Camp Shelling Was a Tragedy Waiting to Happen, Observers Believe

On the first day of “Operation Grapes of Wrath” last week, Israel’s air force fired “smart bombs” at three windows on the first floor of a 10-story building in a Beirut neighborhood of high-rises and showed the world aerial photographs of their high-tech precision firing.

On Thursday, Israel fired 155-millimeter cannon shells at rocket launchers belonging to Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, missing its target by a distance of three football fields. This time, the pictures broadcast across the world showed dead refugees at a U.N. camp in flames.

The killing of more than 75 civilians in Qana prompted President Clinton to back off his nearly unqualified support of the Israeli operation, which began in retaliation for continued attacks on northern Israel by pro-Iranian Hezbollah guerrillas based in southern Lebanon. Clinton’s sudden call Thursday for a cease-fire will likely force a halt to Operation Grapes of Wrath earlier than the Israeli government intended.

The Israeli military has gone into high gear to defend itself, blaming the tragedy on Hezbollah; military officials point out that even the United Nations recognizes that the Shiite Muslim guerrillas fired rockets from nearby the U.N. base and drew the Israeli return fire.

But still the world is left with two starkly contrasting images--and wondering how Israel’s high-tech military could have been so stunningly accurate in the first attack and so fatally wrong in the latter.

To begin with, there is a radical difference in the kind of weapons used in the two attacks. Neither is meant for fighting the kind of hit-and-run guerrilla war that Hezbollah is waging, but the fighter jets and helicopter gunships the Israelis used in Beirut are at least precision weapons, whereas the artillery used on Qana--the 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzer--is known to be far less accurate.

In that sense, the incident at Qana appeared to some military observers as a tragedy waiting to happen.

In the days leading up to Thursday’s tragedy, the Israeli army had fired up to 15,000 artillery shells at suspected guerrilla positions in or near southern Lebanese villages, U.N. officials said, and only a handful landed on Hezbollah military targets. The rest landed in an area where tens of thousands of civilians remained despite Israeli warnings to evacuate.

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With such a rain of powerful shells, said Mikael Lindvall, a spokesman for the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, “the room for accidents gets smaller and smaller.”

On Thursday night, Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak publicly declared that he believed that “there has been no mistake in judgment” on the part of his troops. But the commander of the U.N. force, Gen. Stanislaw Wozniak, said Shahak had apologized to him and said “human error” was to blame for the shelling of the U.N. base.

Wozniak said that was no excuse for the attack. “Simply, you don’t attack civilians,” he said during a visit to the base. “You don’t attack U.N. positions.”

Timor Goksel, spokesman for the 4,500-member U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, said Israeli officials have told them the soldiers “overshot” their target.

Goksel said that shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday, Hezbollah guerrillas fired two Katyusha rockets and eight mortars from a cemetery about 380 yards south of the U.N. post. About 15 minutes later, he said, Israel let loose a barrage of artillery fire “without warning” and two shells fell on the compound where about 800 civilians had been camped since the Israeli operation began a week earlier.

The shells exploded in a blast of shrapnel and heat-turned-fire that claimed at least 75 dead and 100 wounded.

“The explanation they are giving us is that they double- and triple-checked before firing. They know this [Hezbollah] position was about 350 meters from a U.N. post, but they thought they had an adequate safety margin. . . . They say the artillery overshot,” Goksel said.

Normally, a 155-millimeter shell falls within about 50 yards of its target, military experts say. How or why Israeli soldiers overshot the target is unclear, and Israeli military spokesmen declined to discuss specifics of the case Friday except to reinforce the point that whatever happened was in self-defense.

During Operation Grapes of Wrath, the Israeli military unveiled new radar for identifying the launch point of a Katyusha rocket within seconds after Hezbollah fires it. The location is put on a digital map at the command post and transferred by computer to the cannon batteries, which quickly fire at the launcher.

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According to Avihai Beker, a military analyst for the Tel Aviv newspaper Maariv: “The whole process from the moment of the launching of the Katyusha until the firing of the shells toward the launcher is extremely short.”

At Qana, no Katyusha launchers were hit. One military source trying to explain the accidental deaths said the mistake was sad but, unfortunately, not uncommon.

“I have been shelled myself by my own troops. In the Lebanon war, 30% to 40% of our casualties were by ‘friendly fire,’ ” the source said, referring to Israel’s 1982-85 invasion of Lebanon. “Casualties are going to happen.”

Hezbollah formed as a response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and says its goal is to evict Israeli troops from the 9-mile-wide “security zone” they occupy in the southern part of the country. Israel says it will not leave southern Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed.

Hezbollah’s main weapons against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon recently have been roadside bombs and suicide bombers. They fire the Katyusha rockets at northern Israel, allegedly in reprisal for Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians behind whom Israel says Hezbollah guerrillas hide. Israel said it started Operation Grapes of Wrath to stop the Katyusha attacks on northern Israeli towns.

The United Nations has had peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon since 1978, when they arrived to try to separate Israeli troops from Palestinian guerrillas who were fighting in the area.

Israel evicted the Palestinians to Tunisia in 1982, but the United Nations and Israel have remained.

The Israeli military source, who asked not to be identified, said the military has standing orders not to fire at suspected Hezbollah targets near U.N. posts.

“I have been in Lebanon and seen [Hezbollah] setting off Katyushas, and I couldn’t return fire because it was next to the U.N. I knew where they were within 100 meters, and I couldn’t do anything,” he said.

Miller reported from Jerusalem and Daniszewski from Beirut.