Robert Fisk: Beirut Diary

[toastkid]

Robert Fisk: A gripping diary of one week in the life and death of Beirut
Published: 23 July 2006 Independent

Sunday 16 July

It is the first time I have actually seen a missile in this war. They fly too fast - or you are too busy trying to run away to look for them - but this morning, Abed and I actually see one pierce the smoke above us. "Habibi (my friend)!" he cries, and I start screaming "Turn the car round, turn it round" and we drive away for our lives from the southern suburbs. As we turn the corner there is a shattering explosion and a mountain of grey smoke blossoming from the road we have just left. What happened to the men and women we saw running for their lives from that Israeli rocket? We do not know. In air raids, all you see is the few square yards around you. You get out and you survive and that is enough.

I go home to my apartment on the Corniche and find that the electricity is cut. Soon, no doubt, the water will be cut. But I sit on my balcony and reflect that I am not crammed into a filthy hotel in Kandahar or Basra but living in my own home and waking each morning in my own bed. Power cuts and fear and the lack of petrol now that Israel is bombing gas stations mean that the canyon of traffic which honks and roars outside my home until two in the morning has gone. When I wake in the night, I hear the birds and the wash of the Mediterranean and the gentle brushing of palm leaves.

I went to buy groceries this evening. There is no more milk but plenty of water and bread and cheese and fish. When Abed pulls up to let me out of the car, the man in the 4x4 behind us puts his hand permanently on the horn, and when I get out of Abed's car, he mouths the words "Kess uchtak" at me. "f**k your sister." It is the first time I have been cursed in this war. The Lebanese do not normally swear at foreigners. They are a polite people. I hold my hand out, palm down and twist it palm upwards in the Lebanese manner, meaning "what's the problem?". But he drives away. Anyway, I don't have a sister.

Monday 17 July

The phones are still working and my mobile chirrups like a budgerigar. Too many of the calls are from friends who want to know if they should flee Beirut or flee Lebanon or from Lebanese who are outside Lebanon and want to know if they should return. I can hear the bombs rumbling across Hizbollah's area of the southern suburbs but I cannot answer these questions. If I advise friends to stay and they are killed, I am responsible. If I tell them to leave and they are killed in their cars, I am responsible. If I tell them to come back and they die, I am responsible. So I tell them how dangerous Lebanon has become and tell them it is their decision. But I feel great sorrow for them. Many have been refugees four times in 24 years. Today I am called by a Lebanese woman with Lebanese and Iranian citizenship and one child with a US passport and another with only a Lebanese passport. Her situation is hopeless. I suggest she travels to the Christian mountains around Faraya and try to find a chalet. It will be safe there. I hope.

I come back from Kfar Chim where part of an Israeli missile or an aircraft wing has just partially decapitated the driver of a car. He looked so tragic, his head lolling forward in the driver's seat, just looking at all the blood splashing down his body on to the floor. Abed was getting spooked because I spent too long at the scene. The Israelis always come back. "Habibi, you took too long. Never stay that long again!" He is right. The Israelis did come back and bombed the Lebanese army.

Now my housemaid Fidele is spooked. She thinks it is too dangerous to travel from the Christian district of Beirut to my home since the Israelis blew the top off the local lighthouse 400 metres from my front door. Fidele is from Togo and makes fantastic pizzas (I recommend her Pizza Togolaisi to anyone) so I send Abed off to pick up her up and bring her to my home for one hour. She puts my dirty clothes in the washing machine, and after five minutes the power goes off and we have to take them all out and try again tomorrow.

Tuesday 18 July

At 3.45am, I wake to the sound of tank tracks and a big military motor heaving away in the darkness. I go downstairs to find that the Lebanese army has positioned an American-made armoured personnel carrier in the car park opposite my home. It has been placed strategically under some palm trees, as if this will stop Israeli aircraft from spotting it. I don't like this at all and nor does my landlord, Mustafa, who lives downstairs. The Lebanese army is now an occasional target for the Israelis and this little behemoth looks like a palm tree disguised as a tank. Later in the morning, I call a general in the army who is a friend of mine and army operations calls me back to check the location. It takes an hour before they find the car park on their maps. Then I receive another call telling me that the APC is next to my home to prevent the Hizbollah from using the car park to launch another missile at an Israeli ship. The empty American Community School is just up my road. The Lebanese army is defending us.

The first French warship arrives to pick up French citizens fleeing Lebanon. It steams proudly past my balcony. Many French naval vessels are named after great military leaders, and this particular anti-submarine frigate is called the Jean-de-Vienne. I pad off to consult my little library of French history books. Jean de Vienne, it turns out, was a 14th-century French admiral who raided the Sussex town of Rye and the Isle of Wight and who was killed - oh lordy, lordy - fighting in the Crusades against the Muslim Turks. A suitable ship to start France's evacuation of the ancient Crusader port of Beirut.

Wednesday 19 July

Now that the Israelis are destroying whole apartment blocks in the Shia southern suburbs - there is a permanent umbrella of smoke over the seafront, stretching far out into the Mediterranean - tens of thousands of Shia Muslims have come to seek sanctuary in the undamaged part of Beirut, in the parks and schools and beside the sea. They walk back and forth outside my home, the women in chadors, their bearded husbands and brothers silently looking at the sea, their children playing happily around the palm trees. They speak to me with anger about Israel but choose not to discuss the depth of cynicism of the Shia Hizbollah who provoked Israel's brutality by capturing two of its soldiers. As well as the Hizbollah, the Israelis are now targeting food factories and trucks and buses - not to mention 46 bridges - and the bin men are now reluctant to pick up the rubbish skips each night for fear their innocent rubbish truck is mistaken for a missile launcher. So no rubbish collection this morning.

