numerous articles arguing that the area was historically Jewish and supporting annexation. He led IDF raids on Palestinian communities, or as one of his friends told it to Israeli internet outlet ynet: “He volunteered and assisted soldiers across various sectors, showing his unmatched knowledge of villages and farms”.

As we left the temple complex, the drone still overhead, we stopped and looked at the completely flattened Menshiya Palace, home to the Ottoman Governor, that had been destroyed by Israeli bombing. It stands close to some of the Classical ruins which had been damaged by fragments. There was no justification for destroying this museum other than the obliteration of history and cultural heritage.

We then proceeded on to two civilian houses that had been destroyed. Two people were killed and twelve seriously injured. This was quite a drive away, but the drone followed us and again circled right overhead. I looked through the detritus of the buildings; Laith was very insistent I climb to the top of the rubble, which was frankly very precarious. Coming down was even worse. But close inspection revealed nothing at all but the contents of a normal civilian family home with children.

It was also worth noting that in addition to the two destroyed homes, about ten homes nearby had been rendered uninhabitable. A dozen vehicles had been destroyed; some of them – fifty or sixty metres from the site – appeared to have had their paint burnt off by great splashes of some kind of burning or caustic liquid from the explosion.

Death in the Bekaa Valley is sudden, random and frequent. There are no warnings at all here that Israel is about to bomb and the targets are always civilian homes. Since we have left the Director of the hospital has been killed in his home.

The Israelis claim that all the targets are Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the ruling party here, so they take that to mean any government employee can be targeted. This is of course not the case in international law, and this terror inflicted on a helpless civilian population is a war crime. Many victims appear to be entirely random.

Missiles have never been fired at Israel from within the town of Baalbek.

We then received information that fresh bombing attacks were believed to be imminent; F-35s had been seen and we were ordered to get out as quickly as possible, which we did.

It was an unexpected and then truncated time in the Bekaa Valley, and as darkness fell we were pleased to be driving back to Beirut all still alive and well. My overwhelming reflection is that any fear or pressure we experienced is felt by those in Baalbek every single day. I recall the thoughts I had about the safety of the cat, and wondered how mothers felt, who were making decisions on where their children go from moment to moment which may kill them, in the lottery of death the Israelis have inflicted on the Bekaa Valley.

Well that was an interesting excursion. I look forward to our next tour.

————————–

We have plans for a serious programme of written and video content to be produced in Lebanon between now and Christmas, but this will depend on our obtaining the money to do it.

We require to raise an absolute minimum of sixty thousand pounds, and preferably more. This is for transport, accommodation, logistics and staff.

We are prepared to put our lives on the line to try to bring you the truth from here and counter the Zionist media, but that requires the sacrifice from you readers and viewers of putting in the resource required.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post.

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I could not tell the easy, comforting lie.

“No”, I told the woman, her traumatised children clinging to her legs, “I can’t say you are safe here; not one of us is safe. The Israelis are genocidal. But in Lebanon so far, I don’t think they have bombed a school”.

I was with one of 67 families, with 215 children, living as refugees in a small school at Ain Rumaila in Southern Beirut. The area borders the evacuated suburb of Dahiya which the Israelis are systematically demolishing, and bombings rattle the windows of the school every day.

This woman is a school teacher when at home in Southern Lebanon, and her husband a retired soldier. They had to leave their small town with no notice, through an intense air raid, as Israeli bombs destroyed buildings and killed and maimed people all round them.

They got out only with what they could carry. Their home was destroyed behind them.

Israel has targeted refugees all over Lebanon. Just the day before, we had been at the site of a refugee aid centre in central Beirut, which had been targeted for missile attack. The death toll on that attack has now risen to five, with seventeen seriously injured.

I reached that site before I could establish exactly what the target was:

My aim in visiting the school was to let a few refugees tell to camera their own stories about their daily pre-war lives and their communities, so that people might see them as individuals, and not just a huddled mass of misery.

I think that worked. Within 48 hours the resulting video will be available. But what this woman urgently wanted me to tell her was that now they are safe.

And I couldn’t. If the children understood English, then I might perhaps have lied for their sake and replied that everything is OK. But the situation is too serious for self-serving false cheer.

Before I left, one of the families we met who have lost everything and are struggling with basic provision, absolutely insisted we sat and shared their meal of salad and lentils, cooked on a single burner ring directly on top of a gas bottle.

It was a deeply humbling experience to experience their graciousness and warmth to strangers.

Yesterday Amos Hochstein, the US Middle Eastern Envoy, flew in to Beirut to “negotiate” a peace deal between Lebanon and Israel.

Over 3,500 Lebanese have been killed, the majority of them women and children. The bombs that killed them were not only made in the USA, they were supplied by the USA for the purpose. As were the aircraft that dropped them.

The Americans are arrogant enough to send Amos Hochstein, born in the terrorist state to Israeli parents and himself a former member of the IDF, as their “peace envoy”.

And it says everything about America’s real interest in the region that Hochstein’s official position in the Biden Administration is actually Energy Security Adviser.

As I explained in my last article, Israel’s intensified bombing campaign is designed to terrify Lebanon into signing a peace deal that is actually a surrender. It guarantees Israeli armed forces access at will into Southern Lebanon, and military overflight of the entire country.

The access to Southern Lebanon in the latest draft has been supposedly toned down and phrased as “in pursuit of Israel’s right of self-defence”.

As the entire world has seen this last year and more that “Israel’s right to self-defence” is interpreted by both Israel and the United States as the right to commit genocide, Lebanon would be utterly mad to sign this document.

Similarly Lebanon is supposed to be reassured by insertion of the USA as the “guarantor” of the agreement.

You read that right; the county which is currently funding and supplying the genocidal bombing of Lebanon is going to be the guarantor of its safety.

As always in such negotiations, neither side wishes to be seen to be standing in the way of a deal, so the Lebanese were polite to Hochstein and he is now shuttling off to Tel Aviv to seek Israeli agreement to little linguistic tweaks that make it all sound better.

I worry for Lebanon. In another post I will try to outline the myriad ways in which the USA and Israel are attempting to re-open the old divisions of the civil war to undermine the resistance.

One of those ways is of course to convince factions that Israel really wants peace and Hezbollah is blocking a reasonable deal. It is plainly not a reasonable deal, but people made desperate by Israel’s state terror inflicted on their country, may see what they wish to believe.

Should Lebanon accept the deal in the interest of preserving unity, as the US connive, then I have no doubt whatsoever that this deal will shortly be understood to have been a key step on the path to Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon.

Because it is essential to understand that Greater Israel has been the goal all along of both Israel and the United States.

If you have not by now seen through the Biden administration’s pretence of “trying to restrain” Israel, whilst providing ever greater funding and weapons for the genocide, then you are such a fool that I cannot help you.

Reporting from Lebanon

————————–

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Flying from Rome on a bright Sunday morning, the MEA Airbus was configured for about 300 people. About 20 of us boarded to fly to Beirut. It is a very strange feeling to be on an almost empty commercial airliner, particularly as nearly all of the small number of passengers were in business class, leaving economy class barren.

Two Christian priests travelling economy, with impressive beards and pillarbox hats, were rescued by the hostesses before takeoff and moved forward to business. The flight was entirely uneventful, except that for some reason it served no alcohol, which is new to MEA. Niels suggested they had been warned about us!

