Swingback by Mike Blanchfield

Author:Mike Blanchfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780773548985
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Israel and the Middle East

25 JULY 2006

Israel’s war on Hezbollah in Lebanon is in its fourteenth day. For nine of them, bombs have been falling in a belt of land no wider than five kilometres at Lebanon’s southern border. The Israeli Defence Forces has designated this patch of land a “Special Security Zone.” Three dozen Lebanese villages, two dozen United Nations observation posts, and several Hezbollah positions lie within the zone. The UN Patrol Base Khiam is one of them. The fortified twostorey building with an underground bunker sits in a compound ringed by razor wire and perched high atop a hill looking down on Lebanon and, four kilometres further south, on Israel itself. The base was established in 1978 by a UN Security Council resolution confirming the withdrawal of the Israeli military from Lebanon. A pair of Hezbollah positions sits two hundred metres from Khiam, one to the north, another west.

The Hezbollah-Israel war began two weeks earlier, after the militants started shooting rockets into Israel and then killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two more along the border. On that day, Prime Minister Stephen Harper sparked heated criticism in Canada when he called the Israeli response – a massive aerial bombardment – “measured.” The Conservative government was accused of favouring Israel in its ongoing, unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. Now Harper was about to spark controversy again. This time it would be over his initial reaction to the death of a Canadian peacekeeper and three of his UN colleagues on this day.

A bomb dropped by an Israel Defence Forces warplane crushed the bunker where forty-three-year-old Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener was watching the war. “Wolf” was a gregarious, mustached paratrooper with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the married father of a grown daughter and stepson.1 His two decades in the Canadian Forces brought him to Cyrus, Bosnia, and Congo, and he’d trained with the U.S. Green Berets.2 Hess-von Kruedener had arrived in the Middle East the previous autumn to work with the UN Truce Supervision Organization based in Jerusalem. He was part of a four-person team assigned to Patrol Base Khiam along with officers from China, Finland, and Austria.

They all died together on 25 July 2006.

The sixty-six-page report of the Canadian Forces Board of Inquiry told the story of his final hours. It noted that the “clashes between the IDF and Hezbollah escalated to the point that there was a large scale protracted land incursion into South Lebanon by the IDF,” with “no traditional military front” and “pockets of operations.”3 On the day of the fatal bombing, Hess-von Kruedener’s base was hit by three waves of Israeli bombardment, including four 155 mm artillery rounds that landed in the base compound at 6:29 p.m.4 UN peacekeeping leadership decided that they would withdraw their four people from Patrol Base Khiam the following morning at 7:00 a.m. Meanwhile, rockets continued to fall. Radio transmissions from the base reported “firing close” to it at 7:15 p.m., 7:16 p.m., and 7:17 p.m. At 7:25 p.

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