By Robert Fisk

July 18, 2006

All night I heard the jets, whispering high above the Mediterranean . It lasted for hours, little fireflies that were watching Beirut, waiting for dawn perhaps, because it was then that they descended.

They came first to the little village of Dweir near Nabatiya in southern Lebanon where an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on to the home of a Shia Muslim cleric. He was killed. So was his wife. So were eight of his children. One was decapitated. All they could find of a baby was its head and torso which a young villager brandished in fury in front of the cameras. Then the planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a family of seven.

It was a brisk start to Day Two of Israel's latest "war on terror", a conflict that uses some of the same language - and a few of the same lies - as George Bush's larger "war on terror". For just as we "degraded" Iraq - in 1991 as well as 2003 - so yesterday it was Lebanon's turn to be "degraded".

That means not only physical death but economic death and it arrived at Beirut's gleaming new £300m international airport just before 6am as passengers prepared to board flights to London and Paris.

From my home, I heard the F-16 which suddenly appeared over the newest runway and fired a spread of rockets into it, ripping up 20 metres of tarmac and blasting tons of concrete into the air in a massive explosion before a Hetz-class Israeli gunboat fired on to the other runways.

Two of Middle East Airlines' new Airbuses were left untouched but, within minutes, the airport was deserted as passengers fled back to their homes and hotels.

The flight indicators told the whole story: Paris no flight, London, no flight, Cairo, no flight, Dubai, no flight, Baghdad - from the cauldron into the fire if anyone had chosen to take it - no flight. Someone was playing "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" over the public address system.

Then the Israelis went for the Hizbollah television station, Al-Manar, clipping off its antenna with a missile but failing to put the station off air. That might be a more understandable target - "Manar", after all, broadcasts Hizbollah propaganda. But was it really designed to find or recover the two Israeli soldiers captured on Wednesday? Or to take revenge for the nine Israelis killed in the same incident, one of the blackest days in recent Israeli Army history although not as black as it was for the 36 Lebanese civilians killed in the previous 24 hours.

Source: The Independent

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