We have all seen photos of Israeli bombing near the airport as MEA flights come in to land, but our approach was untroubled and we could not spot any bomb damage in the vast sprawling vista of Beirut as we came down.

Niels Ladefoged and I had toured Germany together, with the film Ithaka, on which Niels was cinematographer. That tour was related in great detail on this blog. So regular readers know the two of us, who arrived into Beirut airport slightly confused.

Our aim in coming to Lebanon was to counter the overwhelmingly pro-Israel narrative of Western media reports of the Israeli assault on Lebanon. Before coming, I had spoken with a friend from my Blackburn election campaign, whom I knew to be very well connected in the Middle East.

This friend had told me he had a sponsor for us in Lebanon who could organise all the necessary logistics, and the first instance of this was the arrival into Beirut. We knew that other activists who had recently arrived had encountered difficulties with Lebanese immigration.

To counter this, we had been asked to provide our aircraft seat numbers before embarking, so we could be met on the plane and escorted through immigration. We had done this, but on arrival nothing happened on the plane.

We saw how it was meant to happen as we disembarked into the finger that led to the terminal: the two priests were whisked through a side door down to a vehicle that waited on the tarmac, to take them straight out of the airport.

As we wandered along the arrivals pathway through the terminal, the feeling of weirdness aroused by the near-empty plane returned. Where there would normally be hundreds of people pouring in from multiple flights, the place was empty and echoing, with just the 20 from our flight trailing through the vast halls.

It felt strange and ominous.

Once we reached immigration, the reason almost everyone had been in business class was apparent, as almost our entire flight headed into the “UN and Diplomatic” lane. That left us and a Lebanese family with small children. As we approached the immigration desk, a man in jeans and a striped shirt approached us, identified himself as a policeman, and asked us to leave immigration and head to a side area.

There were eight disconsolate people waiting there, with five chairs between them. We waited, and waited. Two hours passed uncomfortably. We tried without success to contact the sponsor who was supposed to have helped us with immigration.

Every now and then somebody was called forward into an office, stayed there for ten minutes, then came out and sat down again, looking unhappy. This was an ethnically and socially disparate bunch; the odd brief conversation revealed that European passports were the obvious common factors.

We were in essentially a very tatty corridor; everything from the furniture to the tiling to the counters appeared in need of renovation. It was not dirty; merely worn and chipped.

Niels and I had at no stage been asked for anything at all, not even our names. Our passports had not been inspected. Nothing was happening, very slowly.

I managed to phone my friend from Blackburn, who said he would try to contact our sponsor. After a further hour of waiting, a large uniformed man with a moustache and notably bold spectacles came out and pointed at us.

“Why are you waiting here?” he asked.

“I don’t know”, I replied, “A policeman told us to.”

He called me in to the office.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I am a retired diplomat, and now a journalist.”

“What kind of journalist?”

“Independent media. I publish online.”

“So, you are a social media influencer?”

“Oh no, I am much too old.”

“Aren’t you scared to come to Lebanon at this time?”

“No, I am Scottish.”

This answer was obviously sufficient explanation, and he got up and waved to a subordinate, who took us through and stamped our passports. A very patient driver from the hotel had been waiting four hours for us and had already rather brilliantly tracked down and loaded our luggage.

Heading out into the car, we immediately heard the Israeli drones circling overhead.

I want you to understand how loud this noise is. You do not have to strain to hear it; rather it is impossible to block it. You can still hear it even over heavy traffic.

It is far louder than a normal light aircraft at that height, and the noise must be a deliberate feature, an instrument of psychological warfare. I suppose the comparison would be the deliberate screeching of Stuka dive bombers, although the quality of sound is very different.

To come into a city which is under active bombardment, where dozens of people are killed every single day, is not entirely a comfortable feeling. Particularly when journalists are deliberately and systematically assassinated by Israel and, not to put too fine a point on it, the Israelis are not particularly keen on me.

The large Israeli drones carry a range of unerring missiles, have state-of-the-art surveillance and target-locking capability and can be triggered to fire by AI without human intervention. I would be lying if I pretended that on this first occasion the hairs were not standing on the back on my neck.

But you get used to it.

After this interesting drive through nightfall, we arrived at the Bossa Nova hotel in Sinn el Fil, a Christian area of Beirut, which we had been told would be unlikely to be attacked by Israel.

The hotel is, rather surreally, South American themed, with a restaurant serving only allegedly Brazilian dishes. It is nine storeys high and constructed with massive concrete pillars, and a great many of them. It has a very well-stocked cocktail bar to cater for the most pernickety fan of mixology, though without a presiding mixologist at present. It is allegedly owned by a Scot.

All of the other guests in the hotel were refugees from the evacuated areas. 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon. The human trauma of this is immense, particularly as the homes, farms and businesses these people have left are being systematically destroyed behind them.

Over the next ten days we slowly get to know some of the refugees. A school teacher, a policeman, a farmer, a tailor. All with their large families, crammed in, a family to a room in this hotel which is creaking to cope. Being Lebanese they are tidy and clean, and emerge looking well dressed and groomed.

Like refugees everywhere, they sit listless and morose, displaced and discarded, filling in time doing nothing. Chat is infrequent and subdued. People sit isolated with their thoughts, even from their own families.

They do not look up when somebody walks past. Food in paper bags is brought from local bakers and consumed in the lobby. The free water cooler is the busiest spot in the hotel.

Only the children are happy; an unexpected school holiday, a trip to a city, lots of new friends for games of mass soccer in the hotel courtyard.

When the drones are particularly loud or low, the children race inside, mostly before their mothers have to call. One small boy in particular, about three years old, bursts into tears every time the drones get loud.

The Israelis have made a point of bombing hotels housing refugees, particularly in Christian areas. Turning the Christian community against the refugees is part of the Israeli plan.

The next morning we received a message from our sponsor that a driver, Ali, will come to pick us up. We had explained we wished to start by visiting the much-touted (in Western media) “Hezbollah stronghold” of Dahiya, which is subject to continual bombing.

Ali arrives, a well dressed individual driving a very comfortable and new Lexus saloon. He doesn’t speak any English, but through Google Translate he explains that we need special permits to visit Dahiya.

We give Ali our passports and he takes photos of them with his phone, sending them to somebody whom he then phones to discuss it. He then speaks into his phone again and shows us on his phone:

“You cannot go to Dahiya now. Permits will take one or two days. But I can take you on a tour of bomb sites, without stopping the car or taking photos.”

So we embark with Ali on a tour of recent death, driving to nine different bomb sites. What is immediately clear is that eight of the nine sites are residential buildings, blocks of flats. Ali is very well informed indeed about each one, relating how many people were killed there – men, women and children.

Ali does not attempt to hide the fact that, in almost every case, there were Hezbollah members present, and sometimes he can tell us who. Flags are planted on top of the mounds of rubble to commemorate these martyrs, and sometimes there are pictures of them in uniform, on planted stakes.

One or two of the sites have been struck by precision missiles targeting an individual apartment, with usually a handful of immediately neighbouring apartments also damaged or destroyed. But at the large majority of the sites whole blocks of apartments, containing 20 or more, have been completely reduced to rubble, much of which is powder.