The local Beirut papers are filled with photographs that would never be seen in the pages of a British paper: of decapitated babies and women with no legs or arms or of old men in bits. Israel's air raids are promiscuous and - when you see the results as we now do with our own eyes - obscene. No doubt Hizbollah's equally innocent civilian victims in Israel look like this but the slaughter in Lebanon is on an infinitely more terrible scale. The Lebanese look at these pictures and see them on television - as does the rest of the Arab world - and I wonder how many of them are provoked to think of another 9/11 or 7/7 or whatever the next date will be.

What does war do to people? Later, I am talking to an Austrian journalist and idly ask what her father does. "He drinks," she says. Why? "Because his father was killed at Stalingrad."

I walk across with tea for the soldiers on the APC in the car park. They are all from Baalbek, Shia Muslims. They would never open fire on a Hizbollah missile crew. Then I return home from another visit to the southern suburbs and find they have gone, along with their behemoth. The first good news of the day.

The minister of finance holds a press conference to talk of the billions of dollars of damage being done to Lebanon by Israel's air raids. "We have had pledges of aid from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar," he proudly announces. "And from Syria and Iran?" the man from Irish radio asks, naming Hizbollah's two principal supporters in the Muslim world. "Nothing," the minister replies dismissively.

Thursday 20 July

A bad day for messages. Phone calls from the States to tell me I am an anti-Semite for criticising Israel. Here we go again. To call decent folk anti-Semites is soon going to make anti-Semitism respectable, I tell the callers before asking them to tell the Israeli air force to stop killing civilians. Then a fax from a Jewish friend in California to tell me that a man called Lee Kaplan - "a columnist for the Israel National News", whatever that is - has condemned me in print for developing a "high-paid speaking career among anti-Semites". Unlike Benjamin Netanyahu and many others I can think of, I never take money for lecturing - ever - but to smear the thousands of ordinary Americans who listen to me as anti-Semites is outrageous.

Another fax from the editor of the forthcoming paperback edition of my book, apologising for bothering me at a "very difficult (sic) time" but promising to send me page proofs by DHL which is still operating to Beirut. I go downtown to check this with DHL. Yes, the man says, parcels for Lebanon are sent to Jordan and then in a truck via Damascus to Beirut. A truck, I say to myself. Ouch.

Friday 21 July

The Israelis have just bombed Khiam prison. An interesting target since this was the jail in which Israel's former proxy militia, the South Lebanon Army, used to torture male prisoners by attaching electrodes to their penises and female prisoners by electrocuting their breasts. When the Israeli army retreated in 2000, the Hizbollah turned the prison into a museum. Now the evidence of the SLA's cruelty has been erased. Another "terrorist" target.

The power comes back at home at 11pm and I watch Israel's consul general, Arye Mekel, telling the BBC that Israel is "doing the Lebanese a favour" by bombing Hizbollah, insisting that "most Lebanese appreciate what we are doing". So now I understand. The Lebanese must thank the Israelis for destroying their lives and infrastructure. They must be grateful for all the air strikes and the dead children. It's as if the Hizbollah claimed that Israelis should be grateful to them for attacking Zionism. How far can self-delusion reach?

Saturday 22 July

I have coffee in my landlord's garden and he climbs an old wooden ladder into his fig tree and brings me a plate of fruit. "Every day it gives us our figs," he tells me. "We sit under our tree in the afternoon and with the breeze off the sea, it is like air conditioning." I look at his little paradise of pot plants and sip my Arabic coffee from a little blue mug. We watch the warships sliding into Beirut port. "What will happen when all the foreigners have gone?" he asks. That's what we are all asking. We shall find out this week.

[firemanlala]

Hi all
reading Robert Fisk in diary form is pretty gripping?
His own fear and that of the people of Lebanon during this sustained shocking assault is all too apparent...

It saddens me greatly when the best our media can come up with is to sterilise the death toll with bland numbers, "50 killed, 100 killed, 150 killed". These "numbers" are people too! They all lived, breathed, hoped and worried just like us....

It further saddens me that rather than contemplating what Fisk is reporting and trying to comprehend the complete lack of mercy afforded to the Lebanese he is attacked as an Anti-Semite!!

Has nobody in Israel or the US read "Pity the Nation - Lebanon at War" by Robert Fisk?

What planet are we all living on?
_________________
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
Voltaire

[toastkid]

Robert Fisk: Under fire in Beirut
In his second weekly dispatch from the front line, our veteran war reporter confesses he was so scared after one attack that he could not put pen to paper
Published: 30 July 2006

Sunday 23 July

To Sidon. Ed Cody has found a cool, 120-mile-an-hour driver called Hassan - he has a black Mercedes which I nickname "Death Car" (because that will be the fate of anyone who gets in our way) and we zip down the coast road and turn east into the hills at Naameh, where the Israelis have just blown the bridge.

Thirty years ago, Cody was an Associated Press correspondent in Beirut and taught me how to cover wars. "Get in the car, drive to the battle and find out what the arseholes are doing," he used to say. Cody is from Oregon, a slim, brilliant, highly subversive journalist who is now Beijing correspondent for the Washington Post. A great guy to travel with, eyes sharp for F-16s, brave without being a poseur, fluent in Arabic, he understands the dirty war we are watching and thrives on cynicism.

"Look," he says, pointing to a blown-up highway interchange. "It's a terrorist bridge! And if you take the road to Zahle, you'll find a burned out terrorist flour and grain lorry!" If the world became a better place, I fear Cody would contemplate suicide.

