Craig Murray, “Ceaseless Fire” (2025)
Continuing his tour of Lebanon, UK citizen journalist Craig Murray visits southern Lebanon to find that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) continue to occupy the area in violation of the current ceasefire deal with Lebanon. He visits the town of Khiam – the site of a former notorious POW camp controlled from 1975 to the early 2000s by the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army, later converted into a museum by the Lebanese government and destroyed by the Israeli air force in 2006 – and other towns in the area that were occupied by the IDF in late 2024. All these towns suffered extreme damage and resemble war zones. Astonishingly though, as Murray and his driver travel through the towns, local people they pass look up from the wreckage they are inspecting and greet them with smiles, as though they are having a normal day just like any other!
In one town – I forget which it was – Murray visits what was once a wealthy neighbourhood and surveys the severe destruction wrought by the IDF. He enters the house of Dr Julia Ali and discovers the piano (once featured in a video that went viral) all but unsalvageable, its inner frames and strings wrecked and pulled apart. Inspecting other rooms, Murray finds slashed upholstery on chairs. All electrical equipment is missing (that is, stolen). In one room, Murray finds the remains of a meal and faeces spread on the floor. Graffiti in Hebrew letters is scrawled on several walls. Murray shudders to consider the psychology behind IDF soldiers’ wanton vandalism and theft, and their deliberate and literal shitting on other people’s possessions and properties.
Murray also visits a part of the Litani River in the Khiam Valley where IDF soldiers shot film of themselves that was later used in a propaganda film suggesting that they had reached this part of the river through fighting, when in fact there had been no fighting. The Litani River area is important in this part of the Levant as the river is large and the focus of a large agricultural region, so it is much coveted by Israel as part of its Eretz Israel agenda.
This is a remarkable mini documentary, made by extraordinary brave people, in which Murray lets his camera do most of the talking and his monologues basically explain what the camera focuses on or what the context behind the scenes focused upon may be. The destruction, vandalism, looting and sheer disregard for other people demonstrate more than anything else the moral depravity rife through the IDF. Nothing more needs to be said.