The same of course is true of the inhabitants. Driving slowly past the sites, it is immediately apparent these residences are civilian, with corners of settees and beds and kitchen equipment jumbled in the rubble and heart-stopping indications of children, including a bright pink poster of a pony, held down by a dust-filled boot.

There is no indication whatsoever of military or industrial activity. It is not a question of Hezbollah hiding behind human shields. It is rather a question of Hezbollah figures being killed alongside their partners, parents and children in their civilian homes, with numerous other families in the block killed too. It is plainly a war crime.

Killing 40 or even 70 entirely innocent people is of no concern to Israel in eliminating a target. Nor do they care in the least how many of them are children. Non-Jewish life simply has zero intrinsic value in their eyes.

But there is also of course a real problem with who is being targeted. Hezbollah is an intrinsic part of Lebanese society. It is a political party with elected members of parliament and forms part of the Government of Lebanon.

Hezbollah also runs extensive health, welfare and infrastructure functions in the predominantly Shia districts, particularly in the South of the country, and these functions and institutions are organically interwoven with the official Lebanese state in a hundred different ways.

So doctors, professors, ambulance drivers, journalists and teachers may be designated “Hezbollah” by Israel, in an exact parallel to the situation with Hamas in Gaza.

So the “terrorist target” Israel is eliminating by bombing an apartment block, with the deaths of forty other people, may not have any military function at all. They may be an ambulance driver. In fact that is one of the most likely possibilities. As in Gaza, Israel is systematically eliminating healthcare workers. In 40 days, it has killed over 200 paramedics in Lebanon. That is five a day on average.

We take a road which bounds Dahiya and, looking into the area, startlingly, the destruction is extremely extensive. Block after block after block of apartments has been levelled. In one place the bomb crater is simply massive, a great deep hole you could fit dozens of buses in, several buses high. It is hard to comprehend the power of such an explosion.

The one building we see which is not residential and which has been bombed is a hospital. It looks gutted with shattered windows. I cannot particularly recall having seen this reported in the West.

It is a deeply sobering experience. We arrive back to the hotel in pensive mood, and take a gin and tonic in the courtyard, as the refugees huddle and the drones buzz overhead. I am awoken by loud explosions in the night, and the next day the smoke is still billowing into the air, rising up about a kilometre from our hotel, and the acrid smell and taste will not wash away.

On Tuesday we had arranged finally to meet our sponsor, a charming and urbane man who is genuinely horrified by the genocide in Gaza and the unfurling carnage in Lebanon. He phones “Ali’s boss” to check on progress with our permits for Dahiya. He advises that we they will be available later that day or the next morning.

We agree to have a day to orient and prepare, and go to Dahiya the next day once the permits are done.

Our sponsor tells us a number of worrying things, including that he had offered friends of his from evacuated areas accommodation in properties he owned outside of Beirut, but that some of the local Christian communities had objected in case the presence of refugees provoked Israeli attack (as indeed is frequently occurring).

He apologised for the delay at the airport and said that a new policy had been introduced the very day we arrived, when dozens of Europeans had been sent back. He had been working behind the scenes to vouch for us (which was later confirmed to me by another source).

The new crackdown on entry is reported in L’Orient Today:

L’Orient Today spoke to and heard reports of dozens of people turned away in recent weeks, including around 10 NGO workers from various organizations, two journalists who received entry bans and were deported, two people who were refused for not having “sufficient grounds to enter the country,” and three passengers from Germany, Spain and the U.S. who were told this past weekend that foreigners can’t enter unless they have a work permit.

According to Ingrid, through her phone, an employee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs spoke with airport staff who told them that a new law had been implemented restricting entry…

“There has not been a change in the law regarding the entry of foreigners into Lebanon,” a source at General Security told L’Orient Today… “However, due to the security situation in Lebanon, General Security is being more vigilant about who is entering and leaving the country and some people are not permitted entry due to security reasons,” …

A General Security spokesperson said the order came from the Directorate roughly one month ago and that it applies across the board but is focused on the airport. In the last two months, Hezbollah, currently at war with Israel, has suffered a number of profound security breaches, one of which led to the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah. In the two weeks following the escalation into full-out war, starting on Sept. 23, several people were arrested under suspicion of espionage, including a journalist who entered Lebanon on a British passport only to be discovered with an Israeli passport after residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs alerted the authorities to his presence.

“One person making a mistake will affect the others sometimes,” the spokesperson said. “No one [at border control] wants to be labeled as the person who let someone into the country who shouldn’t have been allowed.”

Which sounds entirely reasonable, but read on.

So we had a relaxed day waiting for permits to come through. I sat in the courtyard writing as the drone buzzed overhead, and Niels made a little tweet about it:

Writing in Beirut, Lebanon pic.twitter.com/vYX7B7RGsx

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 29, 2024

We then walked out into Beirut. The only way to walk from the hotel is down one side of a buzzing dual carriageway. We crossed a concrete bridge over the sad remnant of the Beirut river.

Its waters entirely diverted for the uses of the great city, the river course is a giant, entirely concreted storm drain, perhaps fifty metres wide and 10 metres deep. In it oozes a trickle of greenish-brown sewage, perhaps three metres wide and ten centimetres deep. The sickly sweet smell is nauseating. Our hotel is on the bank and carries a truly giant neon sign on its flank: “Riverside Bossa Nova”, devoid of irony. Briefly during a storm the river returns to life for a few hours.

Beirut is not pedestrian-friendly. Frequently on major streets there are long stretches with no pavement at all, it having been either never built or removed to make way for car parking, bonnets right up against the building and cars often stacked two deep at right angles to the traffic.

As we walk down the busy Damascus Road to the city centre, major junctions are designed with no provision for pedestrians to cross; not just no pedestrian feature in the traffic lights, but nowhere for them to navigate the sea of open tarmac buzzing with aggressive vehicles.

Scooters buzz pedestrians with almost the malevolence of Amsterdam cyclists.

On the corniche and beach, the tented refugee city that had sprung up along the promenade and beach has been cleared away. Locals are following the tradition of putting their living room in the back of a car and reassembling it on the corniche for the evening, whole families sat around on circles of domestic chairs on the promenade, with tea, chess, backgammon, shishas and gossip.

The glamorous, golden, wide-balconied apartments across the corniche, overlooking the sea, glower mostly dark and empty. The rich have left for Paris, London and New York for the duration of the war.

In this national emergency, temporarily relocating refugees in the vacated apartments of the runaway rich would seem an obvious step. Sadly, that is not the way of the world. Instead the schools are closed and house thousands of refugees. It gives some understanding of how the process developed in Gaza, and we wonder when Israel will start to target the schools here.

It is a lot to think on, and on Wednesday morning we look forward to getting into Dahiya and making our first video report. Ali arrives around noon and says through Google Translate he is ready to take us there. I foolishly assume that this means the permits have come.

We enter into the Dahiya suburb (which is a redundancy – Dahiya just means “suburb”), and I am immediately struck by just how vast is the evacuated area and how very well developed. As we move in, it is a pleasant, middle-class area. It reminds me of good bits of Marseille. There is nothing to distinguish the blocks of flats which have been demolished or damaged from the other residential blocks all around.