Sidon is full of Shia refugees, and I hunt down Ghena Hariri, daughter of Sidon's MP and niece of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. She is a Georgetown graduate and reckons three more Hizbollah buildings will be bombed in her city. The Israelis have just bombed a Hizbollah mosque. Cody and I mosey over to take a look at the crushed cupola, and the local Lebanese "Squad 112" - a kind of paramilitary police - arrive to shoo us away.

We race back to Beirut, joining the coastal highway south of the city. It is a bleak, desolate, empty road and we watch the sky, detouring round the airport, the air filled with smoke from burning oil tanks and the vibration of another massive Israeli bomb on the southern suburbs just as we pass.

Monday 24 July

To southern Lebanon on a humanitarian convoy. No problems as far as Zahle in the Beka'a - though we pass Cody's "terrorist" flour truck, a missile hole through the cab door - and then turn south towards Lake Qaraaoun. A bright, wonderful day of sun and fluffy clouds, and then the scream of high-flying jets. We watch the skies again. I'm becoming an expert on light and cumulus clouds.

In the middle of a field of tomatoes, I see a London bus. I turn to the driver. "Isn't that a London bus?" I ask, like the man who sees the sheep in a tree in Monty Python. "Yes, that's a London bus." It is. It's a bloody great bright red Routemaster double decker. In the Beka'a Valley. In Lebanon. During the war.

Seventeen miles south and the road is blown up, craters in the middle and narrow tracks on the edge for our vehicles to pass. One Israeli bomb has blown away most of the road above a 60ft chasm and it reminds me of that scene in North West Frontier where Kenneth More has to manoeuvre a steam locomotive over a blown-up railway bridge, on which the tracks are still connected but there's nothing underneath. More turns to Lauren Bacall and says: "Of course, it's one of my hobbies, driving trains over broken railway bridges."

We inch forward along the narrow section of road and the stones spit out beneath our wheels. The vehicle starts to lean to the right and I lean to the left. So does the driver. Then we are across and turn our heads like wolves to see how the second driver copes. North of Khiam, I can see fires burning in the forests of northern Israel and smoke drifting from Metullah, and hear the thump of shells into Lebanon. Great weather. Pity about the war.

Tuesday 25 July

I prowl around Marjayoun, the Christian town wedged between two slices of Hizbollah territory. This was the headquarters of Israel's brutal "South Lebanese Army" proxy militia, and there are still a lot of ex-SLA men here, all with Lebanese mobile phones, but a few of them, I suspect, with Israeli ones. No shells fall on Marjayoun - not yet - so the locals gather at Rashed's Restaurant (yes, there is a restaurant open in southern Lebanon, serving kebabs and cold beer) and watch the war. You can sit on the ridge and hear tank fire, Katyusha fire, bombs from jets and bombs from helicopters. Far across the valley, beside the old fort at Khiam, there is a UN post where four unarmed UN observers are watching the battle at first hand, reporting each shell burst.

Wednesday 26 July

Indian UN soldiers bring what is left of the four observers to the run-down hospital in Marjayoun. All day they had been reporting Israeli shellfire creeping closer to their clearly marked position. An officer in the UN's headquarters at Naqoura phoned the Israelis 10 times to warn them of their fall of shot, and 10 times he had been promised that no more shells would fall close to the Khiam post.

But the four soldiers did not run away - as the Israelis presumably hoped they would - and so yesterday evening an Israeli aircraft flew down and fired a missile directly into their UN position, tearing the four brave men to pieces and flattening their building. I notice that they are brought to the hospital in unwieldy black plastic bags, apparently decapitated. One of the Indian soldiers is wearing a turban, painted the same pale blue as the UN flag.

The schools of the region are now crammed with refugees, white flags on the roofs. I go to a classroom where 15 Shia families are squatting on the floor. The lavatories are blocked, the place stinks of urine. "What are you doing to us?" a dark-haired man with a heavily lined face asks me quietly. How should I reply? Well, my Prime Minister doesn't think it's time for a ceasefire just yet, but he promises to give you acres of freedom and lots and lots of democracy and a new dawn later on. But no truce right now, I'm afraid. In other words, you've had it, chum. No. I just remain silent and say "Haram" in Arabic. It means shame or pity, depending on the context, which I am happy to leave vague.

Thursday 27 July

I sit with a French friend on a small hill, looking across southern Lebanon at dusk, watching aircraft swooping like eagles on to patches of scrub and blasting rocks and trees into the air. To our left, Israeli artillery is ranged on to a house this side of Khiam. The first shell bursts in a bubble of flame and there is a double report, then a barrage - a pillonage, as my friend calls it in his more powerful French - of fire consumes the house and we can see bits of it high in the air, then more bubbles and eventually a grey cloud of smoke covers the wreckage.

"My God, I hope there was no one in there," my friend says. We may never know. All over southern Lebanon, the dead are sandwiched between the floors of bombed houses. We discuss the language of war, and discover that most of the French words for battle and death are feminine.

To Nabatea at lunchtime, a few shops bravely open amid the rubble of houses on the main road, a market blasted across the fields (a terrorist market, I hear Cody's spirit announcing) and then, just by Arab Selim, a plane puts a bomb on the bridge in front of our vehicle and we beat a hasty retreat from this unpleasant ambuscade and return to the sanctuaire of our little house on the hill. Mosquitoes at night, a bare mattress on the marble floor, a dirty pillowcase to sleep on.

Friday 28 July

At 3am, a huge bombardment starts across the valley over Beaufort Castle, the massive Crusader keep to the west. Captured by Saladin in 1190, handed over to the Knights Templar - the neo-conservatives of their age - in 1260, besieged on one occasion by a Muslim army which asked to negotiate with Beaufort's commander and then tortured him in front of its defenders, it looms over us as 46 shells ripple across the next-door village of Arnoun.

My mobile phone rings. An American journalist is walking south of Tibnin towards the Hizbollah-Israeli battle at Bint Jbail - a wise precaution because all cars are now prey to Israel's eagles - and has found two wounded Druze men lying by the road. One of them cannot stand. She has no car. Can I help? I am 15 miles away. "Can I tell them they will be rescued?" Don't lie to them, I say. Tell them you will try to get help. I promise to call the Red Cross.

I phone Hisham Hassan at the ICRC in Beirut and tell him the precise location. Both men are lying by a smashed roadside stall with an orange flag in the ground, a kilometre past a road sign which says "Welcome to Beit Yahoun" and next to a huge bomb crater. Hisham promises to call the Tibnin Red Cross ambulance centre. Ten minutes later, I get a text message: "Red Cross on the way." Angels from heaven.

I start my way back to Beirut on another convoy, grinding back over the same dangerous roads and past the same bomb craters. There are new ones, and a man shouts that we must detour down a dirt track. "Big rocket on road," he says, and that's good enough for me. We trail past an old, tree-shrouded cemetery. Three hours later, we stop for sandwiches in a Christian town, among people who traditionally despise Hizbollah. I find that they are all watching Hizbollah's station, and when I talk to them, an old man says he believes Hizbollah tells the truth.

Saturday 29 July

Home. I shower and sleep in my own bed and hear the wash of the Mediterranean on the rocks below my window. Fidele has recovered her courage and has returned to clean and cook. I receive a call from a Turkish journalist to talk about the 1915 Armenian genocide - a lot grimmer than this little war - and do an interview with a New Zealand television crew who are about to set off for southern Lebanon with "TV" written in giant silver letters on the roof of the car. I don't think it will help them.

A call from DHL. Proofs of the paperback edition of my book have arrived from London. Someone drove them and DHL's other parcels from Amman to Damascus and then - beneath the jets - across the Beka'a to Beirut. I get a bill for $30 for the extra risks involved in the freight transit. Then go through my notes of the week for this diary. I find that my handwriting briefly collapsed after the air attack on Thursday. I was so frightened that I could hardly write.

I sit on the balcony and read Siegfried Sassoon. Cody also reads to calm himself in war. But Cody reads Verlaine.

[toastkid]

Robert Fisk: Slaughter in Qana
In his weekly dispatch from the front line, our veteran war reporter witnesses the aftermath of a massacre
Published: 06 August 2006

Sunday, 30 July

Qana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook. Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds - the shells exploded in the air - and now today I am heading south again to look at the latest Qana massacre.

Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were "hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.

But the roads, my God, the roads of southern Lebanon. Windows open, listen for the howl of jets. I am astonished that only one journalist - a young Lebanese woman - has died so far. I watch the little silver fish as they filter through the sky.

On my way back to Beirut, I find the traffic snarled up by a bomb-smashed bridge, where the Lebanese army is trying to tow a vegetable-laden truck out of a river. I go down to them and slosh through the water to tell the army sergeant that he is out of his mind. He's got almost 50 civilian cars backed up in a queue, just waiting for another Israeli air attack. Leave the lorry till later, I tell him.

Other soldiers arrive, and there is a 10-minute debate about the wisdom of my advice, while I am watching the skies and pointing out a diving Israeli F-16. Then the sergeant decides that Fisk is not as stupid as he looks, cuts the tow-rope and lets the traffic through. I am caked in dust, and Katya Jahjoura, a Lebanese photographer colleague, catches sight of me and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. "You look as if you have been living in rubble!" she cries, and I shoot her a desperate look. Better get out of this place, in case we get turned into rubble, I reply.

Monday, 31 July

Benjamin Netanyahu tries another lie, an old one reheated from 1982, when Menachem Begin used to claim that the civilian casualties of Israel's air raids were no different from the civilians killed in Denmark in an RAF raid in the Second World War. Ho hum, nice try, Benjamin, but not good enough.

First, the story. RAF aircraft staged an air raid on the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, but massacred more than 80 children when their bombs went astray. The Israelis are slaughtering the innocent of southern Lebanon from high altitude - high enough to avoid Hizbollah missiles. The reason the RAF killed 83 children, 20 nuns and three firemen on 21 March 1945 was that their Mosquitoes were flying so low to avoid civilian casualties that one of the British aircraft clipped its wing on a railroad tower outside Copenhagen central station, and crashed into the school. The other aircraft assumed the smoke from its high-octane fuel was the target.

Interesting, though, the way Israel's leaders are ready to manipulate the history of the Second World War. No Israeli aircraft has been lost over Lebanon in this war and the civilians of Lebanon are dying by the score, repeatedly and bombed from a great height.

Tuesday, 1 August

Electricity off, my fridge flooded over the floor again, my landlord Mustafa at the front door with a plastic plate of figs from the tree in his front garden. The papers are getting thinner. However, Paul's restaurant has reopened in East Beirut where I lunch with Marwan Iskander, one of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri's senior financial advisers.

Marwan and his wife Mona are a source of joy, full of jokes and outrageous (and accurate) comments about the politicians of the Middle East. I pay for the meal, and Marwan produces - as I knew he would - a huge Cuban cigar for me. I gave up smoking years ago. But I think the war allows me to smoke again, just a little.

Wednesday, 2 August

Huge explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut shake the walls of my home. A cauldron of fire ascends into the sky. What is there left to destroy in the slums which scribes still call a "Hizbollah stronghold"?

