Interlude with Robert Fisk

"Anderson and I had been on the streets...under some of the worst Israeli bombardments...'time-on-target' salvoes from Israeli guns that laid 50 shells at a time across a narrow street, slaughtering everyone within a 500-yard radius of the explosions. Anderson had stood on the AP bureau roof with me for an entire afternoon as phosphorus shells crashed onto the buildings round us, the gentle, fluffy white clouds from the explosions drifting off across the apartments as if they were no more than smoke from a garden bonfire. One had plopped onto the roof of the headquarters of the International Red Cross. We saw it explode just behind the huge Red Cross flag that was strapped to the roof to prevent air attack. We reported it. The International Red Cross complained. The Israelis then denied that they had ever shelled the Red Cross...

'The medical staff at the...hospital were shocked by the...wounds. When the family was brought into the emergency room..., Dr. Shamaa found that two five-day-old twins had already died. But they were still on fire.

'Shamaa's story was a dreadful one and her voice broke as she told it. "I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames," she said. "When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours." Next morning, Amal Shamaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames."

Think this is an untold tale from the recent massacre in Gaza? No. It's from Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation The Abduction of Lebanon (4th edition, copyright 2002) and he's describing the Israeli bombardment of West (Muslim) Beirut in the summer of 1982, forerunner to the unspeakable massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Chatila. 1982! More than a quarter of a century ago.

Somehow - and Laila el-Haddad (http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html) has some good ideas - those of us with human hearts still beating in our chests must stand up and say, "Enough!"