Niels has me wired up for sound and the strategy is to record everything, to do some straight-to-camera talks in key areas, and then to edit it down to a short piece in the evening, possibly with a considered reflection added. Accordingly, we are filming as we go along.

In the middle of a long shopping street in Dahiya, Ali – who has appeared very confident and in control, having told us he is Dahiya born-and-bred and knows everybody – pulled up at a checkpoint manned by armed militia in civilian clothes, to check that it is OK for us to get out and film.

Then it all starts to go wrong.

First a young man opens the car doors and politely asks us in good English for our passports, which we give him. He is wearing a red shirt and carries his AK47 with great care, pointing down to the ground.

Ali tells us via phone translation that we should not worry, it is only process. Then the young man comes again and asks for our phones. We give him two each. He then takes Niels’s camera bag and goes through the microphones and other equipment.

Several more militia men are gathering, and the young man leaves. An older man with white hair and beard arrives in a beaten-up saloon car. He does not seem to speak any English other than “Don’t worry!”

Nobody here now speaks English. A huddle of people is now looking in bemused fashion at our phones and equipment. The old man offers us coffee, and two strong, gritty, sweet concoctions are brought in tiny paper cups.

But it has become gradually plain that we are not free to leave. Ali’s confidence has dissipated like a punctured balloon.

Then two larger and more military-looking men appeared in a battered old Jeep Cherokee with cracked windows, followed by a pickup holding several more men with guns. They were obviously in charge. The atmosphere had become much less friendly. I got out of the car and walked round shaking hands, in an effort to remedy this.

Standing on a street strewn with bombing rubble, amid a group of four parked vehicles, three of them Hezbollah, at the centre of a growing knot of armed Hezbollah militia, while missile-armed Israeli drones circled overhead and had us under close surveillance, I could not help but inwardly reflect that I had spent safer afternoons.

There was now nobody around who spoke any English. Our possessions were loaded into, and then taken out of, a series of backpacks, being slowly and carefully inventoried in notebooks each time. Every now and then an item would be brought over for Niels to identify – charger, or microphone, or hard drive – but I don’t think anyone understood his answers.

I looked around the area. It was a well-established shopping street with decent stores, all now shuttered, stretching as far as the eye could see, punctuated by restaurants and cafés.

The area was largely deserted except for one or two armed militiamen on every corner to prevent looting. A few people were around, returning to their homes to collect possessions, and some storekeepers were removing stock into their vans. Many had opened temporary stores elsewhere. The scene was one of quiet order and discipline.

I am sure everybody was aware a bomb could fall without warning on this area under evacuation, and people worked quickly with obvious purpose. But there was no visible emotion.

Just opposite me was a large toy shop with one shutter open, and a cluster of large teddy bears looked at me forlornly over a sit-on electric model car. Occasionally scooters would pass, their occupants waving at our captors.

After what I am sure was a shorter time than it seemed, we were motioned into the rear seat of the Jeep Cherokee behind the two senior men. One man with a gun squeezed on to the passenger seat beside us, and another entered the luggage space behind us.

Ali followed behind driving the Lexus, with armed men both beside and behind him. This did not appear to be playing out well.

I was relieved we left Dahiya for a rather more populated area, but felt very isolated again when the vehicle turned off through a gated entrance guarded by several men openly carrying guns, and pulled up in a small car park opposite a nondescript concrete building.

This had an entrance porch protected by a wrought iron gate. With the entrance doors shut, by placing Niels, Ali and me inside this porch and locking the gate behind us, we were now in an effective cell. The gathering of men discussing our fate grew larger and louder.

After a little while somebody opened the gate to hand us bottles of water. But he also motioned us to turn our chairs and sit with our faces directly to the wall. I made only a token compliance, being far too keen to see what was coming up behind us.

Niels later told me that he thought I was turning away from the wall because of the large amount of blood spatter on it, right in front of my face. I have to say I simply did not notice this. I assume Niels observed correctly, although he is from Scandinavia, and therefore has a dark and brooding imagination.

Eventually somebody arrived in another vehicle who actually spoke very good English. He entered the porch and asked if any of us had ever been in Israel. We answered in the negative. I was hoping to give further explanation of who we were, which side we were on, and how easy it was to prove, when Ali broke in volubly in Arabic.

Our interrogator turned to Ali, who had for some time appeared terrified, and asked him several questions in Arabic, to which Ali responded earnestly. The man then left. This was not helpful as Ali, to my knowledge, knew nothing about either Niels or me.

Shortly afterwards a bag was brought in with our possessions, and there was a further fuss as each was identified, noted and transferred into yet another rucksack. We were then led outside and into the back cab of a large pickup, again surrounded by armed men. Ali did not follow and we did not know where he had gone.

We went back into Dahiya again, and on a deserted street were driven down into an underground car park. This seemed particularly alarming. A single man, apparently unarmed, stood in the car park waiting to receive us. The car doors were opened, we were bundled out and our captors delivered us into his possession.

“Don’t worry”, he said in English, “you are safe now. I am with General Security. We are official Lebanese government state security.”

Having some experience of state security services around the globe, I am afraid I perhaps did not find this as comforting as intended. We were taken up to a corridor, where our possessions were yet again repacked and inventoried.

15 minutes later a vehicle arrived with three more General Security agents, none of whom spoke English. My feeling of unease was deepened when Niels and I were both immediately handcuffed. We were placed in the back of a much nicer Toyota, and driven away with two General Security officers in the front and one between us.

Our next destination was General Security HQ, which was more obviously a government building. On arrival our possessions were inventoried once again, and this time we had to sign an acknowledgement.

At this stage, two rather alarming things were said. The first is that we were asked about medications “in case you have to stay in prison”. The second is that one of the officers said to me, in a hostile tone,

“Why do you want to support the Palestinians? If you want to support the Palestinians, why don’t you go to Gaza and join them?”

It was a reminder that in Lebanon not all on the government side can be assumed to be hostile to Israel.

There was now a further long wait, on broken chairs in a dingy back office, while nothing happened for hours. Eventually an officer arrived who was deemed to have sufficient English to interrogate us, a judgment I would dispute.

We went through my life in minute detail. My date of birth, my parents, their dates of birth, my grandparents, their dates of birth, my brothers and sisters, their dates of birth, my children, their dates of birth, my partner, her date of birth. We also went through my education and every job I had ever held, every single stage taking six times as long as it would if we could communicate freely in the same language.

What we did very little of was discuss who I actually am and why I was in Lebanon in general and Dahiya in particular. My efforts to spend more time on that were simply ignored. I don’t think he understood my explanation that I believed the permits had been applied for and granted.

At one stage my interrogator asked “Dahiya is very dangerous. You can be killed. Why are you not scared?”, and I was delighted to redeploy the line “I am not scared, I am Scottish.” This time I got a smile and a one word response “Braveheart!”

After we had finished, it was Niels’s turn to go through the same process while I waited.

Finally we were told that our passports and possessions would be retained. We would have to return when called to face the investigating judge of the Military Court. Meantime we would be either held in prison or allowed to go, as the judge decided. We would have to wait for this.