The Israelis are now bombing all roads leading to Syria, especially at the border crossing at Masna (very clever, as if the Hizbollah is bringing its missiles into Lebanon in convoys on the international highway). Then the guerrilla army, which started this whole bloody fiasco, fires off dozens more rockets into Israel.

I put my nose into the suburbs and get a call from a colleague in south Lebanon who describes the village of Srifa as "like Dresden". World War Two again. But the suburbs do look like a scene from that conflict. My grocer laments that he has no milk, no yoghurt, which - as a milkoholic myself - I lament.

Thursday, 3 August

More friends wanting to know if it's safe to return to Lebanon. An old acquaintance tells me that when she insisted on coming back to Beirut, a relative threw a shoe and a book at her. What was the book, I asked? A volume of poetry, it seems.

Electricity back, and I torture myself by watching CNN, which is reporting this slaughterhouse as if it is a football match. Score so far: a few dozen Israelis, hundreds of Lebanese, thousands of missiles, and even more thousands of Israeli bombs. The missiles come from Iran - as CNN reminds us. The Israeli bombs come from the United States - as CNN does not remind us.

Friday, 4 August

The day of the bridges. Abed and I are up the highway north of Beirut with Ed Cody of The Washington Post (he who reads Verlaine) and we manage to drive on side roads through the Christian Metn district, which has inexplicably been attacked (since the Christian Maronites of Lebanon are supposed to be Israel's best friends here). "You cannot believe how angry we are," a woman says to me, surveying her smashed car and smashed home and shattered windows and the rubble all over the road. A viaduct has fallen into a valley, all 200 metres of it, though another side road is left completely undamaged, and we cruise along it to the next destroyed bridge. So what was the point of bombing the bridges?

We drive back to Beirut on empty roads, windows open and the whisper of jets still in the sky. I go to the Associated Press office, where my old mate Samir Ghattas is the bureau chief. "So how were the bridges?" he asks. "I guess you were driving fast." He can say that again.

I do an interview with CBC in Toronto and talk openly of Israeli war crimes, and no one in the Canadian studio feels this is impolitic or frightening or any of the other usual fears of television producers, who think they will be faced with the usual slurs about "anti-Semitic" reporters who dare to criticise Israel.

I turn on the television, and there is Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's boss, threatening Israel with deeper missile penetrations if Israel bombs Beirut. I listen to Israel's Prime Minister, saying much the same thing in reverse.

I call these people the "roarers", but I leaf through my tatty copy of King Lear to see what they remind me of. Bingo. "I shall do such things I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth." Shakespeare should be reporting this war.

Saturday, 5 August

Lots of stories about a massive Israeli ground offensive, which turn out to be untrue. The UN in southern Lebanon suspects that Israel is manufacturing non-existent raids to pacify public opinion as Hizbollah missiles continue to fly across the frontier. But a friend calls to tell me that Hizbollah might be running out of rockets. Possibly true, I reflect, and think of all the bridges which haven't yet been blown to pieces.

More gruesome photographs of the dead in the Lebanese papers. We in the pure "West" spare our readers these terrible pictures - we "respect" the dead too much to print them, though we didn't respect them very much when they were alive - and we forget the ferocious anger which Arabs feel when these images are placed in front of them. What are we storing up for ourselves? I wrote about another 9/11 in the paper this morning. And I fear I'm right.

[toastkid]

Robert Fisk: Tea and rockets: café society, Beirut-style
This week: A close shave in downtown Beirut and why you'll never find our man in a flak jacket
Published: 13 August 2006

Sunday, 6 August

In the early hours, motor-cycle riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines. Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.

A friend calls from Tyre where Palestinians are welcoming Shia refugees from the hill villages of southern Lebanon into their homes. One old Palestinian lady turned on her guest with memories of her own endless exile since 1948. "Better to die in your home than run away," she shouts.

Too many journos are wearing flak jackets and helmets, little spacemen who want to show they are "in combat" on television. I notice how their drivers and interpreters are usually not given flak jackets. These are reserved for us, the Westerners, the Protected Ones, Those Who Must Live.

I used to wear a flak jacket in Bosnia, but no more. Ever since a bullet penetrated the neck of a colleague and was kept within his body by the iron jacket - going round and round until it had destroyed his kidneys, liver and heart - I have refused to touch these things. Better to die in shirtsleeves.

Monday, 7 August

A pilotless drone buzzes over my home at 4am. To Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp to talk to Suheil Natour, the human rights man for the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A book-crammed room that smells of paper and cups of tea - always a good sign - and he goes through the options of the Israelis and Hizbollah.

Do the Israelis want to draw the Palestinians into their battle, to help destroy Hamas? "Do you realise that the largest community in Lebanon - the Shias - are now spread as refugees in every other area of Lebanon for the first time ever?" he asks.

As I leave his office, I hear the drone again, surveying the camp. I do an interview with New Zealand television on the Beirut seafront and a group of young Shia men and women - the latter all in brown scarves - stand behind the camera to listen.

I talk about Lebanese history, the Ottoman empire, the disasters of the Shias, the Israeli invasions/bombardments of 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and now. Even the threats of the PLO, Hizbollah and the Israelis are the same.

When I've finished, one of the young men translates for his extended family. He is from Qana, he says. They fled after last week's massacre of 28 civilians who were hiding from Israel's bombing in a basement. The Israelis dropped a bomb that exploded in the basement.

Tuesday, 8 August

Ed Cody and I pick up Hassan and the "Death Car" to race to the southern suburb of Shiyah, where the Israelis have fired two missiles into an apartment block. Rubble, muck, body parts, shrieking men and women - the death toll of 20 soon to rise to 63, all civilians.

