"No", I told the woman, her traumatised children clinging to her legs, "I can't say you are safe here; not one of us is safe. The Israelis are genocidal. But in Lebanon so far, I don't think they have bombed a school".
I was with one of 67 families, with 215 children, living as refugees in a small school at Ain Rumaila in Southern Beirut. The area borders the evacuated suburb of Dahiya which the Israelis are systematically demolishing, and bombings rattle the windows of the school every day.
This woman is a school teacher when at home in Southern Lebanon, and her husband a retired soldier. They had to leave their small town with no notice, through an intense air raid, as Israeli bombs destroyed buildings and killed and maimed people all round them.
They got out only with what they could carry. Their home was destroyed behind them.
Israel has targeted refugees all over Lebanon. Just the day before, we had been at the site of a refugee aid centre in central Beirut, which had been targeted for missile attack. The death toll on that attack has now risen to five, with seventeen seriously injured.
I reached that site before I could establish exactly what the target was:
My aim in visiting the school was to let a few refugees tell to camera their own stories about their daily pre-war lives and their communities, so that people might see them as individuals, and not just a huddled mass of misery.
I think that worked. Within 48 hours the resulting video will be available. But what this woman urgently wanted me to tell her was that now they are safe.
And I couldn't. If the children understood English, then I might perhaps have lied for their sake and replied that everything is OK. But the situation is too serious for self-serving false cheer.
Before I left, one of the families we met who have lost everything and are struggling with basic provision, absolutely insisted we sat and shared their meal of salad and lentils, cooked on a single burner ring directly on top of a gas bottle.
It was a deeply humbling experience to experience their graciousness and warmth to strangers.
Over 3,500 Lebanese have been killed, the majority of them women and children. The bombs that killed them were not only made in the USA, they were supplied by the USA for the purpose. As were the aircraft that dropped them.
The Americans are arrogant enough to send Amos Hochstein, born in the terrorist state to Israeli parents and himself a former member of the IDF, as their "peace envoy".
And it says everything about America's real interest in the region that Hochstein's official position in the Biden Administration is actually Energy Security Adviser.
As I explained in my last article, Israel's intensified bombing campaign is designed to terrify Lebanon into signing a peace deal that is actually a surrender. It guarantees Israeli armed forces access at will into Southern Lebanon, and military overflight of the entire country.
The access to Southern Lebanon in the latest draft has been supposedly toned down and phrased as "in pursuit of Israel's right of self-defence".
As the entire world has seen this last year and more that "Israel's right to self-defence" is interpreted by both Israel and the United States as the right to commit genocide, Lebanon would be utterly mad to sign this document.
Similarly Lebanon is supposed to be reassured by insertion of the USA as the "guarantor" of the agreement.
You read that right; the county which is currently funding and supplying the genocidal bombing of Lebanon is going to be the guarantor of its safety.
As always in such negotiations, neither side wishes to be seen to be standing in the way of a deal, so the Lebanese were polite to Hochstein and he is now shuttling off to Tel Aviv to seek Israeli agreement to little linguistic tweaks that make it all sound better.
I worry for Lebanon. In another post I will try to outline the myriad ways in which the USA and Israel are attempting to re-open the old divisions of the civil war to undermine the resistance.
One of those ways is of course to convince factions that Israel really wants peace and Hezbollah is blocking a reasonable deal. It is plainly not a reasonable deal, but people made desperate by Israel's state terror inflicted on their country, may see what they wish to believe.
Should Lebanon accept the deal in the interest of preserving unity, as the US connive, then I have no doubt whatsoever that this deal will shortly be understood to have been a key step on the path to Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon.
Because it is essential to understand that Greater Israel has been the goal all along of both Israel and the United States.
If you have not by now seen through the Biden administration's pretence of "trying to restrain" Israel, whilst providing ever greater funding and weapons for the genocide, then you are such a fool that I cannot help you.
Reporting from Lebanon
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