We asked what had happened to Ali. We were told he was safe at home with his family, which we mentally filed under “Good if true”. There followed a long and anxious wait for the decision of the judge, and we were acutely aware that the judge had only the information furnished by somebody who had understood very little of what we had said.

One by one the security agents went home, until there was only one man left on this floor of the building, who complained he could not go home until the judge called. Thankfully about 10pm the judge did call, and said that we could be released pending further investigation.

Niels and I walked the two miles back to our hotel to clear our heads.

I accept that the fault was mine. I had assumed that our sponsor and Ali knew what they were doing in applying for the permits, and they had assumed that I understood the permit system. I had failed to take on board that our sponsor was merely a wealthy and well-meaning friend of my Blackburn contact, and had no relevant experience at all.

Mainstream media organisations all employ fixers, at a standard rate of $250 a day, to organise the permits and negotiate these things. I had assumed that to be basically Ali’s role. In fact he was just somebody our sponsor had arranged to drive us, who thought he understood the system but apparently did not.

Given that I was a fool blundering around a war zone where actual Israeli spies had recently been caught, I have nothing to complain about in my treatment either by Hezbollah or by General Security.

There is a psychological terror in the situation that they did their best to allay with coffee and water and assurances that all was OK. At no stage did anybody point a gun at me; at no stage did anybody threaten violence in any way. The Hezbollah militia were notably disciplined and professional for a local volunteer force.

The problem was the situation, not the people. And the situation was my fault.

I was now warned not to publish anything until I had all the proper accreditations, beginning with the Ministry of Information. We could not apply for accreditations until we had got our passports back. So there was nothing to do now except wait for the judge.

The alarming part now was the disappearance of both Ali and our sponsor. The morning after this ordeal, we were surprised to hear nothing from either of them. I contacted the sponsor through his office, and received a response from his secretary not to worry, all would be OK.

This was followed by a message from my friend in Blackburn to say I was not to contact our sponsor again.

Through multiple contacts I was soon in touch with a plethora of people in Lebanon who all were called upon for help and advice. The universal response was not to worry, this was all perfectly normal. One very well-known Lebanese journalist texted me:

“General Security, Military Courts – we all go through this. Do not worry, it’s normal.”

I spoke with a lawyer who said much the same thing, but did also give the useful advice that, while I could not publish journalism without accreditation, there was nothing to stop me being interviewed by accredited journalists, as a well-known person in Beirut.

So I did some of this. I particularly enjoyed this conversation with Laith Marouf for Wartime Café on Free Palestine TV:

I also caught up with Steve Sweeney of Russia Today. You may not be able to watch this in the UK:

RT spoke with Former British diplomat Craig Murray, who flew to Beirut on a mission to expose the truth about Israel’s deadly strikes on civilian areas pic.twitter.com/GUHofWbdcI

— RT (@RT_com) November 2, 2024

We also had a chance to see more of this extraordinarily resilient city of Beirut. Adults in Beirut have lived through a catalogue of civil war, occupation, resistance and disaster, and internal coherence is both weak and elusive.

But this has led to an instinct to survive. When Israel ordered the evacuation of the majority Shia Dahiya district, and commenced to destroy it systematically, the majority of its inhabitants simply moved north within Beirut.

Of the 1.4 million displaced persons, an estimated 400,000 have left, half to Syria or Iran and half to Europe or the United States. Of the remaining 1 million internally displaced, the majority have come into Beirut. The great magnet is Hamra district. I ask a resident why. He replies:

Everybody wants to settle in Hamra. It has bars and brothels, churches and mosques. Everybody has always been welcome in Hamra. It shelters everybody.

It is certainly now extremely crowded, and the traffic is in permanent gridlock. A taxi driver refused to enter with me as he would never get out again. Vehicles are double- and triple-parked, sometimes right across junctions.

The influx reminds me of the Edinburgh festival, minus the bad temper and vomiting stag parties.

We also learn about Dahiya. At what soon becomes a favourite restaurant, there works a young woman named Yasmeena. In her early thirties, she dresses in a Western style, does not wear a veil or scarf, and is the single parent of a seven-year-old. Yet she lived happy and unthreatened in what the Western media calls the “Hezbollah bastion” – until she had to evacuate and her home and possessions were completely destroyed, bombed to oblivion, as she now tells us with momentary tears, soon dispersed by a beaming smile.

Dahiya was founded after the Israel invasion of 1982 brought an earlier flood of Shia refugees from the South, and they founded a place to live among dusty lanes and crops. It rapidly developed into a thriving hub of commerce, and as in refugee areas all over the Middle East – including Gaza – good quality housing, workable infrastructure and good healthcare and, above all, education were developed, with remarkable resource and effort.

The Israelis are now involved in trying to destroy the entire area, systematically, through an unopposed bombing campaign that I predict will, as in Gaza, roll on relentlessly for over a year.

But the interesting thing about Dahiya, as represented by Yasmeena and others like her, is that it had become a centre of freedom of expression, with a café culture and thriving arts scene. Islam was at the centre of the community, but not forced upon anybody and not even Muslims were forced to abide by any particular precepts, while other religions were protected.

Tyre is another example. This great ancient city is under continual bombardment by Israel as another Hezbollah centre, and indeed Hezbollah has there firm political control. Yet it is also a city where anybody can wear swimwear on the beautiful beaches and alcohol is freely available and can be consumed in public with no problems.

In other words, Hezbollah is not at all on the ground as you have seen it portrayed in the West, and bears no relation to ISIS.

In fact the longer I am in Lebanon, the more I realise that much of what I thought I knew, was wrong. I do hope you will stay with me on this journey of discovery.

Six more days roll by in comparative inactivity, with the frustration of being unable to publish or film anything. Israeli bombing intensifies, and starts to occur by day as well as night. The wanton destruction in Southern areas is appalling and the Israelis also start bombing heavily the Bekaa Valley, North East of Beirut, massacring civilians mercilessly. Photographs of dead infants start once again to flood my timeline.

On the Tuesday evening, now nine days after arrival, we are approached in our hotel by a man from General Security, who presents each of us with a summons (“convocation”) to reappear at their HQ at 9am the next day. He says it is to collect our passports. We suspect it is more complicated than that, and try without success to find a lawyer to accompany us.

The next morning we arrive promptly at 9am, and to our dismay are taken again to the same floor we were held in before. We are locked in a dirty waiting room with a single wooden bench and a mattress on the floor. Gradually three other people join us, all suspects.

We are prisoners again.

We talk to one, a young man who was caught, by his own account, taking pictures around his own home and community, just for fun. He has been back four times for interrogation and had spent three nights in prison, which he described as “hell”. He said the food was inedible, the cells overcrowded with nowhere to sleep, and he had witnessed a man screaming in agony and terror with a heart attack but unable to get any attention from the guards.

This did not cheer us much.

We waited in that room until about 11am, when a General Security officer who spoke some English came to interrogate us. We had not seen him before.

He complained the officers last time had done nothing, and he had not seen the file. He then proceeded to start the entire process over again: My date of birth, my parents, their dates of birth, my grandparents, their dates of birth, my brothers and sisters, their dates of birth, my children, their dates of birth, my partner, her date of birth.

I could have screamed.

He brought out my phones from a large brown envelope, and asked me who Eugenia was. I replied I had no idea, I did not know any Eugenia. He said I had Eugenia in my contacts with an Israeli phone number. I said I did not believe so. He asked me to switch on the phone and look, but I could not as it was out of battery and no charger was available.

The second phone did have a charge, and we confirmed it contained no Eugenia. In the process, we came across the messages between me and our sponsor about Ali, the car, and when the permits to visit Dahiya would arrive. These messages were so clear, and made so plain the transgression was a misunderstanding, that he appeared largely to lose interest.

He went through the process also with Niels, and asked us whether we had money to pay for our flights home to Europe. He then went “to speak with the judge” and came back after half an hour with the news that it had been decided we were genuine, and we could stay, which seemed to surprise him.

He declared it was now only a matter of time, but he had to also get the consent of the “Big Boss” of national security to let us go. He did however proceed to ask us a great many more questions, much more acute and relevant than any that had been asked so far, and kept noting down our answers on a laptop – until this point the process had been entirely pen and paper.

Again, it was the strange situation of him being apparently very friendly – he shared his sandwich lunch with me – but at the same time we were prisoners. We were given back our phones and passports, and had to sign for them, but still were not allowed to go.

We then had to sign a form in Arabic three times within printed boxes, and then make an inked thumbprint three times over them. We asked what the form was, and were told it was for our release. It was very hard to believe this – why would you have to sign and thumbprint in triplicate your release? But there was no help for it.

As the afternoon wore on, the officer identified for us the different makes of Israeli drones buzzing overhead, and their capabilities. Then the drones were joined by a deeper rumble, which he said were F-35 jets come to bomb. If General Security HQ has a bomb shelter, they were ignoring it, but a huddle of agents gathered to look out the window and plainly they were concerned.

At 5pm the officers all left, bar one again, who said we had to stay for the answer from the “Big Boss” on our release. Suddenly the return of our passports and phones seemed horribly premature, and we wondered about those triple-signed forms. Initially we were locked back in the dirty waiting room, but then the duty officer (who spoke no English) came and led us to a comfortable office, where we were not locked in.

Finally, at 8pm the “Big Boss” phoned the duty officer to say we could go, and we walked out into Beirut, free but for the Israeli killer drones circling over our heads and the throbbing tones of the F-35s.

We were now desperate to get accredited to report so that we could finally do what we had come to Lebanon to do. So the next morning we went in to the Ministry of Information Press Bureau, armed with credentials supplied by Consortium News.

My work has been carried there for many years, but coincidentally I had just had the great honour to be elected to the Board of Consortium News, replacing my friend the great John Pilger.

The head of the Ministry Press Room looked at us mournfully and told us he was sorry, they could not accept credentials from Consortium News as it was an online publication. Accreditation was strictly limited to print newspapers and broadcast television.

He sent Niels a text confirming what was needed for accreditation, which included an email from the legacy media editor covering an official letter of credentials, and copies of press cards, passports and visas.

To rub salt into the wounds, at that moment the team of journalists from the Zionist, Murdoch-owned, Wall Street Journal came in. They were accorded VIP treatment.

Lebanon’s regulations ensure that only the state- and billionaire-owned, Zionist legacy media can accredit, whereas anti-Zionist alternative media are banned from accreditation and thus publication.

At this stage we might have been forgiven for giving up, but the idea did not cross our minds. We immediately sat down, inside the foreign press room, and set about texting anyone we could think of who might help.

This resulted in numerous dead ends, but through friends in Rome I got an introduction to Byoblu media, an alternative channel that has obtained national TV status in Italy, as both a terrestrial and satellite channel.

They were willing to provide accreditation, and the Editor was willing to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops required by Lebanon, in exchange for occasional news reports, which they will need to dub. They sent us the artwork for the required press cards and we had them made up locally.

Meantime, we had moved out of the hotel and into an Airbnb. It had never been quite plain if our sponsor was paying for the hotel (he had not charged us for the services of the disappearing Ali), but the hotel started to make plain to us that he was not. Finances started to become a real problem, as we now had no transport either and it was obvious that an interpreter was essential. We settled into a cosy Airbnb and started to get organised to live more cheaply.

On Monday morning we were back in the Ministry of Information presenting our new Byoblu credentials. The head of accreditation looked sceptical, but could not find anything immediately wrong with Byoblu TV. Before he left, he phoned somebody and kept mentioning “Byoblu” to them during an animated conversation in Arabic.

He then told us the application would go to General Security for processing. I could imagine the officers there throwing their hands in the air and screaming “Not these two again!”

We returned to the Ministry the next day as instructed, steeled for yet another disappointment. To our amazed delight, we were handed our press accreditations immediately.

We have to get further accreditation from the Ministry of Defence, and from local militias, before we can travel anywhere, but this should not take long.

You are now up to date, and we are poised to start the real reporting from Lebanon. Let us get started!

We have plans for a serious programme of written and video content to be produced between now and Christmas, but this will depend on our obtaining the money to do it.

We require to raise an absolute minimum of sixty thousand pounds, and preferably more. This is for transport, accommodation, logistics and staff.

We are prepared to put our lives on the line to try to bring you the truth from here and counter the Zionist media, but that requires the sacrifice from you readers and viewers of putting in the resource required.

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I have a confession to make.

When a journalist writes this it generally means they will proceed to reveal something they hope will actually show them in a good light or justified in some way. But I have a real confession to make, of something I did that was wrong.

Somewhere in the UK, among the papers of a dead loved one which nobody has the heart to throw out, in cardboard boxes in dusty attics or deep in the filing cabinets of Jeremy Corbyn, exist still a few copies of thousands of letters bearing my authentic signature.

These letters, on expensive paper with an impressive Foreign and Commonwealth Office crested header, state that the British Government will not deal with the African National Congress because it is a terrorist organisation.

Many of them go on to state that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist who was rightly convicted of terrorism by a South African court after a free and fair trial.

I really did write those thousands of letters, not just sign them. I did not believe a single word of it, and was only “doing my job” as a civil servant, but in a sense that makes it worse.

So I know how many government functionaries currently feel in carrying out the government’s policy of supporting and indeed actively participating in genocide.

When I joined the FCO, in my “fast stream” intake of 22 I was one of only two who was not public school and the only one who was not Oxbridge. I also had the unusual background of being a member of CND, Friends of Palestine and various other activist groups.

I could not be excluded because in the several days and stages of public examinations I had (tied with 2 others) outperformed everybody else of the 80,000 people who had entered the Civil Service administrative exams (it was 1984 with 3.5 million unemployed).

But the security services were not happy, and my “positive vetting” was delayed. This is an extremely exhaustive process (nowadays direct vetting) for those with the highest security clearance. An MOD officer, usually retired military, is assigned to investigate everything about you for months, including interviewing many who know you.

So while I joined the FCO in September 1984, for five months I was not given a job but rather put on full time French language training together with three other misfits (one of whom I think was being given extra investigation because his uncle was Roger Hollis).

In the end my positive vetting was left with a query, and I was pulled in to see the Head of Personnel Department. They said that they had decided to grant my vetting certificate, but that I was going to be placed on the South Africa (Political) desk as a direct test of whether it was possible for me to put my politics aside and function as a civil servant.