Some idiot had heard a drone over the street and opened fire on it. and within minutes an Israeli plane - or maybe the drone itself, so wonderful is American technology - had demolished the nearest building.

We drive across to the Mount Lebanon Hospital to talk to the wounded. How different it all is from Europe or America, where a journalist visiting a hospital is regarded as a vulture feasting on human misery. In Lebanon, we are always greeted by the head doctor, taken immediately to the wards, encouraged to talk to any of the patients.

And the patients brighten up when the foreigners arrive and talk happily. They want to shake hands and try to discuss their torment and pain and misery. It is always the same, at every hospital in the Middle East. We are welcome. Dr Nazih Gharios orders tea and asks his secretary to find out the name of the little boy in the mortuary who was brought dead to the hospital after the bombing.

The morning papers carry an odious speech by an American diplomat visiting Beirut. He is David Welch and he manages to express his love for a country his nation is helping Israel to destroy while avoiding any journalists' questions.

"I am late for another meeting," he pants. But get this for a quote: "Much has happened [sic] in the past three weeks, but the commitment of the United States to Lebanon remains firm; it remains enduring and it is not negotiable. The relationship of the United States with Lebanon is based on mutual respect..."

At no point does he mention the word "Israel". Of course not. The US embassy in Ulan Bator would beckon if he did.

Wednesday, 9 August

Oil from the burning fuel storage depot at Jiyeh is washing up on the shore opposite my home, dead birds, black fish and the smell of a refinery. It's broken up into thick black balls that lie on the rocks and sand when the tide goes out.

In the Chouf, the Druze are now caring for 100,000 Shia refugees. "There is not a single man between 25 and 40 among them," the wife of a Druze official remarks. I have a shrewd idea where all those men have gone.

To a hubble-bubble café in the evening where the oil-sogged waves slosh around the feet of a Lebanese fisherman perched on an old concrete pillar in the water. He wears a straw hat and I think at first he's a statue for tourists until he turns to put an oily fish into the basket on his back. "We have no food and we have stopped selling alcohol," the waiter proudly tells me. Well, I say, that's really going to bring in the customers!

The BBC is back to its old craven self, referring in a report from Israel to the tiny sliver of Lebanese territory taken at great cost by Israeli troops as Israel's "security zone" - Israel's own preposterous title for what must be the most insecure piece of land on earth.

It is, of course, an "occupation zone" but not, it seems, if it's occupied by the Israelis. Had Hizbollah seized Israeli territory - they did after all provoke this savage conflict with their own reckless crossing of the border - would the BBC be calling it Hizbollah's "security zone" in northern Israel? Would they hell.

Thursday, 10 August

To the City Café to meet Leena Saidi, Lebanese journalist and formerly one of the national television station's top newsreaders. City Café is definitely upmarket, opposite a traffic circle but filled with boring old men smoking cigars and discussing the future of Lebanon and elegant ladies in silk skirts, and one or two women whom my Mum used to describe as "mutton dressed as lamb".

We order green tea and then there's the roar of an explosion in the sky. An Israeli missile screeches right past us and crashes into the old French Mandate lighthouse, a brown-stone tower built in 1938 from which the Vichy French once sent out their propaganda.

Never have I seen the great and the good of Beirut society hurl themselves from their seats at such speed, overturning tables amid splintered glass, racing from the café for their chauffeur-driven cars, crashing into each other's vehicles - and failing to pay their bills. I see a panic-stricken motor-cyclist thrown on to the road. He rolls down the side of the traffic island, then runs for his life.

A second missile streaks past us into the tower. Do the Israelis think that Hizbollah's television station is broadcasting from here?

"Fisk!" Leena roars, almost as loudly as the rocket. "Why do you always bring trouble with you?" We finish a second cup of green tea and The Independent pays the bill. I am left wondering: what has Israel got against the French Mandate?

Friday, 11 August

I visit the barber. "Thanks to the God!" cries George when he sees me. It is lunchtime, and I am his first customer. Every Lebanese believes that we journos know the future, and we have to pretend that we do so that they will tell us what they know.

Ceasefire? Will Hizbollah fire more rockets into Israel? Photographs on the Lebanese front pages show burning Israeli tanks near Khiam. Shortage of newsprint. One of my morning papers is now only four pages - it was blown off my balcony by the wind this morning and I had to run down the street to retrieve it. But a bad thought. I like small newspapers. Less to read. More time to report.

Saturday, 12 August

A long radio interview with an Israeli professor who says "the number of people killed [in this war] doesn't reflect morality". Well, at more than a thousand Lebanese civilians dead against a few dozen Israelis, it can't reflect morality because, if it did, that would suggest Israel was committing war crimes.

But Hizbollah will also have their day of reckoning. Who gave them the right to bring this cruelty down upon the head of every Lebanese? Who gave the Shias permission to go to war for Lebanon? There will be questions in Israel too. How come the Israel Defence Forces, famous in legend and song, could not defend the people of Israel, despite slaughtering so many Lebanese civilians?

Cody has invented a great new word: to "flamboozle". It's what politicians do to their people when they go to war. Ehud Olmert has been flamboozling the Israelis and Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has been flamboozling Lebanon's Shias. We may have a ceasfire at the weekend. So the end of the flamboozling may be nigh.

