This injunction scribbled in French on a chuck of tumble down wall at the entrance to what was once Qunaytra soon seems superfluous.

In June 1967, a smiling town of 37,000 inhabitants, living happily in the freshness of the winds blowing from over the snows of the Jabal al Sheikh (Mount Hermon), amongst its fruit trees, its vines, its wheat, its poultry and its oxen…

Today Qunaytra is no more than the ghost of a town. On either side of streets that are still in one piece the houses lie fallen, dismantled, and gutted, as if blown down by some giant hurricane. Three or four cracked minarets and the two towers of a church, with gaping holes in them, point symbolically towards the sky. Some way off, a building that was once a modern hospital with three hundred beds in rent with holes. Five or six houses, alone in the center, from a small unscathed island… Built as they are of volcanic rock (the rest of the town was concrete) the bulldozers could not shift them!

For the tragedy of Qunaytra is not that it was, like so many other towns in the world, alas, pounded by artillery and flattened by air forces; there was particularly no fighting here. Qunaytra was "totally and systematically" destroyed by Israel. All the international experts have affirmed that the destruction was "deliberate". No need to be an expert to spot the effects of deliberate dynamiting. The buildings have not been blown up; they just caved in, as the supporting pillars were knocked away. The destructive fury of the occupying forces, which in June 1974 were suddenly forced to evacuate the Syrian town they had held since 1967, is shown by any number of other details: electricity and telephone poles sawn up; mosques, churches and cemetery sacked; removal of commemorative plaques from the Monument to the Dead; and even the precious tiles that covered the Khaled Ibn al-Walid Mosque, etc.