So I did. You tell yourself many things to get by, chiefly that the UK is a democracy and ministers are elected by voters to determine policy; whereas you as a civil servant are merely carrying through the wishes of the voters.

Thatcher was Prime Minister and she simply was a straightforward supporter of apartheid. This is much denied but I am an eye witness. Geoffrey Howe was Foreign Minister and it was never easy to determine what he thought about anything. Junior ministers running day to day policy were Lynda Chalker and Malcolm Rifkind, who were both viscerally anti-apartheid.

But the line that Mandela was a terrorist and the ANC a terrorist organisation was dictated by Thatcher and absolutely insisted upon.

It is difficult now to explain the intensity of feeling in the UK and the strength of the anti-apartheid campaign. Scores of letters would arrive every day, many from MPs, and – this bit is hard to believe now – in those days every letter would be answered point by point, not with a generic reply.

I was writing those replies by hand, and then giving them to the secretaries to type up. In 1985 the Department got its first word processor and I was able to draft forty template paragraphs and select from those for the replies. But out those replies went from Craig Murray, stating that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, thousands of them.

I was very actively involved in the Whitehall battle to change the policy, but that is a different story which I have in part explained before.

But this is an extremely important thought that I want you all to ponder.

In 1985, the Terrorism Act 2000 was still 15 years away. There was no such thing as a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act.

Under today’s legislation, every single one of those people writing in support of the African National Congress or out campaigning for the release of Nelson Mandela would have been liable for arrest under Section 12 1 (a) of the Terrorism Act.

That is the danger of allowing the state to dictate whom you must consider a terrorist and punishing those who disagree with the state.

In 1985 the official position of the British state was that the ANC were terrorists and apartheid South Africa were the good guys.

In 2024 the official position of the British state is that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists and apartheid Israel are the good guys.

The state can be wrong.

It is therefore not an irony that Starmer and Cooper banned Nelson Mandela’s grandson from entering the UK as a “terrorist sympathiser” because of his support for Palestine. In this as so much else, Starmer is a follower of Thatcher.

The difference forty years later is that the state is now persecuting British citizens and locking them up for daring to say that the state can be wrong.

The ANC example explains why it is essential we do not give way to this pressure.

Let us face facts. Like most resistance units against colonialism, the ANC were indeed forced by the exigencies of asymmetric warfare into actions that were careless of, or even targeted the lives of, colonial settler civilians.

That did not put them on the wrong side of history. Apartheid South Africa was wrong just as Apartheid Israel is wrong. Occupied people have, in international law, the right of armed resistance. Within that context of lawful struggle, individuals remain accountable for individual war crimes.

The Terrorism Act, abused by the Israel lobby to make it illegal to support Israel’s opponents, is fundamentally bad legislation. It literally provides for up to 14 years in jail if you “express an opinion” in favour of a proscribed organisation.

40 years ago it would have been used against the large majority of the population who “expressed an opinion” in favour of the ANC, officially viewed as a terrorist organisation.

The sickening ratcheting up of pressure on Palestine supporters by super Zionist Keir Starmer continued yesterday with a 6am raid on highly distinguished journalist Asa Winstanley. All his electronics and journalistic materials were seized.

Today 10 UK police launched a pre-dawn raid on the home of Asa Winstanley, one of Britain’s leading and most celebrated investigative journalists.

All this devices, so all his journalistic materials, were seized and are now with the authorities.

He was not charged with a crime. pic.twitter.com/bT9fpnE8rU

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) October 17, 2024

Panicked Zionist “elites” who run western states are lashing out in fear at their opponents. As their popular support evaporates in the face of clear evidence of appalling Israeli atrocities, they are resorting to the methods of fascism.

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Today is my 66th birthday, so I am hoping that you will forgive an article that is at core the anecdotal ramblings of an old man.

It was inspired by horror at Wes Streeting (I could end the sentence there but I shall continue it) ‘s plan to give weight loss jabs to the unemployed.

The unemployed are more likely to be underweight than the population average, and this attempt to portray the unemployed as lazy couch potatoes is vile in many ways. Its masking as an “investment” in the economy by Big Pharma is chilling.

If it goes ahead, how many years do you think we are away from those who refuse to have the drug injected into their veins, having their benefits stopped?

How are we to view this attempt to use the “unproductive” as lab rats for Big Pharma?

It has also been announced that the government is to send employment advisers into mental health wards to try to get sick people back into work. This is astonishing. It is extremely difficult to access any mental health care at all on the NHS.

To get residential care requires in truth a level of mental health crisis that indicates a threat to life of yourself or others. Yet people from mental health wards are going to be got into work, when there are hundreds of thousands of perfectly well people desperate for a good job who cannot find one?

What is the purpose of this nonsense other than propaganda and stigmatisation of the unemployed?

Which leads me to my anecdotes on the NHS and its purpose.

Sixty years ago or so, when my siblings or I were sick enough to be in bed, my mother would phone the surgery and the GP would come to our home to see us. This was perfectly normal. It is probably difficult for Generation Z to believe this really used to happen.

Now if I am sick enough to be in bed, I have to phone the surgery precisely at 8am and go through the lottery of getting in to the phone queue, rather than the engaged signal as the queue is at capacity. I may have to call numerous times.

If I do manage to get into the queue I have to hope I get to the front of it before all appointments are taken. If I fail, I cannot make an appointment for the next day but have to try my luck again then, once more at precisely 8am, while a hundred other people are trying exactly the same thing.

If I am fortunate enough to make it through the queue, I am de facto triaged by a receptionist with no medical qualifications but to whom I have to explain my medical symptoms.

She will then, if she thinks I have a case, explain my symptoms to a doctor and I may come out of this process, not with the doctor coming to my home, nor with me attending the surgery, but with a phone call from the doctor and a down the line diagnosis.

I find that everybody I have spoken to – and from all parts of the UK – has to put up with the same system. I cannot believe we have fallen in to accepting this.

It is not medical treatment. It is not a national health service, it is a notional health service.

If I feel really bad I can attempt to bypass the system and go to the hospital Accident & Emergency service, which I will find clogged with scores of other desperate people, waiting hours and hours to try to get medical attention.

I have not told this story before, but about three years ago I was invited to a party in Ealing after one of the Assange hearings. I had just one glass of wine and started to feel dizzy and nauseous, so I made my excuses and left.

I got a taxi back to the hotel near the Old Bailey where I was staying, but collapsed in the street just across from the hotel. I vomited and could not stand up. The problem was my heart condition. I phoned 999 and was told by the ambulance service it would be approximately three hours before an ambulance could reach me.

Passers by assumed I was a drunk or drug addict and gave me a wide berth. After a very cold half hour (it was I think February) a group of Irishmen stopped to help me and carried me into my hotel. I quite soon fell asleep on the bed and the next morning felt fine – and went back into court.

I spent several months this year living in Greece. I had very bad bronchitis and pitched up at the local rural medical centre, the equivalent of the GP surgery. I was seen immediately by two doctors, examined at length, X-rayed and given an ECG and left with prescriptions, all within an hour of turning up.

Some months later I fell and dislocated my shoulder, in a highly remote rural location and after midnight. An ambulance arrived within half an hour and drove me for 90 minutes to the hospital in Volos, where my shoulder was reset.

