‘If we have any honour, we will defend the Palestinian people’

On October 24, 2023, I travelled from Beirut to areas of south Lebanon bordering on Israel.

After stopping in Qana (which is the subject of a separate report I published yesterday), I visited the village of Rmaich. There, I spoke with the owner of a hotel about Israel’s repeated artillery attacks on the areas surrounding his hotel. As he and I spoke, we could hear Israeli drones in the sky.

I then visited an olive grove near Rmaich. There, members of a Lebanese family were picking olives despite the danger of an artillery strike. The olive harvesting season has begun in Lebanon, and these farmers felt they had no alternative but to tend to their olive trees.

From there, I travelled to a United Nations military compound on the southern coast of Lebanon, in the area of Naqoura. That U.N. compound lies a few kilometres to the north of the Lebanon-Israel border and was recently struck by a rocket of unknown provenance.

Finally, I visited a compound in the coastal city of Tyre which currently houses persons from south Lebanon who have been displaced by Israel’s shelling of their villages. Although most of the displaced persons who have sought sanctuary in that compound did not want to speak on camera, I managed to interview one man from Naqoura. He has been in the compound for two weeks. He referred to Palestinians as his ‘brothers and sisters’, and expressed the view that, ‘if we have any honour, we will defend the Palestinian people’.

My full report can be watched and listened to here: