Seeing the destruction of Lebanon, where she lived for seven years, has been 'like watching the agonising death of a dear friend', writes Lara Marlowe
Pope John Paul II once called Lebanon "the remorse of the world". The world should feel remorse at allowing the wholesale destruction of the Shia Muslim areas of this country to continue for more than a month now, while the UN Security Council could not even agree on a resolution calling for a ceasefire.
I lived in Lebanon from 1989 until 1996. To witness dead bodies being pulled - again - from the rubble of Qana, to see villages flattened by Israeli bombs and the country's proud new highways broken into pieces is like watching the agonising death of a dear friend.
In Tyre, I went several times to an internet shop owned by a Shia Muslim Hizbullah supporter. Yet the picture posters on the wall were of Fayrouz, a Christian and Lebanon's greatest singer, and Rafik Hariri, the Sunni Muslim former prime minister who was assassinated last year.
"Fayrouz is the beauty of Lebanon," the owner explained. "Hariri was its strength."
Before leaving Paris for Beirut, I attended a protest rally against the war. When they played Fayrouz singing To Beirut, tears flowed down the cheeks of the Lebanese around me.
"To Beirut, peace with all my heart," she sang. "From the soul of her people she makes wine,/ From their sweat she makes bread and jasmine./ So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?"
Lebanon carried such a weight of tragedy before this war that the 1,100 new deaths and billions of dollars in devastation seem unbearable. I waver constantly between memories of past atrocities and present-day horrors. It is the same for the Lebanese. Everywhere I go, I see pictures of Hariri, whom I interviewed many times. And Samir Kassir, the journalist and writer, also a friend, who was murdered four months after Hariri.
So many places in Lebanon evoke unspeakable suffering. At the City Cafe in Hamra, I think of Lara Mattar, killed by a car bomb on the road outside on her 17th birthday in 1989. She was an only child, and the grief of her parents, Ghassan and Maggie, was boundless. Now I'll remember the clients racing out, their bills unpaid, the screeching of brakes and blaring horns when Israeli missiles hit a disused radio tower nearby on Thursday.
In Qana, where I saw 25 people dug out of a bombed shelter on July 30, I recalled old Saadallah Balhas telling me in 1996 how his wife, children and grandchildren were killed when the Israelis shelled the Fijian Battalion headquarters.
"I saw my children scattered like dead sheep around me," he said.
In conversation, Lebanese have repeatedly mentioned photographs of pretty Israeli girls writing messages on 155mm artillery shells. "From Israel and Daniele" and "Nazrala [the Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah] with love," were inscribed on the weapons in felt pen.
"When I see Israeli children writing on missiles, I think it's in their character to massacre Arabs," says Mohamed al- Husseini, a lawyer and the son of the mayor of Tyre. "They teach their children to hate. Maybe they think they're taking revenge against the Nazis. But we're not Nazis."
In a much-criticised statement, the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: "What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing, the birth pangs, of a new Middle East . . ."
The Lebanese have taken to calling her "Condi Candide", after Voltaire's character, who believed that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
The roads of southern Lebanon are littered with cars. Some stand perpendicular in bomb craters, or halved like melons, blown apart by missiles. Some crashed into walls, trees or other cars when their drivers were killed or wounded. There is dried blood in the broken glass, and it isn't difficult to imagine the same fate for oneself. Many of the destroyed cars have white sheets tied onto the roof or antenna.
I stopped at a shop in the battered Shia town of Nabatiyeh, in the hope of buying something to eat. But with no electricity for refrigeration, the cheese was covered in mould. The shopkeeper mocked the TV sign in white tape on the bonnet and roof of our car.
"You journalists!" he laughed. "Do you really think that will protect you? They bomb children!"
ROLAND HUGUENIN, OF the International Committee of the Red Cross, tells me that collecting bodies from destroyed vehicles is the worst thing he's encountered.
"Sometimes they lie there for 10 days before anyone can get to them," he says."You do it with gas masks, for the stench, and even then it is very difficult; you put the bodies in quick lime.
"Between Srifa and Deir Qanoun al Nahr, we found a car with a mother, father, two young children, a baby and a third adult. We couldn't get the driver out because he was pinned behind the steering wheel. It was getting dark and we had to leave him. It felt horrible, really horrible."
If sorrow is a deep, dull knife blade, fear is a kind of stimulant, razor-sharp in intensity, nonetheless painful. I have rarely been more frightened than when driving from Unifil headquarters at Naqoura to Tyre, after waiting six hours for the Israelis to stop shelling.
As we set out, Sleiman, my interpreter and driver, slipped a cassette of prayers into the tape deck.
"I am not religious," he said. "I smoke and drink beer. But at times like this . . . "
At times like this, I said, the more prayers the better. We drove in silence for several kilometres. The first shell exploded just after we passed the white cliffs, to our right and behind us. It's a long way away, I lied, trying to reassure Sleiman. Don't speed up. A speeding car is guilty. Steady.
More than a dozen explosions followed, ahead, behind, on either side. I kept remembering what Capt Kevin McDonald, an Irish UN observer, told me when talking about the four UN observers killed by an Israeli bombardment: "No one expects to be killed."
One explosion was so close that Sleiman and I banged our heads against the ceiling of the old Volvo. I apologised for the expletive I'd shouted, and Sleiman forgave me. When we heard the loud "whoosh" of outgoing Hizbullah rockets from the banana grove to the left, I thought it was all over, that the Israelis had the technology to pinpoint outgoing fire and bomb the place immediately. I asked myself what I was doing in southern Lebanon.
A few days later, the Israelis issued a blanket prohibition on all vehicles moving south of the Litani. The threat is taken seriously, and journalists walk now. On Thursday, I called a colleague in Tyre who sounded shaken: he had just seen a man on a moped killed by a rocket fired from a drone.
Survivors say the bombing that killed 32 people in the Beirut district of Shiyyah on Monday night was sparked when a moped rider shot at a drone that followed him. Two days later, the Israelis dropped two bombs near the cemetery where 26 of the 32 victims were being buried. The crowd resumed chanting "Israel is the enemy of God". Then five more bombs fell. Pallbearers and mourners abandoned the dead to run for cover.
It was the second time this week that bombing disrupted a funeral of victims of an earlier bombardment. Fifteen people were killed at Ghaziyeh, between Sidon and Tyre, in a bombing on Monday. Two more buildings were bombed during their funeral on Tuesday, killing at least six more people.
On Thursday, an Israeli jet dropped pamphlets over Martyrs' Square in downtown Beirut, ordering the residents of the Shia Muslim neighbourhoods of Hay al-Silm, Bourj al-Barajneh and Shiyyah - already bombed on Monday - to evacuate. Beirut is bursting with refugees from the south, and they have nowhere to go. Israel's response to "terrorist operations" by Hizbullah "will not be confined to Hassan's gang of criminals", threatened the pamphlet, signed "State of Israel".
I was in the rubble of the former souk in Nabatiyeh when two civil defence workers invited me into a fruit and vegetable stall on the periphery of the destruction. They gave me fresh pears and spring water.
"The people of southern Lebanon have the whole case on their shoulders," said Hassib Dagdoug. "How are other Lebanese supporting us? With bread and sardines. In places where there are Sunnis and Christians, there is no bombing. This is a war on the Shia."
With a few exceptions - a bombed bridge in the Maronite city of Jounieh, missiles fired at old water tankers in the Christian quarter of Ashrafieh - Dagdoug was right. That is why Shia refugees have flocked to Christian villages along the Israeli border.
HIZBULLAH IS SO entrenched among the Shia population that some analysts say Israel would have to carry out a genocide against the Shia to eradicate Hizbullah. Walid Charara, the opinion page editor of al-Akbar newspaper and the author of a book on Hizbullah, uses Israeli academic Baruch Kimmerling's term "politicide" to describe what Israel is trying to do to Hizbullah: "They want to destroy the conditions of its political existence, create a disaster zone so people are forced to leave. Today, it has become possible to make war on civilians without anyone reacting."
Resentment between the Shia and Lebanon's other minorities is temporarily stifled by the war. "The real danger begins after the ceasefire," says Bahia Hariri, a member of parliament and the sister of the slain leader, Rafik Hariri.
Politicians such as Samir Frangieh, from the pro-western March 14 movement, complain that Hizbullah established "a state within a state" in which Hizbullah members were exempted from military service on the grounds they were serving with "the resistance", and Hizbullah used government funds to provide health care and social benefits to their followers, whose loyalty naturally went to the party.
"The state failed to protect these people when they were invaded and occupied," counters Walid Charara. "The March 14 group ignored and were contemptuous of the south. For years, Hizbullah was fighting and dying while they had a nice life. And it continues."
I call an acquaintance in Baabdat, a mainly Christian resort above Beirut. She is a former journalist from the Sunni Muslim establishment, and has taken her four children to the family's summer home for safety.
"There's plenty of food, plenty of petrol; it's another world here," she says. "We have a swimming pool, a billiard table, ping-pong and baby-foot. The kids go cycling . . . Deep down inside, everybody wants to get rid of Hizbullah."
A representative from the municipality of Baabdat knocks on the door, looking for donations for the refugees sheltering in the local school, so the wealthy Sunni housewife raids her medicine chest for the poor Shia.
"Nobody minds them," she says. "They're not allowed to put Hassan Nasrallah pictures on the wall, or play their resistance songs loudly on the radio."