Hezbollah rejects war crimes allegations

Correspondents Report - Sunday, 17 September , 2006 

Reporter: David Hardaker

HAMISH ROBERTSON: The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has rejected an Amnesty International report accusing it of committing war crimes when it fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Israeli citizens during the recent conflict.

In the north of Israel, though, Hezbollah's protests just don't wash.

Smadar Haran has lived for years under the threat of Hezbollah attacks in the northern town of Nahariya.

But Smadar Haran is also a survivor of a horrific series of murders carried out by a Lebanese militant championed by Hezbollah.

Our Middle East Correspondent, David Hardaker, has compiled this report.

SMADAR HARAN: We have been under attack here for many, many years. And there were terror attack, Katyusha attack, and many people got killed here in the north.

And the most sad part is that we've never seen that the Lebanese Government or the army tried to stop it.

DAVID HARDAKER: There's good reason for Smadar Haran demanding the Lebanese Government control the south of its country.

Thirty years ago he life was shattered when a man called Samir Kuntar slipped from southern Lebanon into the town of Nahariya.

He came on a mission to kill Israelis. Unfortunately for Smadar Haran, he and his gang chose at random her family home.

SMADAR HARAN: He is a murderer, and he's a very brutal murderer, and vicious one.

He was wanted for five life sentences plus 47 years in jail in Israel.

DAVID HARDAKER: Kuntar seized her husband Danny, and their four-year-old girl Einat.

He took them down to the local beach. There he shot Danny and he smashed the little girl's head repeatedly on a rock until she too was dead.

Smadar Haran meanwhile had hidden in the attic of her home with her other daughter, two-year-old Yael.

There, in cold fear, the young mother covered her daughter's mouth to keep her quiet, lest the killers hear them.

In this most desperate of positions she recalled the stories her own mother had told her from the Holocaust.

SMADAR HARAN: When it happened and I was hiding, I felt as if it happened to me before, that this is something I know from all the stories. And while they were trying to find us, listening to the cry of my daughter and so on, this is exactly from the stories of the Holocaust.

DAVID HARDAKER: In the process of trying to survive, Smadar Haran killed her own daughter.

SMADAR HARAN: And then at the end of the night my whole family was dead. My daughter never came back to consciousness.

And it took two hours until somebody came to rescue us, because nobody knew where the attack took place.

DAVID HARDAKER: How do you recover from an event like that?

SMADAR HARAN: It was very hard because there was nobody. You knkow, I had my friends of course, but I didn't have my daughters.

Nobody could call me mummy again. And I decided ... it was understood that I have to begin from the most simple things.

But I think that as soon as I understood that I have only two choices; one is to live and one is to die.

And to die, I could take my life, you know. But what is the meaning of to live? And to live for me is not just to survive. I don't see myself as a survivor, because to survive is not enough. I think that from the person I was before, I was very young then, I was 27 years old, but I knew who I was, and I always trusted in people. And I always had belief in others and so on.

I decided I have to go and trust and not to become full of hatred. And I don't have spare time or energy to put it into hatred and so on.

I felt always that I have a lot of love to give, and a lot of things I could do.

DAVID HARDAKER: Smadar has rebuilt a life. She married again, and now has two teenage daughters.

Her personal story is powerfully symbolic for Israel and its battle to justify its massive assault on southern Lebanon, which saw the Jewish state also accused of war crimes.

SMADAR HARAN: The terror group that were ... always used the population.

They were hiding in the population. They were shooting from the houses. And when Israel was defending, it looked always as we are the bad guys, we are attacking a, you know, population.

But that's why I say nobody attacks from my house or from any private house here. We even don't have here army bases, although we live on the border.

So I feel, and I wish that Lebanon could, you know, take some responsibility and to try to start to rule, you know, this area.

Because in my point of view, many times, I saw it and I felt that there are two kinds of hostages. We are hostages of the terror groups, and the people northern to south Lebanon, are also hostages of this group.

HAMISH ROBERTSON: Smadar Haran speaking to our Middle East Correspondent, David Hardaker.