Q: You also have done a lot of reporting on an Israeli attack on a Lebanese ambulance full of people. What was that story?
Fisk: It was the thirteenth of April, 1996. Abbas Jiha was a farmer and a volunteer ambulance driver for the village of Mansouri in southern Lebanon. On this day, he’d taken two trips to Sidon--first with a wounded man, then with a wounded baby. When Abbas returned to Mansouri, there was panic, shells were falling all around. People were saying, “Take us to Sidon, take us to Sidon.” He put four of his children in the vehicle, he put another family in, and another guy, a window cleaner--in all there were fourteen people in the ambulance. He’d gotten up to the U.N. Post 123 on the main coast road. He was one-third of the way to safety in Sidon. So he goes through the checkpoint, and Reuters photographer Najla Abujahjah is standing there and sees the car go through and sees two helicopters. One of them comes down and starts chasing the car up the road. When helicopters start flying at vehicles, you know you’re in trouble. They’re coming up behind to fire a missile into the back of the vehicle. That’s the way they do it.
Q: There’d be no denying that the helicopter wanted to hit this ambulance?
Fisk: Oh, absolutely not. They intended to hit it, they absolutely did. They fired two missiles. One didn’t explode, the other did. It exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it twenty meters through the air. Abbas Jiha stood in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking, “God is Great.” He held up his fists to the sky and cried out, “My God, my God, my family has gone.” He saw his two-month-old baby, Mariam, lying outside the ambulance, her body riddled with holes and her head full of metal. His five-year-old, Hanin, “was cut through with holes like a mosquito net,” he told me. The Reuters photographer saw her collapse on the broken window frame, her blood running in streams down the outside of the vehicle. Abbas Jiha also lost his nine-year-old daughter, Zeinab, and his wife, Mona. “She was so terribly wounded, I couldn’t recognize her face,” he told me. Two other passengers died, a sixty-year-old woman and her eleven-year-old niece.
The Israeli government admitted it had targeted the ambulance but made two claims: that the ambulance was owned by the Hezbollah, and that it was carrying a Hezbollah guerrilla. Both of which were totally untrue. Jiha has no connection with the Hezbollah at all. Just before 1996 he returned from Germany where he and his wife and children sought political asylum because it was so dangerous in Lebanon. Even if the vehicle had been owned by the Hezbollah, the idea that it’s all right to kill women and children because you don’t like the owner of the vehicle is an entirely new view of the rules of war.
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