Israeli press: No rockets fired at Israel from Qana Wednesday , 02 August 2006 Bethlehem-Ma'an-Israeli press sources revealed on Tuesday that the Israeli army had not observed rockets being launched near the home the Israeli war planes demolished in Qana, which killed more than 50 Lebanese civilians. It was also revealed that they had not received information indicating that there were Hezbollah fighters in the house or near it. The Israeli force shelling of the home was part of a policy to bomb the houses within the a certain radius from within which rockets were being launched - even if there were homes in the area that had no relationship to the launching of the rockets. The Israeli army confirmed that conducted and aerial distribution of leaflets over the village of Qana telling the residents to evacuate the village a few days before the massacre. On Monday two contradictory stories about what events in Qana emerged: In the first version, the Israeli army claimed that they had bombed the house once, but did not destroy it. They said that there was ammunition belomging to Hezbollah stored in the house which exploded resulting in the massacre. However residents of the Qana village insisted that the Israeli army bombed the house twice within the space of two minutes. In the alternate version, the head of the Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre Ziad Yazbek confirmed that news of the massacre reached their office at 7:00 am in the morning but that ambulances reached there late because of the ongoing Israeli air force attacks on the the roads which lead to the village. Lebanese sources blamed the time-lag between the massacre and the news reaching the press to the fact that the Qana village has been completely cut-off from the world as a result of the Israeli attacks on the village. The Israeli army had claimed immediately after the massacre that several rockets were launched at Israel from the village Qana, yet once the weakness of this claim became clear, they quietyl withdrew it. http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=35829
As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike, questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident. It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time. The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday. The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/745185.html
The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.
The deadly secret that led to the Qana massacre index: Robert Fisk | war crimes The deadly secret that led to bloodbath at Qana ROBERT FISK Independent, 1 June 1996 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 cynical 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. http://fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=132
Bloggers raise questions about Kana The IDF is looking into allegations raised over the past few days by several pro-Israel, Jewish and conservative Weblogs that Hizbullah may have staged aspects of the Kana tragedy on Sunday, in which some 60 Lebanese bodies were removed from a building that collapsed seven hours after being hit in an Israel Air Force strike. The dead were mainly children, women and elderly people. The International Committee of the Red Cross Mission in Israel said Tuesday that it would inform its Swiss headquarters about the allegations and seek to clarify the questions raised. ... At a press conference on Sunday night, Air Force Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel said the building was struck by IAF missiles a little after midnight, but only collapsed seven hours later, at about 7 a.m. Eshel said he could not explain what caused the structure to collapse so many hours after it was hit, and speculated, while stressing that he had no conclusive evidence, about whether Hizbullah had played a role in what had transpired, perhaps by firing on the building itself. Another possibility that has been raised is that the building sustained damage from the original strike, but collapsed only later from structural damage or the impact of further IAF strikes nearby. Alternatively, the building may have contained Hizbullah weaponry that detonated after the strike. ... According to Elon, the IDF had "sources and information which were sure that civilians had left the area after warning pamphlets were dropped," but the information turned out to be mistaken. According to one of the Web sites raising questions about the affair, Israel Insider, "the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to 'plant' bodies killed in previous fighting... place them in the basement, and then engineer a 'controlled demolition' to fake another Israeli attack." An official IDF spokesperson said the army was "aware of the rumors." Military sources would say nothing more on Tuesday than that they were looking into the swirl of allegations. According to the blogs, perhaps the most suspicious element in the Kana affair was the fact that the dead children whose photographs appeared in the media displayed virtually no signs of blood, bruises or broken bones and, with one exception, were not caked with debris or pulverized cement. For example, according to the antiliberal Conservative Yankee blog, "The child in the photo shows no signs of injuries - no blood, no disfigurement or crushing wounds consistent with a building collapse. The two men [carrying the child] show no signs of having been digging in rubble. Their clothes are unbelievably clean, especially the black fatigues that would so easily shown concrete dust." Israel Insider cited a CNN report that, it said, noted the victims had died in their sleep. It seemed highly improbable, the piece asserted, that people could have slept "through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras," it went on, "were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building... Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hizbullah rocket attacks could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. While medical examination is clearly called for to arrive at a definitive dating and cause of their deaths, they do not appear to have died hours before. The bodies looked like they had been dead for days." Several blogs maintained that such suspicions were strengthened by the fact that some of the bodies were in an apparent state of rigor mortis when they were dug out and that this state does not set in for several hours after death. An independent medical expert, however, said he could not draw any definitive conclusions on the basis of photographs he had viewed of the scene. Other bloggers have ridiculed some of the claims raised on the sites, disputing that the photographs show long-dead victims or that the state of the corpses was inconsistent with death in a collapsing building. A Lebanese Web site, Libanoscopie - associated with Christian elements and a supporter of an anti-Syrian movement called the "March 14 Forces" - asserted, by contrast, that Hizbullah deliberately drew IAF fire to the building having brought disabled children into it. On Tuesday, The EU Referendum, a blog campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union, published an article entitled "Who is that Man?" The man in question, wearing the clothing and equipment of a rescue worker, appeared on the front pages of one newspaper after another, including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, Arab News and the Gulf News. It also displayed a picture of a rescue worker photographed at Kana during the bombing of a UN facility that killed over 100 Lebanese in 1996, and maintained that it was the same person. Another photo taken by Reuters allegedly showed the same rescue worker on Monday, a day after the Kana bombing, at Sreefa, 18 kilometers southeast of Tyre. ... Two of the photos, one of which was transmitted by Reuters and the other by AP, show the same rescue worker and another, unidentified person holding the dead baby high above their shoulders so that photographers could get a good shot. ... Meanwhile, Bana Sayeh, the spokeswoman who works from the east Jerusalem office of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said she had been unaware of the "staging" claims, but would ask the Lebanese Red Cross about the bodies, how long they had been dead, whether there had been blood, whether autopsies had been carried out and other such questions. She also said she would inform the ICRC in Geneva about the allegations. Sayeh said the ICRC was currently preparing a report on the Kana tragedy on the basis of data collected by professional Lebanese Red Cross staffers on the scene, as well as by ICRC representatives in that country. "We are an objective organization, and we want to find out the truth, which we will soon make public. All the information is already in our legal department in Geneva. Everything will be clear, very clear," she said. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153292055086&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer
The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.
the building was struck by IAF missiles a little after midnight, but only collapsed seven hours later, at about 7 a.m. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to 'plant' bodies killed in previous fighting the dead children whose photographs appeared in the media displayed virtually no signs of blood, bruises or broken bones "The child in the photo shows no signs of injuries - no blood, no disfigurement or crushing wounds consistent with a building collapse. The two men [carrying the child] show no signs of having been digging in rubble. Their clothes are unbelievably clean, especially the black fatigues that would so easily shown concrete dust. Israel Insider cited a CNN report that, it said, noted the victims had died in their sleep. It seemed highly improbable, the piece asserted, that people could have slept "through thunderous Israeli air attacks.The bodies looked like they had been dead for days." A Lebanese Web site, Libanoscopie - associated with Christian elements and a supporter of an anti-Syrian movement called the "March 14 Forces" - asserted, by contrast, that Hizbullah deliberately drew IAF fire to the building having brought disabled children into it. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153292055086&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer
Too funny... Israel changes its story.... And you redo your post to make a bolder headline... Oh man... This just in: "Israel does nothing wrong, and their shit smells good...." LOL...