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
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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1.2 million people have been forced from their homes and have become refugees. Each one is an individual human being, and they all had lives before this calamity. In many cases, their homes and all they possess have been destroyed. We met up with some of them, so they can tell you their stories.
This is the first of a series of short documentaries we intend to make about Israel’s attack on Lebanon
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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, interpretation, logistics and production.
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.
Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above
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.
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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.
Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above
“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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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.
Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above
Israel has intensified its air strikes on Lebanon and in particular on Beirut, ahead of a visit on Tuesday or Wednesday by US envoy Hochstein, at which he will press Lebanon to accept a US/Israeli ceasefire plan.
This plan is touted as being based on UNSCR 1701, but in fact represents its abnegation.
You may have noted that neoliberal politicians and media pundits, who ignore and denigrate every other UN Resolution on the Middle East, are suddenly very enthusiastic about UNSCR 1701. This is because it mandates withdrawal of Hezbollah forces to the north of the river Litani.
But it also mandates, at operative paragraph 3, that the Government of Lebanon must have full sovereignty over Southern Lebanon and that only the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL might operate there.
3. Emphasizes the importance of the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory in accordance with the provisions of resolution 1559 (2004) and resolution 1680 (2006), and of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, for it to exercise its full sovereignty, so that there will be no weapons without the consent of the Government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the Government of Lebanon;
The US/Israeli ceasefire proposal directly contradicts this, by giving Israel the right to invade Southern Lebanon with ground forces whenever Israel considers it necessary, and by giving Israel permanent military overflight rights.
The US/Israeli proposal is therefore incompatible with UNSCR 1701.
These are direct intrusions on the sovereignty emphasised by UNSCR 1701. They are of course terms no self-respecting nation could possibly accept.
In order to try to force Lebanon to accept these humiliating terms, Israel has substantially intensified its bombing campaign throughout Lebanon these last two days. Yesterday in Beirut alone there were nineteen waves of airstrikes, in addition to airstrikes in Tyre, Baalbek and throughout the South.
A new development in Beirut today was a definite move to bomb in Christian, as well as Muslim, areas. If you take one thing away from this article today, I want you to understand this.
The narrative portrayed in Western media, that Lebanese Christians support Israel and are egging on the destruction of the Shia community, is completely false. Only a very small and unrepresentative minority of Christians, related to the thankfully declined fascist movement, think in this way.
The large majority of Christians, including the major Christian political parties and politicians, are as horrified as the rest of the world by the genocide in Gaza and still more horrified by Israel’s genocidal attack on Lebanon.
I have spent the last three weeks living among the Christian communities here and I have found this same view, from wealthy businessmen, to students, to shopkeepers, to the families of very senior politicians.
I should acknowledge that I have met a couple of young men in a bar who were pro-Israel, but that really is it. It is also the case that, certainly in Beirut, the large majority of Sunni Muslims, including the large Syrian refugee population, are extremely horrified by the genocide mostly of their fellow Sunni Muslims in Gaza and the West Bank, and they are very anti-Zionist indeed.
I understand that in the far northern areas and along the Jordanian border there are pockets of Saudi-influenced Salafist anti-Shia sectarians who do support Israel against Hezbollah, but I am happy to say I have not come across them and it is not an important viewpoint in Beirut. These are the ISIS/Al-Nusra/Al-Qaeda/FSA crowd of CIA puppets.
Extreme fringes aside, the overwhelming majority of the people of Lebanon are no different to the majority of people the world over, horrified by the scale and depravity of the Israeli assaults.
In attacking Lebanon, far from reigniting civil war as they intended, Israel and the US have helped to forge a strengthened multicultural Lebanese identity.
Israel is simply unable to make meaningful progress on the ground against Hezbollah or to hold border villages for longer than a brief orgy of looting and destruction. In consequence we will see a repeat of the genocide in Gaza, with the great bulk of massacres carried out by bombs and long-range artillery.
Plainly the Gaza template is already being followed. Over 220 medics and paramedics have been killed in Lebanon – a deliberate massacre of healthcare providers that repeats Israeli actions in Gaza and testifies to genocidal intention.
Israel killed every single one of these civil defense workers in Baalbek, Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/GRzEqU6n9E
The United States has a huge amount of influence within Lebanon. The economy is thoroughly dollarised; there are McDonalds, Dominos and Dunkin’ Donuts everywhere you go; there is a massive General Motors dealership, and indeed the Lebanese seem to have a higher propensity to buy US vehicles and other US-manufactured goods, than Americans themselves do.
The United States is building its second-largest Embassy complex in the world in Lebanon, a country of only 5 million people. Plainly that is not what is seems – why does Lebanon need a much bigger US Embassy than Germany or Japan or Russia?
It is due to US influence that the Lebanese army remains neutral as its own country is both bombed and invaded, which is a unique way for an army to behave. The bombs falling today on Lebanese children are not only US-manufactured, but the US has paid for those bombs and given them to the Israelis to kill Lebanese with.
Hochstein arrives here as his country carries out mass killing of civilians through its colonial settler proxy. The Lebanese should throw shoes at him en masse.
I hope and trust that the dignity of Lebanon is to be upheld by its politicians and outweighs personal corruption, and that a sharp answer is given to this vicious charlatan Hochstein pretending to talk peace.
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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.
Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.
Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above
Apologies, in setting up Patreon as an alternative subscription method some had requested, I accidentally blocked non Patreon subscribers. Fixed now.
I have also started a gofundme to cover costs of operating in Beirut.
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:
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
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.
Because some people wish an alternative to paypal, I have set up new methods of payment including a gofundme appeal and a patreon account.
Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above
It is illegal to report from Lebanon without prior accreditation by the Ministry of Information.
On the day Niels and I arrived in the country, a new rule was introduced by the Ministry specifically excluding online media from accreditation, which is now limited to print newspapers and broadcast TV stations only.
All freelance journalists and independent TV production companies are also specifically excluded.
The specific instruction from the Ministry of Information states:
not: web or digital or online or production house
The new policy is given in writing to journalists who apply, by the Press Bureau of the Ministry of Information. I have been unable to find any evidence of it being announced or what its statutory basis is, but that is probably available in Arabic. None of the many Lebanese journalists I am in contact with were aware of this rule or its implications.
As you will have noticed, by restricting legal publication and reporting from Lebanon to only print newspapers and TV stations – overwhelmingly billionaire- or state-owned – the Lebanese Government is in effect saying “Zionist, pro-Israeli coverage only”.
To illustrate this starkly, when we were in the Ministry of Information on Thursday presenting our credentials from Consortium News, the team from the Murdoch-owned, Zionist Wall Street Journal were being accredited. Consortium News on the other hand was refused as an online publication, even though it hosts some of the most distinguished and experienced journalists on the planet, including Chris Hedges and Joe Lauria.
Consortium News is of course pro-Resistance and was refused permission to report from Lebanon. The Zionist Wall Street Journal was accepted to report from Lebanon.
I am not reporting from Lebanon, merely telling you of my personal affairs in trying to get established to report here. Future articles once we can publish are well advanced – including on American influence in the Lebanon (ahem), the reality of life in carpet-bombed Dahiya, and the multiple functions of Hezbollah – and we plan to visit Tyre, Baalbek and the Resistance in the South.
Being prepared to deploy infinite persistence and resource, we have now been commissioned to report, and designated as correspondents, by a media outlet which does meet the Ministry of Information’s stipulations. We will be presenting our new media credentials first thing on Monday morning.
While not doing any journalism myself until accreditation, I have been advised there is no restriction on myself being interviewed, as a well-known person visiting Beirut, by accredited journalists who can operate and publish from here.
I can’t publish those interviews here, but if you search Russia Today or Wartime Cafe you may find me.
This is a very expensive operation and we have already spent a five-figure sum on travel, accommodation, subsistence, transport and administrative expenses.
Constant liaison with multiple authorities (and, sadly, lawyers) is required, and for what we want to do in both video and written content we need a car and driver, interpreter and production assistant, as well as workspace.
Niels and I both earn our living from this and money goes to us too and, as regular readers know, keeps me in Lagavulin. At the moment not only are we are both not receiving any income, but we have put substantial personal funds into working towards bringing you the real narrative from Lebanon.
I believe we will soon become a force from here in countering the Israeli and Western state propaganda, across multiple outlets.
There is no source of income except the readers of this blog.
I am very grateful indeed to those who have already helped, and I do not want anybody to cause themselves any financial discomfort. Even the smallest subscription does help. Monie a mickle maks a muckle. I intend to launch a full crowdfunder once credentials are finally established, but in the meantime we need funds rather urgently. If you can help by any of the established methods below, it would be greatly appreciated.
On Wednesday we were arrested and held awhile by General Security in Lebanon and told not to report from here until we receive the proper permits. This is a frustrating delay but I hope will soon resolve.