Qana – Sunday July 30th , 2006
Only to let you know that these are 55 civilians, all killed , 20 of them are kids betwween 7 months and 12 years old.
Only to let you know that a number of these children are handicapped, they were hit in the last Qana massacre in 1996.
Only to let you know CNN and BBC are hosting IDF spokespeople who tell the world that these civilians were warned to leave , but they just didn’t.
Only to let you know the air strikes took place at 1:00 am , all they people were sleeping, in their pyjamas, bare feet, in a shelter. The house was hit twice. Twice. To make sure they will all die.
Only to let you know that despite the fact that we’re animals, but it would have been impossible for animals to sleep had there been any shelling from anywhere close , as the IDF alleges.
Only to let you know you free media won’t show you these pictures.
Only to let you know that this is not the first time this happens , and I can promise you it won’t be the last time.
She also sent pictures, which have been uploaded to the Flickr account. As always, be warned: they are very graphic. There is also a previous set from a few days ago here, and another of the environmental damage done by oil spills from Israeli warships on Lebanon’s beaches.
The 1996 Qana massacre was largely ignored by the international community after the initial outrage that forced Israel to stop its “Grapes of Wrath” operation. But there never was any follow up beyond condemnations by human rights groups, as the Wikipedia entry linked above notes:
Amnesty International conducted an on-site investigation of the incident in collaboration with military experts, using interviews with UNIFIL staff and civilians in the compound, and posing questions to the IDF, who did not reply. Amnesty concluded, “the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound, although the motives for doing so remain unclear. The IDF have failed to substantiate their claim that the attack was a mistake. Even if they were to do so they would still bear responsibility for killing so many civilians by taking the risk to launch an attack so close to the UN compound.”
Human Rights Watch concurred, “The decision of those who planned the attack to choose a mix of high-explosive artillery shells that included deadly anti-personnel shells designed to maximize injuries on the ground — and the sustained firing of such shells, without warning, in close proximity to a large concentration of civilians — violated a key principle of international humanitarian law.”
Ten years later and Israel carries out the same attack. It might have not if senior officers who made the decision had been pursued for war crimes, of if the US had put pressure or ended weapon shipments to a state that is a serial war crimes committer, it might not have happened.
QANA MASSACRE & COVER-UP: NO ONE HELD ACCOUNTABLE, NO COMPENSATION PAID
ANOTHER TERRIBLE U.N. FAILURE
MER – Washington, 4/18/98 – Today, April 18th, marks the two-year anniversary of one of the most brutal and unforgivable massacres in Middle East History.
The name “Qana”, like those of “Sabra and Chatilla” and “Deir Yassein”, goes down in history as among Israel’s most brutal and outrageous acts. And it should not be forgotten that without the ongoing and constant support and assistance of the United States, Israel could not act as it does nor prevent international sanctions against it.
Even though the U.N. formally found that Israel had purposefully brought about the massacre and then grossly lied to cover up its deeds — itself a unique finding for the U.N. and one which was further supported by an independent Amnesty International investigation and report — to this date no one has been brought to justice and both the massacre and the cover-up have gone completely unpunished. Much flowed to and from Qana. Like the assassination of “The Engineer” in Gaza the previous January, Qana backfired on Shimon Peres personally. His attempts to look tough and act with military force in order to win the upcoming election instead resulted in a wave of Hamas suicide-attacks and the downward spiral in what was already a deceptive and disingenuous “peace process.” And the defeat of Peres has since lead to another round in the “good cop/bad cop” maneuvering by the politicians who have a way of claiming things would have worked out, “if only” this or that… Of course the actual realities are otherwise. Just as the Qana massacre was so terribly distorted and covered-up; much the same is done daily by the same political players when it comes to what the “peace process” is really all about, rather than what they say it is all about. The following was originally published by MID-EAST REALITIES in June of 1996:
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MID-EAST REALITIES SPECIAL:
QANA MASSACRE COVERUP SUCCESSFUL:
U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL AND SEC-GEN BOUTROS-GHALI COLLAPSE UNDER U.S. PRESSURE
PERES’ HOPE TO BECOME U.N. SEC-GEN UNDERMINED
In April, the Israelis brutally massacred over a hundred persons at the Qana U.N. Base in Southern Lebanon. A U.S./Israeli cover-up immediately took place. However unexpected hard evidence, including a video tape of the attack, convinced U.N. investigators that the attack was premeditated. Severe pressure was brought on U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali not to release the report to the Security Council or the public. However, after watering it down as best he could Boutros-Ghali was forced to release the report, some U.N. officials going so far as to indicate they would resign if he did not do so. Shamefully though the U.N. Security Council has refused to act on the report or to hold the Israelis accountable. Of course the American veto threat and tremendous pressures upon Boutros-Ghali and member states at the U.N. was behind this further demonstration of U.N. impotence andcowardice.