[toastkid]

Robert Fisk's Beirut Diary: A land reduced to rubble
'These places now look like French villages did after German bombardment during the First World War'
Published: 20 August 2006

Sunday 13 August

A series of profound explosions from the south of Beirut; the Israelis "jostling the rubble" of the suburbs, as we now say, although who knows how many corpses lie in this pit? An Israeli calls me from Los Angeles. She thinks she has discovered a reason why the Lebanese Red Cross may have been targeted by the Israeli air force. "I will send you a fax proving that they are helping the Hizbollah," she says.

I await the fax, which turns out to be a New York Times report from southern Lebanon, recording how the Red Cross gave medical assistance to wounded members of the Hizbollah. I call Rachel back. The Lebanese Red Cross helped wounded American marines after they were suicide-bombed in Beirut in 1983, I tell her, and they gave help - and were criticised for it by their Lebanese neighbours - to wounded Israelis after a suicide bombing in Tyre the following year. Isn't it the duty of all Red Cross teams to help all those who are suffering? "Perhaps, but they should have detained the Hizbollah," comes the voice from Los Angeles. What? The Red Cross is now supposed to imprison Israel's enemies?

I receive another fax from Rachel. "I am for dialog (sic) but not with the Devil, Nazis et al," she says. "Reality and justice are derived from the ability to discern between good and evil, between truth and lies, and between the fireman and the arsonist. Keep safe."

A ceasefire at 8am tomorrow, or so we are told.

Monday 14 August

The Israelis and the Hizbollah fought to the end, 200 rockets into Israel and a few final bombing runs on the suburbs of Beirut. Among the last to die was a small child in the Beirut Dahiya district whose body was found clutched in her dead mother's arms. A final kick to the civilians of Lebanon, just in time to meet the truce deadline.

Cody and I set off to southern Lebanon over smashed bridges, round vast bomb craters, beating the earth down to allow Hassan's "Death Car" to drive over them, trying to avoid the thousands of unexploded shells lying in the fields. So many bombs on the Litani that the river has partly changed its course and we walk into the water. We drive to Srifa, a village which clearly was - heaven preserve us from these clichés - a Hizbollah "stronghold", but whose ruins now cover dozens of civilian dead. I am photographing the wreckage - using real film because I still feel that digital cameras lose definition - and I find that I see through the lens more pain than I see with my own eyes. I think this is because the sheer extent of the bomb damage is focused in a frame. Later, I look at my developed pictures in Beirut and am appalled by the level of destruction. Some of my pictures look like the photographs of French villages after German bombardment during my dad's First World War. They will find 36 bodies under the Srifa rubble upon which I have walked.

Epic traffic jams on the way back to Beirut as hundreds of thousands of Muslim Shias try to return to homes which in many cases no longer exist. Cody, normally a cool customer, jumps out of the car in rage to remonstrate with a man who refuses to reverse up the road to let our queue of cars through to Beirut. "The arsehole says the reverse in his car doesn't work," he says in fury. I remind Cody that Captain Cook lost his life when, after many years, he lost his temper with a native and got pierced by a spear.

Tuesday 15 August

I am sending my dispatch to The Independent from an internet café when an American nurse whom I have known for years walks up to me. "We have a badly burned woman in emergency and we've just had to tell her that her three children are dead," she says. And how did she take this news? "You can imagine. We found out she'd had her tubes tied so she can't have any more children." And her husband? "Dead," the nurse replies.

The Lebanese papers carry the news of the death in action of David Grossman's son Uri, killed fighting the Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. That Grossman, a brilliant and compassionate writer well known in Lebanon - his books are on sale here and the local newspaper reports are written with dignity - should suffer in this way seems especially cruel. I turn to his work on the Palestinians of Israel, which nestles in the bookcase beside my desk. "Every acrobat knows the secret of walking a tightrope over an abyss; the Arabs in Israel have learnt something even more difficult - to stand still on the wire," Grossman wrote in 1993. "To live a provisional life that eternally suspends and dulls the will... So it has been for decades, for hundreds of thousands of acrobats."

Wednesday 16 August

Sixteen-hour power cuts, worse than before the ceasefire. Plenty of oil tankers in Cyprus but the shipowners - and the insurers - are cravenly waiting for Israeli permission to sail their vessels to Lebanon. Hizbollah says it doesn't want to disarm. The French say they want a clearer mandate before sending troops to join the international force in southern Lebanon. I hear the ceasefire creaking.

Thursday 17 August

All the talk is of a "robust" international force and my journalistic colleagues have become besotted by the word "robust". The BBC talks about a robust mandate for a robust army and robust United Nations peacekeeping. It reminds me of the Nato manoeuvres in Germany that I watched back in the 1980s when the Reuters correspondent expressed his belief that generals loved missiles because they could no longer have erections. In the Arab world, to be arrogant is to "have a big nose", and the problem is that whenever generals in Lebanon become "robust", they tend to get their noses chopped off. We shall see.

Friday 18 August

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, has appeared on television, talking like a president - though admittedly a more impressive one than the Syrian satrap currently installed in his palace above Beirut - but acting as if the Shias of Lebanon will now define the future of the country.

Through my office window I watch the Shia poor still driving back to the blasted south of Lebanon, mattresses on the roofs of their cars, mothers and babies in the back, interspersed on the roads with Lebanese troop trucks, tanks transporters and armoured vehicles which will soon be joined - or not, as the case may be - by foreign troops to augment the UN army in the south.

[toastkid]

Robert Fisk: 'I think there are enough weapons for the next war'
In his diary of a week which saw yet another assassination, our man in Beirut reflects that the present violence in Lebanon creates longings for a supposedly peaceful past
Published: 26 November 2006

Sunday 19 November

To Khiam, in the far south of Lebanon, to photograph Israeli bomb craters in which a British scientific team say they have found traces of enriched uranium. Spanish troops - along with Indian soldiers - now patrol this dangerous corner of Lebanon, and their UN vehicles hum past us as we drive under a white-bright winter sky.

