… I will do such things –What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth
-William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 2, scene 4.
Dispatch from the Past
WBT began posting on the 13th of July 2006 in response to Israel’s bombing of Beirut and its International Airport.
It seems fitting that we publish this brief excerpt from Robert Fisk’s Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East. Written as a follow-up to his landmark The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, it reflects Fisk’s eyewitness reporting on the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war and his enduring commitment to documenting the human consequences of conflict.
Fisk covered the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the 1982 Israeli invasion and massacres at Shabra and Shatila, the 1993 Israeli bombardment, which was repeated in 1996 and again in 2006.
On each occasion, only the dead were new.
We note here that Hezbollah emerged as a political resistance arising in response to Israeli invasions of Lebanon from 1982 onwards. A political organisation, Hezbollah developed an extensive network of:
- schools,
- clinics and hospitals,
- welfare and reconstruction programs,
- charities,
- and other social services,
which became a major source of legitimacy among many Lebanese, particularly in southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and the Bekaa Valley.
Only through an understanding of the past can we hope to understand the present.
Ian Curr, 13 July 2026
“How brave our warships looked that dawn.”
— Chapter 10, Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk.
“Well, under the cover of a rocket attack on Israeli towns, Hezbollah men had crossed the border fence that morning and had seized two Israeli soldiers inside Israeli territory, killing three others as they did so.
An Israeli tank that pursued the captors into Lebanese territory hit a mine, which killed another four Israeli troops. Then, an infantryman beside the tank was killed.
By evening, the UN official, senior official in Lebanon, Geir Pedersen, was calling the Hezbollah attack a violent breach of the UN’s Blue Line, the hastily constructed version of the international frontier created in June 2000 by an over-ambitious UN civil servant.
But in Beirut, many Lebanese were angered when squads of Hezbollah men drove through the streets of the capital to celebrate the border crossing. All that night, I heard the jets whispering high above the Mediterranean, waiting for dawn, for it was then that they descended.
They came first to a little village of Dweir, near Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, where an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on the home of a Shia Muslim cleric. He was killed along with his wife and eight of his children.
Then, the planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a family of seven. It was a brisk start to day two of Israel’s war on terror, a conflict that used some of the same language as George W. Bush’s larger war on terror.”
Robert Fisk**
in Night of Power: the Betrayal of the Middle East
13 July 2006
Who actually made this quote up: The (anti-semitism) laws were a “common sense” response to the Bondi terror attack, Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington said in February.
Terrible report in Brisbane Times: “The highly contested phrases are ‘seen by some’* to advocate for the genocide of Jewish people from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” See Gaza flotilla detainee arrested during protest at Brisbane court https://share.google/2ZfhGkkUqYkze5M9v
* By whom? No sources named. The article is a verbatim wire from AAP printed without question by the Brisbane Times. Shame on the journalists who put up with this mendacious reporting, especially given the hundreds of journalists that have been slaughtered by Israel.
The IDF is knee-deep in the blood of Palestinian and Lebanese children, and yet the reporters claim that it is the Palestinians who wish the genocide and ethnic cleansing.