The only good thing to come from the Qana Massacre is that there is no longer a likelihood of Shimon Peres becoming Secretary-General of the U.N. Peres is known to covet the job. At first, shortly after Binyamin’s Netanyahu’s victory, Peres and his long-time aide Yossi Beilin, maneuvered to join another “national unity government” with Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Peres served as Foreign Minister in previous Likud-led governments, as did Yitzhak Rabin who served as Defense Minister. Realizing this effort would probably fail, at the same time Peres took steps to reinvigorate the idea of his being nominated to become U.N. Secretary-General — an idea Peres (with American encouragement) had pushed prior to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The notion that since an Egyptian had been Secretary- General, now an Israeli should be selected, was one Peres and friends thought they could use to catapult him into the job. With Qana still fresh in memory, it seems this latest Peres gambit is running into considerable roadblocks though there may be further attempts to resuscitate the idea later this year.
In an ironic twist of fate, Peres’ own most recent duplicity did him in. After a half-year cease-fire with Hamas, it was Peres’ assassination of Yehya Ayyash, “the Engineer”, in Gaza in January that unleased the terror-wave in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that in turn led to the attacks on Hizbollah in Lebanon, that then led to Qana — all of which combined to lead to Peres’ electoral defeat. In short, the Israeli people did not believe or trust Peres; and for good reasons. Certainly it would be the height of historical chicanery if the notion of Peres heading the U.N. after an American/Israeli effort to push out Boutros-Ghali should again be pushed forward.
Robert Fisk, writing in THE INDEPENDENT newspaper, has done more than any other investigative journalist to report about the realities of the recent situation in the Middle East — the false “peace process”; the deceptions of Yasser Arafat as he pretends to have an embryonic State and emulates Israeli repression tactics against his own people; the duplicitous conduct of Rabin and Peres in preaching peace while pursuing Middle Eastern apartheid.
The following article by Fisk was published a few weeks ago in THE INDEPENDENT and uncovers more of the realities behind the Qana Massacre and Shimon Peres’ decline.
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THE DEADLY SECRET THAT LED TO BLOODBATH AT QANA
By Robert Fisk
Tyre — An Israeli army operation to plant booby-trap bombs inside the United Nations zone in southern Lebanon led to the Qana massacre last month in which well over 100 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli shells while sheltering in a UN base. It now emerges that the Israeli “patrol” which came under mortar fire from Hizbollah guerrillas on 18 April — the incident which led to the Qana bloodbath — had been tasked to leave plastic explosive charges and mines near the village of Henniyeh, about five miles from Qana.
The UN’s official report, which suggested that the Israeli massacre of civilians was deliberate, quoted Brigadier General Dan Harel, the commander of the Israeli army’s artillery corps, as saying that an Israeli patrol, whose location was not given, had come under mortar fire from the Qana area and that at least one round landed 40m from the Israeli troops. What had not hitherto been revealed was the task the Israeli soldiers had been engaged in, north of their occupation area and inside the UN zone, when they came under fire. A similar and even more complicated field of plastic mines and booby traps was left by Israeli soldiers close to the village of Bradchit in the UN’s Irish battalion area at around the same time.