All of this has a screen of irrelevance over it - journalists writing yesterday's story for tomorrow's paper - as the dangerous political war between supporters of the Lebanese government - Sunni Muslims and Christians - and the pro-Syrian forces opposed to it, especially the Shias, employ increasingly incendiary language. The Shia Hizbollah's leadership demand an end to the democratically-elected Fouad Siniora cabinet, set up after the murder of the ex-prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, last year. The Christians are calling Hizbollah fascists. Tomorrow the cabinet is supposed to sign up to the new UN tribunal to try suspects for Hariri's murder, even though all six Shia ministers (largely pro-Syrian, of course) have resigned.

Monday 20 November

Sure enough, Syria's faithful Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, claims the cabinet is constitutionally unable to approve the UN's tribunal, which just might point a finger at Emile Lahoud himself.

My driver, Abed, mourns for the French mandate of Lebanon under which he was born. The French, according to Abed, provided a respite between the brutality of the Ottoman Empire - Abed's father was taken from his young bride only days after his marriage to fight for the Turks against General Allenby in Palestine - and the corruption of post-independence Lebanon.

I am not sure I agree with Abed. The French cruelly suppressed riots in Sidon with troops from Senegal and resisted independence. But in these fearful, sectarian days, it's easy to see how the grand boulevards built by the French, the Parisian cafés and boutiques - all exquisitely restored by Hariri after the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war (150,000 dead, no less) - has become a useful myth, an oasis of colonial peace between Oriental massacres.

I visit the BBC office in the city centre to record an interview and talk to their Beirut correspondent, Kim Ghattas. We talk about the demand of the Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, for Shia street demonstrations, and I tell her I fear there will be another political assassination soon. I name two Christian leaders who might be murdered and whose killings could unleash the ghost of the civil war.

Tuesday 21 November

Pierre Gemayel shot and wounded. Minister for Industry. Maronite Christian. I remember my conversation with Ghattas - the two prominent Christians I had identified to her did not include the young Falangist MP. But I should have written about my general suspicions in this morning's Independent. I have 38 minutes to write more than 1,250 words. Pierre Gemayel, son of ex-president Amin Gemayel, nephew of murdered ex-president-elect Bashir Gemayel, uncle of Bashir's murdered two-year-old daughter Maya. Unmarried. Driving almost alone. Three gunmen. The hospital pronouncing him dead. The sixth prominent political figure to be slaughtered in 20 months. How many more before we hear gunfire?

Wed 22 November

Beirut's newspapers are filled with pictures with Gemayel's weeping mother Joyce ("those bullets ripped his face to bits") and his wife Patricia (he was married - I got four phone calls today to point out my error). Drive to the scene of crime. There is Gemayel's Kia in the road, still filled with blood, still backed into the van into which it rolled after Gemayel was shot.

An Australian journalist, Sophie McNeill of SBS Television, is counting the number of bullet holes in the driver's cab (around 12), like a police constable - and probably making a better job of it than the real Lebanese cops, who wander among us, giving totally different accounts of the murder. Five killers in all, it seems. Didn't even wear masks.

McNeill suggests we call a telephone number on the side of the damaged van - the driver must have seen the gunman when Gemayel's car crashed into him. "Our office is closed today," says the recorded voice. "We will be open tomorrow." Like Lebanon.

To Bikfaya, where the dead man's body lies in a closed coffin (yes, his face was indeed shot away). Thousands of Christians - and Sunni Muslims and Druze - in black. No shouting. No calls for revenge. Yet.

Thursday 23 November

Half a million? 250,000? Crowd figures are as reckless here as in London or Washington. There are few Shia. I can think of only six who are attending this massive service for the dead at St George's Cathedral, which stands next to the great Hariri mosque - and one of these is the Speaker of Parliament.

I had asked Rudi Polikavic to come with me, an old Christian militiaman opposed to the Falange in the civil war, with the scars of three bullets on his neck and arms. I receive a call from a friend, Amira Solh, who is with another Al Arabiya crew, asking where I am in the crowd. "I am on the mosque side of the church," I shout, and Polikavic collapses with laughter. " Fisky," he roars, "that really is the story of Lebanon. Aren't we are all now 'on the mosque side of the church'?" Later, Rudi will listen with growing horror to ex-Christian militia leader (and convicted murderer) Samir Geagea, as the crowd applaud what sounds suspiciously like a call for retaliation.

Amin Gemayel, Pierre's grieving father, who so honourably urged restraint rather than revenge in the immediate aftermath of his son's murder, has told a TV interviewer that assassination may now "move to the other side...". Does that, perchance, mean the Shia "side"? This is war-war, not jaw-jaw.

Friday 24 November

Shopkeepers have refused to close for a Chamber of Trade strike, called to protest at the congealed politics of the country's leaders. Hizbollah has postponed its street demonstrations until next week. But Shias blocked the airport road to express their anger at funeral speeches insulting Nasrallah.

Saturday 25 November

I fly out of Beirut for a brief trip abroad. Lebanese army vehicles stand in the darkness beside the airport road, their occupants' cigarettes glowing in the night. Most of the army are Shia. What are they thinking as they drag on their cigarettes?

My flight soars over the dawn Mediterranean and there below me are two German warships, tiny grey arrows sliding through the ocean on UN duty to hinder maritime arms traffic to Hizbollah. But I think Nasrallah has quite enough weapons for another war. With good reason, I check my return ticket coupon to Beirut.