Arab Nations, China, Iran Condemn Israeli Minister’s Statement About Dropping Nuclear Bomb on Gaza 

A view of damaged buildings in Gaza following artillery strikes, as seen from southern Israel, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, November 14, 2023. (Reuters)
A view of damaged buildings in Gaza following artillery strikes, as seen from southern Israel, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, November 14, 2023. (Reuters)
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Arab Nations, China, Iran Condemn Israeli Minister’s Statement About Dropping Nuclear Bomb on Gaza 

A view of damaged buildings in Gaza following artillery strikes, as seen from southern Israel, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, November 14, 2023. (Reuters)
A view of damaged buildings in Gaza following artillery strikes, as seen from southern Israel, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, November 14, 2023. (Reuters)

Several Arab nations, China and Iran condemned an Israeli minister’s statement that a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was an option in the Israel-Hamas war, calling it a threat to the world.

At Monday’s long-planned opening of a United Nations conference whose goal is to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, many ambassadors expressed condemnations and criticisms of comments by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, who later called his remarks in a radio interview Sunday “metaphorical.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly disavowed the comments and suspended him from cabinet meetings.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its nuclear capability. It is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, and a former employee at its nuclear reactor served 18 years in Israeli prison for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal program to a British newspaper in 1986.

China’s deputy UN ambassador Geng Shuang said Beijing was “shocked,” calling the statements “extremely irresponsible and disturbing” and should be universally condemned.

He urged Israeli officials to retract the statement and become a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, considered the cornerstone of nuclear disarmament, as a non-nuclear weapon state “as soon as possible.”

Geng said China is ready to join other countries “to inject new impetus” to establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, saying there is greater urgency because of the situation in the current region.

UN disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu, who opened Monday’s fourth conference, didn’t mention Israel. But she said: “Any threat to use nuclear weapons is inadmissible.”

Nakamitsu reiterated the “urgency ... of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction,” stressing that “cool heads and diplomatic efforts” must prevail to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians, based on a two-state solution.

Oman’s UN Ambassador Mohamed Al-Hassan, speaking on behalf of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, said the threat to use nuclear weapons in Gaza “reaffirms the extremes and brutality of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people” and their “disregard for innocent life.” He called on the UNSecurity Council and the IAEA to take decisive action on the matter.

Lebanon’s Charge d’Affaires Hadi Hachem also condemned the Israeli heritage minister’s comments, stressing that “this self-acknowledgment of having nuclear weapons and the threat of using them by its officials, poses a serious threat to both regional and international peace and security.”

He urged Israel to stop “such rhetoric or posturing” and join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state.

Iran’s UN Ambassador Amir Iravani told the conference the nuclear threats directed toward Palestinians by high-ranking Israeli officials highlight Israel’s “pride” in having these weapons in its hands.

“The secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear capabilities poses a significant threat to regional stability,” he said. “In these critical times, the imperative to establish such a zone in the Middle East has never been more urgent.”

Israel did not speak Monday, but Netanyahu has said his country's biggest threat remains the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran, and it is prepared to prevent that from happening.

Efforts to create a nuclear-weapon-free zone date back to the 1960s and include a call by parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1995 and a 1998 General Assembly resolution asking countries to contribute to establishing it. The first UN conference aimed at creating a zone was held in November 2019.

Russia’s ambassador to the IAEA and other UN organizations based in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, told delegates Monday that given the new escalation of violence in the Middle East, a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the region “is more pertinent than ever.”

But he said Moscow is “extremely uncomfortable” that along with the two other sponsors of the 1995 resolution – the United States and the United Kingdom – the promise to establish a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East has not been met after almost 30 years. And for more than 20 years, “there’s been almost no progress whatsoever,” he said.



50 Years after Lebanon's Civil War Began, a Bullet-riddled Bus Stands as a Reminder

FILE - A militiaman aims his rifle down an alley at Christian forces on the other side of the Green Line, in Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 4, 1982. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - A militiaman aims his rifle down an alley at Christian forces on the other side of the Green Line, in Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 4, 1982. (AP Photo, File)
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50 Years after Lebanon's Civil War Began, a Bullet-riddled Bus Stands as a Reminder

FILE - A militiaman aims his rifle down an alley at Christian forces on the other side of the Green Line, in Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 4, 1982. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - A militiaman aims his rifle down an alley at Christian forces on the other side of the Green Line, in Beirut, Lebanon, Jan. 4, 1982. (AP Photo, File)

It was an ordinary day in Beirut. In one part of Lebanon's capital, a church was inaugurated, with the leader of the Christian Kataeb party there. In another, Palestinian factions held a military parade. Kataeb and Palestinians had clashed, again, that morning.

What happened next on April 13, 1975, would change the course of Lebanon, plunging it into 15 years of civil war that would kill about 150,000 people, leave 17,000 missing and lead to foreign intervention. Beirut became synonymous with snipers, kidnappings and car bombs.