Shortly after the Israeli bombardment ended, it now transpires, Israeli officers met UN ordnance officers and handed them detailed maps of the booby traps and mines they had planted. Polish troops subsequently defused the booby traps at Henniyeh on a hilltop from which Katyusha rockets had been fired in the past, although the Irish army took longer to complete its disposal of the Bradchit minefield.
What has caused particular concern to UN personnel is that it was a roadside bomb in the village of Bradchit that killed a Lebanese teenager last month, an explosion which prompted the Hizbollah to blame Israel and fire Katyushas across the border into Galilee in retaliation. Shimon Peres said at the time that Israel had nothing to do with the Bradchit bombs and the Katyusha retaliation set off Israel’s bloody Grapes of Wrath offensive. But the revelation that an Israeli unit was planting booby-trap devices in Bradchit and Henniyeh on 18 April has cast new doubt on Mr. Peres’s denial.
Nor did another claim by Mr. Peres during his abortive campaign for re-election –that the Hizbollah fired rockets at Israel from “within” the UN compound at Qana — do anything to repair the cyn
ical state of relations that now exist between Israel and the UN. Neither the Israeli army nor the UN believe that Hizbollah men opened fire on the Israelis from a UN position — the Hizbollah did so several 100 metres from the outer perimeter of the Qana camp — and UN officers are mystified as to why the Israeli Prime Minister should have made such a statement just before the election, when he must know that it is untrue.
“It was election time in Israel,” a security source in southern Lebanon commented. “On such occasions, truth goes out the window.”
The written ceasefire agreement that followed the end of the Israeli bombardment has meanwhile been rendered meaningless scarcely a day after Binyamin Netanyahu was elected Prime Minister.
The “monitoring committee” that was to have ensured that all parties complied with the truce terms has never met, and in the past three days the Hizbollah have killed four Israeli soldiers and two pro-Israeli militiamen inside the occupied zone of southern Lebanon. Since the ceasefire, the Israelis have also carried out three retaliatory air raids on Lebanon, without waiting for the truce committee to pronounce on Hizbollah attacks, as they are obliged to do under the truce agreement.
In an Israeli air raid on a Hizbollah arms dump near Baalbek before dawn yesterday, an attack which set off secondary explosions for an hour afterwards, three civilians were slightly wounded — another breach of the ceasefire terms, which state that civilians should not be harmed in any Israeli-Hizbollah battles inside Lebanon. Two civilians were also reported to have been wounded when the Hizbollah killed four Israeli soldiers at Marjayoun on Thursday. THE INDEPENDENT – SAT – JUNE 1, 1996
See also this http://www.norplatoon.net/content/view/87/53/“ rel=”nofollow”>more recent article by Fisk on the discovery of video footage proving the presence of an IDF drone at Qana during the 1996 “accident.”
[…] The Arabist news item. Pictures collected by Hanady Salman, editor of as-Safir newspaper, of the Israeli attack on Qana. Late Newsflash. […]
as Mr. Mitch Prothero proclaims to be an explosive super
expert – “They send huge bombs capable of killing things for
hundreds of meters around those targets to destroy them”
and how would he know that ? but that’s peanuts….
check this out :
1. “the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been
killed so far”
yet the lebanese UN delegate declared that more than 1000
lebanese cevilians were killed in the recent IDF attacks,
so which one is it ? you better set your stories straight….
2. “”terrorists” who callously use the civilian infrastructure for
protection.”
you are more than welcome to go into :
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/456/819.html
this is a israely news site, if you know hebrew you can read,
if not – there is a movie that shows rocket launching trucks
hiding at cevilian houses, that is – if you don’t think that the
movie is a fictisious one in the spirit of area 51 stories….
