AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Lebanon, where you live. Tell us about it today.

ROBERT FISK: Well, I woke up on the morning of July the 12th, which was my birthday, Amy. It was my 60th birthday. And I received -- I hadn't exactly been partying, but I certainly got up late that morning. I got a phone call from a friend in Paris, who said, “Well, you've certainly got a birthday present today.” And I said, “What do you mean?” A classic case of the journalist who didn’t know what was going on just south of his own apartment. Of course, my friend said, “Well, you know, two Israelis have been kidnapped, captured, and three others killed.” And I thought, “Damn! You know, that's going to be a war,” because I knew that Ehud Olmert was going to do the usual Israeli policy of savage attacks against Lebanon as a result.

AMY GOODMAN: Hezbollah says they didn't know that.

ROBERT FISK: Well, Hezbollah, I think, is telling us a whopper. Nasrallah said, “Even if we had known one percent, we wouldn't have captured their soldiers.” Nonsense. I think the Hezbollah knew exactly what the Israelis were going to do, and they needed to flex their muscles and show their bravery, which it was, although, of course, it was a reckless kind, when you also bring upon death to more than 1,000 people, almost all of them civilians.

They had clearly, with massive bunkers, underground storage depots, planned that war. They hit a warship. They hit an Israeli warship and almost sank it. They hit it on midships, killed four sailors and set it on fire for 15 hours. That wasn't because some guy got up in the morning and ate his morning minutiae with cheese and said, “Oh, let's hit a warship today.” No, that had been planned weeks, months before. You can't just set that up, like that. And, of course, now, according to Seymour Hersh, we are led to believe and it’s possible that the Israelis planned their war for months before. It's possible, as Nasrallah said, that the Israelis were planning a September offensive, which would have led to even more civilian casualties. Well, maybe, but he didn't tell us that beforehand, didn't give us a warning of it, did he -- if he knew it.

AMY GOODMAN: So, describe what has happened to Lebanon since July 12th.

ROBERT FISK: Well, okay, the pulverization of Lebanon by the Israeli Air Force. You approach villages in the south -- I mean, during the war, it was a hair-raising journey to go to the south and drive on those roads, hearing all the time the howl of jets, and you actually see missiles whizzing over the fields. I mean, you can see tremendous explosions.

And I think, you know, it's a war crime for the Hezbollah to fire missiles at Haifa and civilian areas of Israel. It's a fact. But it's also a war crime that was committed against the Lebanese. The Israelis now say, all the Lebanese civilians are being used as human shields. That's what they always say. The British used to say that in Londonderry or Derry, when they shot down Catholics. And it's not true.

I mean, the worst war crimes were committed around a place called Marwaheen, which is actually not a Shiite village, but a Sunni village right on the border with Israel. And the Israelis came along and both on radios and with bullhorns, or loudspeakers, we call them, said, “You must leave your village now. You've got two hours to leave.” And the people packed into a convoy, open-top truck, minibus, cars, left the village and were savagely attacked on the open road by the Israeli Air Force. That's a war crime.

Now, you have then two questions to ask, which we were asking all the time when we were down there ourselves. The Israelis say, “Well, we have these brilliant pilots, and we’re absolute pinpoint accuracy, surgical strikes.” Well, if that's true, then the pilots are deliberately intending to kill civilians. And that's a war crime. That’s a crime against humanity by the Israeli Air Force. Or, they don't know what they’re shooting at, in which case their pilots are a riffraff. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t.

And we had the same thing in 1982. We had the same thing in ’93. We had the same thing in ’96. Here we go again with our little short memories in the news business. The same arguments: human shields, direct perfect pilots, synchronized bombing, surgical strikes. And they kill all these children again and again. And the people of Marwaheen were running away on the orders of the Israeli Army. That's a war crime.

When you approach the villages now -- it's funny, Amy. I was going around -- during the war, you could only be conscious of what's 50 meters each side of you, because you’re trying to stay alive. And I’m one of those guys who does not wear a helmet and flak jacket. It’s too hot. Anyway, I don’t trust them. You can't run fast enough. But going back now and looking at the damage is even more astonishing than when you were there during the war, because you couldn't have time to look at it. And what happened is, you’ll go over this hillside, and you’ll see this hillside of flowers and poppies and tobacco fields looking very neat. In the background, you’ll say, “Oh, that’s Sadikin. I was there last week.” And you’ll go closer to it, and you’ll realize that the buildings don't have the proper shape anymore. And as you approach it, you realize that the village is gray ash.

I took some pictures in a village south of the Litani a couple of hours after the ceasefire came into force in August, and I didn't realize when I was taking the pictures how bad the damage was, because I was too busy concentrating on the camera. I’m one of these people who still uses real film, because there’s definition. I don't use a digital camera. And I got the pictures back to Beirut and took them in to be developed. And I have them blown up big size, so I can understand which is the picture I send to London, because I do my own editing.

And I picked up this picture of this village street, and I said, “It looks Ypres.” It looks like one of those First World War pictures that my father took, which I still have, of villages in the north of France, which had been fought over. This village had been fought over. And I sent it to London. And within an hour, the foreign editor at the Independent on Sunday came back to me and said, “It looks like Ypres.” I said, “Those are exactly the same words I used, you know?” And that’s what it looks like. And, you know, while I was there, there were Hezbollah men and Lebanese soldiers, supposedly meant to be antagonists, and the Lebanese Red Cross, all of them trying to move these slabs of stone, because of the terrible stench underneath. In that village alone, they found 36 civilians buried, rotting under each others' corpses, civilians, in their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk. We spoke yesterday in Chicago. He is chief Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London.

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