The desert of trapped corpses: Gruesome evidence of Israel’s military failure in Lebanon

31 July 2006: You have to be amid this terrifying destruction to realise the nature of the war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East, writes Robert Fisk

A Lebanese boy passes the rubble of destroyed houses in Srifa, Lebanon, in August 2006 (AFP/Getty)

They made a desert and called it peace. Srifa – or what was once the village of Srifa – is a place of pancaked homes, blasted walls, rubble, starving cats and trapped corpses. But it is also a place of victory for the Hezbollah, whose fighters walked amid the destruction yesterday with the air of conquering heroes. So who is to blame for this desert? The Shia militia which provoked this war – or the Israeli air force and army which has laid waste to southern Lebanon and killed so many of its people?

There was no doubt what the village mukhtar thought. As three Hezbollah men – one wounded in the arm, the other carrying two ammunition clips and a two-way radio – passed us amid the piles of broken concrete, Hussein Kamel el-Din yelled to them: “Hallo, heroes!” Then he turned to me. “You know why they are angry? Because God didn’t give them the opportunity of dying.”

You have to be down here with the Hezbollah amid this terrifying destruction – way south of the Litani river, in the territory from which Israel once vowed to expel them – to realise the nature of the past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East. Israel’s mighty army has already retreated from the neighbouring village of Ghandouriyeh after losing 40 men in just over 36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the smashed town of Khiam where the Hezbollah were celebrating yesterday afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hezbollah men looking at the empty roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the settlement of Misgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.