Lebanon has never fully grappled with the war's legacy, and in many ways it has never fully recovered, 50 years later. The government on Sunday marked the anniversary with a small ceremony and minute of silence, a rare official acknowledgement of the legacy of the conflict.

The massacre Unrest had been brewing. Palestinian militants had begun launching attacks against Israel from Lebanese territory. Leftist groups and many Muslims in Lebanon sympathized with the Palestinian cause. Christians and some other groups saw the Palestinian militants as a threat.

At the time, Mohammad Othman was 16, a Palestinian refugee in the Tel al-Zaatar camp east of Beirut.

Three buses had left camp that morning, carrying students like him as well as militants from a coalition of hardline factions that had broken away from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They passed through the Ein Rummaneh neighborhood without incident and joined the military parade.

The buses were supposed to return together, but some participants were tired after marching and wanted to go back early. They hired a small bus from the street, Othman said. Thirty-three people packed in.

They were unaware that earlier that day, small clashes had broken out between Palestinians and Kataeb Party members guarding the church in Ein Rummaneh. A bodyguard for party leader Pierre Gemayel had been killed.

Suddenly the road was blocked, and gunmen began shooting at the bus “from all sides,” Othman recalled.

Some passengers had guns they had carried in the parade, Othman said, but they were unable to draw them quickly in the crowded bus.

A camp neighbor fell dead on top of him. The man’s 9-year-old son was also killed. Othman was shot in the shoulder.

“The shooting didn’t stop for about 45 minutes until they thought everyone was dead,” he said. Othman said paramedics who eventually arrived had a confrontation with armed men who tried to stop them from evacuating him, The Associated Press said.

Twenty-two people were killed.

Conflicting narratives

Some Lebanese say the men who attacked the bus were responding to an assassination attempt against Gemayel by Palestinian militants. Others say the Kataeb had set up an ambush intended to spark a wider conflict.

Marwan Chahine, a Lebanese-French journalist who wrote a book about the events of April 13, 1975, said he believes both narratives are wrong.

Chahine said he found no evidence of an attempt to kill Gemayel, who had left the church by the time his bodyguard was shot. And he said the attack on the bus appeared to be more a matter of trigger-happy young men at a checkpoint than a “planned operation.”

There had been past confrontations, "but I think this one took this proportion because it arrived after many others and at a point when the authority of the state was very weak,” Chahine said.

The Lebanese army had largely ceded control to militias, and it did not respond to the events in Ein Rummaneh that day. The armed Palestinian factions had been increasingly prominent in Lebanon after the PLO was driven out of Jordan in 1970, and Lebanese Christians had also increasingly armed themselves.

“The Kataeb would say that the Palestinians were a state within a state,” Chahine said. “But the reality was, you had two states in a state. Nobody was following any rules."

Selim Sayegh, a member of parliament with the Kataeb Party who was 14 and living in Ein Rummaneh when the fighting started, said he believes war had been inevitable since the Lebanese army backed down from an attempt to take control of Palestinian camps two years earlier.

Sayegh said men at the checkpoint that day saw a bus full of Palestinians with “weapons apparent” and "thought that is the second wave of the operation” that started with the killing of Gemayel's bodyguard.

The war unfolded quickly from there. Alliances shifted. New factions formed. Israel and Syria occupied parts of the country. The United States intervened, and the US embassy and Marine barracks were targeted by bombings. Beirut was divided between Christian and Muslim sectors.

In response to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, a Shiite militant group was formed in the early 1980s with Iranian backing: Hezbollah. It would grow to be arguably the most powerful armed non-state group in the region.

Hezbollah was the only militant group allowed to keep its weapons after Lebanon's civil war, given special status as a “resistance force” because Israel was still in southern Lebanon. After the group was badly weakened last year in a war with Israel that ended with a ceasefire, there has been increasing pressure for it to disarm.

The survivors

Othman said he became a fighter after the war started because “there were no longer schools or anything else to do.” Later he would disarm and became a pharmacist.

He remembers being bewildered when a peace accord in 1989 ushered in the end of civil war: “All this war and bombing, and in the end they make some deals and it’s all over.”

Of the 10 others who survived the bus attack, he said, three were killed a year later when Christian militias attacked the Tel al-Zaatar camp. Another was killed in a 1981 bombing at the Iraqi embassy. A couple died of natural causes, one lives in Germany, and he has lost track of the others.

The bus has also survived, as a reminder.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the attack, it was towed from storage on a farm to the private Nabu Museum in Heri, north of Beirut. Visitors took photos with it and peered into bullet holes in its rusted sides.

Ghida Margie Fakih, a museum spokesperson, said the bus will remain on display indefinitely as a “wake-up call” to remind Lebanese not to go down the path of conflict again.

The bus “changed the whole history in Lebanon and took us somewhere that nobody wanted to go,” she said.