Now here is the kicker. UK spending per capita on public healthcare is twice Greek spending per capita on public healthcare.

Yet while we spend twice as much, the experience of this patient (I did warn you this is going to be personal and anecdotal) is that key aspects of the Greek system are far better.

The NHS is in a state of near disaster. The reason is that it has been hollowed out for private profit, with the designated “profit centres” which give a high return hived off to private contractors (though not visibly to the patient), and the public purse left paying for the complicated and expensive bits.

Of course, we hear from those the wonderful stories of great care.

The reason we pay such a huge sum per capita for public healthcare – £3,600 a year for every man, woman and child in the UK – and get such a totally unacceptable service in return, is that private companies are sucking out the money for profit.

10% of NHS patients are in fact privately treated, overwhelmingly for the cheapest and simplest problems, and private contractors suck 18% of the NHS budget.

I do not pretend that reform is not needed in the NHS – but getting out the private bloodsuckers and removing the profits would be a good first step.

Renationalisation of the NHS is urgently required.

If it were not so profitable then private healthcare lobbyists would not be bribing our politicians. Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper have between them received over £750,000 from private healthcare lobbyists and companies.

As with the Israel lobby, the essential corruption of our politics is what drives the entire policy agenda of the political class. There is an overwhelming case for banning elected politicians and their parties from accepting large donations.

The chances of this happening short of a revolution are zero.

May I urge you to look at this video of the public meeting we held on the NHS during my Blackburn election campaign. Leaving aside my very obvious exhaustion, I was absolutely fascinated by the speeches of Mary Whitby and Dr Bob Gill.

Purely in terms of its content, I think paradoxically this small gathering was one of the best political meetings I have ever witnessed. I absolutely promise you it is worth your time and attention, and you will come out of it looking at the NHS in an entirely different light.

I most certainly did.

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Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

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Today is the grand opening of the Salisbury Festival of Russophobia, otherwise known as the Public Inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, an unfortunate victim of imperialist spy games.

Do not be fooled. This is not in any sense a genuine public inquiry, supposed to get at the truth. This is an inquiry like the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, designed entirely to conceal the truth and further the official narrative.

In the Kelly case, the official narrative was that one of the world’s leading experts in chemical weapons, with access to instant-action neurotoxins, decided to kill himself after leaking that Iraq had no WMD. He chose to do so by cutting his wrist veins with a rusty penknife and waiting for a slow and painful death in the woods.

The ambulance crew who picked Kelly up testified that there was very little blood and they did not think that he could have bled out, but the Inquiry considered there was little blood because it must have “soaked into the soil”. Nobody thought to dig up the soil and check.

In the Dawn Sturgess case, we are supposed to believe that two top Russian agents sent to kill Sergei Skripal chose a “novichok” nerve agent as the manner of death. In broad daylight they painted this on the front door of his house, in full view of the neighbours and passers-by on the packed housing estate and without any protective equipment, despite the fact that a tiny droplet on your skin could kill you.

The agents then went for a walk in Salisbury town centre, looked in the window of an antique shop, and put the perfume bottle containing the novichok back in its packet including somehow resealing the cellophane wrapping. They then placed the “perfume” in a charity bin.

They then made their getaway on the notoriously unreliable Sunday train service.

The Skripals came back home, and both touched the door handle. Despite the novichok being instant-acting and extremely deadly, they then went out for lunch and ate a full meal and drank wine and had a high old time for three hours, being joined and photographed by their MI6 handler Pablo Miller (whose existence is D-noticed).

After their meal, the novichok finally took effect and they both collapsed on a park bench. Despite the fact that they were different ages, sexes and weights and presumably contacted differing amounts of novichok, they both collapsed at just the same moment, about three hours after contact, so neither of them was able to call for help.

But luckily the very first person to come across them on the park bench was, completely by coincidence, the Chief Nurse of the British Army, who just happened to be passing. They went to hospital and were saved and did not die after all.

A policeman sent to their house touched the door handle and also got novichok poisoning, and he later got ill and was hospitalised, but did not die either. He had returned to his own home and later it was found that he had got novichok all over the light switches and door handles there, but by great fortune his family, who continued to live in this house, did not get ill from it.

The official explanation of this is that it was “a miracle”.

Meanwhile, the “perfume” sat in the charity bin. It sat there for months and months, despite the fact that it was emptied regularly and despite the fact that Charlie Rowley was one of a number of people who also regularly stole from that bin.

Somehow both the bin’s official and unofficial emptiers continually missed the perfume bottle, again and again and again. Finally, several months later, the perfume bottle’s mysterious invisibility cloak failed and Charlie Rowley saw it.

He gave it to his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess, who put some perfume on and died. Charlie Rowley got ill but did not die. He was later able to tell the press inconvenient facts, like the cellophane on the perfume was fully sealed and that he took stuff from that bin fairly often.

When Rowley and Sturgess were taken to hospital, the police descended and sealed off the house and made a massive terrorism theatre of searching it, that went on for days. They were searching for a small container of liquid.

Finally, after days and days of 24/7 painstaking combing through the house by England’s finest, somebody spotted a perfume bottle sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter, and the novichok was found!

Presumably the perfume’s invisibility cloak had spluttered into life again for a few days before fizzling out.

That really is the official story. Yes, it really is. You are not supposed to notice the massive glaring holes in it. If you want to check up on all the sources and links, here is one I made earlier.

I had intended to attend the inquiry in person. Even the most incompetent lawyer would be able to demolish this ridiculous official narrative with great ease. But then I realised that the entire Inquiry is structured to prevent that happening.

Nobody is going to ask difficult questions. The one person who could is the lawyer representing the family of Dawn Sturgess, but her family have been propagandised into total adherence to the official line, presumably by a combination of mainstream media and official hand-holding.

Sturgess’s family have understandably become focused on hatred for the Russians, whom they have been told killed their daughter. The line their KC is instructed to pursue is to query why the state was not more effective in protecting their daughter from those evil Russians.

The other “core participants” – the council, police and health authorities – will be back-covering on similar lines, and we can be pretty sure the Inquiry will conclude with plaudits all round about how well everybody pulled against the evil Ruski menace, and a few “lessons learned” saws.

The role of the “public” is to witness the show inquiry. Nobody else gets to ask a question. “Intelligence” material provided by the security services will not be made public. The Inquiry has already been told this morning by the British Government representative that this is essential to assure future informers of confidentiality.

The scene has been set by an utterly ludicrous attempt to stir up Russophobia by MI5. In the last week the Head of MI5 has solemnly assured us that Russia is attempting to launch chaos on the streets of the UK, and we are told by security service sources that the evil Ruskis plan to disrupt UK ambulances.

I am pretty sure Putin also has an evil plan to eat your grandmother.

Never Trust A Man Who Dyes His Hair

Dawn Sturgess died six miles from the official UK govt facility that manufactures novichok “for test purposes” – and incidentally where David Kelly once worked. Her death reinforced the official Salisbury narrative at a time when public scepticism was growing.

I am pretty sure poor Dawn, who had fallen on hard times and was just the kind of person the Establishment views as dispensable, was a victim of state violence.

I am quite certain that if so, it was not the Russians.

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