3. “My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that
in fact Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more
numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more
numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians like the
plague. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and
Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians,
they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so
many Palestinian militants have been. “
so actually the lebanese people don’t want the hizbulla at
lebanon, right ? the hizbulla is actually a “tumor” in lebanon ?
well if that is the case – why don’t you let israel, or better –
an armed international force to deal with the hizbulla ?
4. the israely army didn’t notified the cevilians of the upcoming
attacks :
the israely army has been dropping posters calling
the lebanese cevilians to evacuate from south lebanon for
more than a week !
some news bulletins have even shown some of the posters
that have flew across the border due to heavy winds on one
day.
furthermore – israel has been broadcasting similar
announcments by radio and television to the lebanese
cevilians.
p.s. i dare you to delete this comment and show your mouth
gagging way of fighting.
The allegations of videos showing HA rocket launchers in civilian areas are on par with the stories in the last few days that claim HA was using UN posts as human shields (the evidence being a private email from a now-dead UN observer at one of those posts – isn’t it sweet that he said the IDF had every right to attack his post, justifying his own death? and convenient that he’s dead and cannot speak for himself?) http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153292018216&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
It’s awfully convenient that “evidence” that suits the Israeli hawkish viewpoint can only be found in rightist Israeli news sources and cannot be verified by independent sources or the UN or human rights organizations.
And clearly these conspiracy theories aren’t even necessary, because Olmert et al. are quite willing to come out and say they need to break some eggs to achieve their military goals.
To hawkeye (an israely student)
I suggest that you read this:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14275.htm
Also written by an Israeli.
A wise man.
Can someone please explain something to me?
If a Hezbullah rocket made a direct hit on an apartment complex or something and killed lots of Israeli children, then Hezbullah would be ecstatic and proud…. so how can Hezbullah supporters try to take the moral high ground regarding Qana?
How do you know HA would be “ecstatic and proud” if it killed a lot of children in a direct rocket hit? Didn’t they apologize earlier when they did kill a child with a rocket?
Most people who write in this blog are “tuzaros”. Check for that word in the google. It means, approximately, barbarians, like the Goths, the Vandals or the Hunes of Atila in the first invasions, or the Hungarians, Bulgarians or Vikings in the second wave. People who rode on horse for many days and drank human blood.
But probably you can not ride and drink Coca-Cola. It doesnt really mate. You are “tuzaros” nonetheless.
How do you know HA would be “ecstatic and proud� if it killed a lot of children in a direct rocket hit?
Because they are doing their best to try it.
Didn’t they apologize earlier when they did kill a child with a rocket?
Only because the child was Arab. Killing Jewish children is part of their objective.
Please place your comments about the babaric acts of inhumanity carried out on innocent children in this conflict. This site is dedicated to make the world put pressure on our so called “leaders” . Stop these WAR CRIMES PLEASE
6 Haiku ( distorted by hot tears )
New Century
in the falsely promised land,
flesh fuses into stone.
Beneath a crushed home
children lie broken, silenced
in the name of ‘peace‘.
From the stretcher
hangs you daughter’s broken arm –
she’s waving goodbye.
Qana’s miracle,
how technology can turn
water unto blood.
Goliath’s reply
to David’s impudent stone,
raining cluster bombs.
The six pointed star
destroys itself, in frenzy
forms a crooked cross.
Do ever start what you cannot finish. Hizbully want to destroy Israel. They threw the first punch now they pay. Lebanon pays to as Hizbully is officially ellected, endorsed by you PM and president.
War and peace are 2 way street. If you chose peace Israel will respect you. If on the other hand you chose war and let Iran and Syria use you there is a price to pay.
rederico,
Actually I do ride, but I don’t drink blood. Or Coke for that matter. But I don’t think the Vikings, Hungarians and Bulgarians did either. Did the Vikings ride? I suspect your history is a little confused. As is your blanket condemnation of everyone who writes in the blog.
I am concerened about lives being lost. Be it An isreali child or Lebanese child. War is wrong. We all have a right to exist. The arabs should recongize the rights of Isreal to exist just as the isrealis should do the same