Nahr al-Bared

This is an excerpt from a recent Robert Fisk report from the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al-Bared as the Lebanese Army fires into the camp in an attempt to root out Fatah al-Islam militants.

What, I kept asking myself yesterday, have we unleashed now? Well, you can ask Suheila Mustafa who stood yesterday at the bedside of her 45-year-old sister, Samia, so terribly wounded by army shellfire in the face that she could neither talk nor focus upon us with her bloated left eye. "We had just woken up when we heard the first barrage of gunfire," she said. "My sister was beside me and fell down with her head bleeding. She hemorrhaged from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At last my brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this. The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say 'thank you' to him and let us have more shelling. And I would like to thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say thanks - really thanks - very much to George Bush and to Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank them for these shells and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice really wants to send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better hurry up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man - and then we'll see!"

The reports coming out of Lebanon state that Fatah al-Islam is about 700 fighters strong, but that only 3% of them are actually Palestinian. That's 21 of 700. And just a reminder: Fatah al-Islam is NOT "Fatah" - the fifty year old Palestinian Liberation Movement, Yasser Arafat's organization that represented Palestinians legitimate struggle for national liberation.