Naked horror in a ‘war on terrorism’, Israel moves an armoured column into southern Lebanon

July 1993: Artillery shells destroy villages as children and elderly people lie naked and dying in hospital wards – but the atrocity continues, writes Robert Fisk

A few courageous men and women still stood in doorways, refusing to obey Israel’s orders to leave their homes (AFP via Getty)

A land without people. For 20 miles we drove below the Israeli gun line yesterday, through a blitzed landscape of smashed homes and bomb-cratered roads, the sky alive with the crack of Israeli shells and the howl of fighter aircraft. Only at Sultaniyeh did a man run across the road from his house, saying: “There were 2,000 people here – now just 35 of us are hiding in my home. An Israeli plane has bombed three cars down the road. They killed a woman and two children.

A minute down the road and we found the scene, a massive hole, a spray of rubble and three Mercedes cars tossed upside down onto the powdered concrete. Terrible shapes lay inside two of them, the doors running with blood. At Jouaya, the Israelis shelled a baby clean out of its cot.

We found the three-month boy in a Sidon hospital, crying silently on a huge bed, internal bleeding in its tiny head and the word “Majhul” written on its name tag. “Unidentified”. All this, we are to believe, is to rid southern Lebanon of Israel’s latest enemy, the pro-Iranian Hezbollah who have been fighting the occupying (and pro-American) Israeli army for just over a decade. What we saw in southern Lebanon yesterday, however, was a disgrace.