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Israel's 'Accidents'

USS Liberty 08 June 1967 Qana massacre 18 April 1996 Gaza Beach Massacre 09 June 2006 Al Khiyam UNIFIL post destroyed 25 July 2006 Qana massacre No. 2 30 July 2006 Israeli standard reply for an atrocity

USS Liberty 08 June 1967

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel's attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

A few hours later more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.

The Liberty's radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called "a buzzsaw sound." Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.

[…]

After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. Nobody was going to get out alive that way.

After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: "Do you need any help?"

The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: "Fuck you."

[…]

Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. "These errors do occur," McNamara concluded.

– Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies by Jeffrey St. Clair, 24 October 2003.

Qana massacre 18 April 1996

Qana, southern Lebanon – It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.

In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.

"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area," a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building – the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters – a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand…

– Massacre in Sanctuary: Eyewitness by Robert Fisk, 19 April 1996.

• The distribution of impacts at Qana shows two distinct concentrations, whose mean points of impact are about 140 metres apart. If the guns were converged, as stated by the Israeli forces, there should have been only one main point of impact.
• The pattern of impacts is inconsistent with a normal overshooting of the declared target (the mortar site) by a few rounds, as suggested by the Israeli forces.
• During the shelling, there was a perceptible shift in the weight of fire from the mortar site to the United Nations compound.
• The distribution of point impact detonations and air bursts makes it improbable that impact fuses and proximity fuses were employed in random order, as stated by the Israeli forces.
• There were no impacts in the second target area which the Israeli forces claim to have shelled.
• Contrary to repeated denials, two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling.

While the possibility cannot be ruled out completely, it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors.

– Findings of the UN Security Council Report, 07 May 1996.

Postscript:

And what happened then? Well, the US urged the Secretary General not to publish the incriminating report. SG Boutros-Ghali insisted. The Clinton administration put pressure on the UN to soften the language, hoping to turn it into a useless "Israel-maintains-this-and-others-allege-that" kind of paper like the one on Jenin. Boutros-Ghali refused, and published the embarrassing report as is.

A week later, on the 13th of May, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher met Secretary General Boutros-Ghali at his official residence in New York. He informed him of the definite US decision that it would veto his re-election. Boutros-Ghali later said this was the first time he had any direct indication from the US that it was unhappy with him. Boutros-Ghali told Christopher that he hoped the US would change its mind. It didn't.

Though Boutros-Ghali was supported unanimously by the African countries as well as by France, China, Russia, Germany, Japan and many European countries, the US vetoed his re-election, threatening African countries that loyalty to Boutros-Ghali would destroy the chances of Africa to retain the Secretary General's post for a second term, and threatening the UN not to pay the US assessments if Boutros Ghali remained. Finally, the US imposed the election of Kofi Annan and did away with Boutros-Ghali, described as "too independent" and "difficult to control".

– The UN from Qana to Jenin: Why the Secretary General's Report Cannot Be Trusted by Ran HaCohen, 14 August 2002.

Gaza Beach Massacre 09 June 2006

Heartrending pictures of 10-year-old Huda Ghalia running wildly along a Gaza beach crying "father, father, father" and then falling weeping beside his body turned the distraught girl into an instant icon of the Palestinian struggle even before she fully grasped that much of her family was dead.

But the images of the young girl who lost her father, step-mother and five of her siblings as picnicking families fled a barrage of Israeli shells a week ago have become their own battleground.

Who and what killed the Ghalia family, and badly maimed a score of other people, has been the subject of an increasingly bitter struggle for truth all week amid accusations that a military investigation clearing the army was a cover-up, that Hamas was really responsible and even that the pictures of Huda's grief were all an act.

However, a Guardian investigation into the sequence of events raises new and so far unanswered questions about the Israeli military probe that cleared the army of responsibility. Evidence from hospital records, doctors' testimony and witness accounts challenges the central assertion that the shelling had stopped by the time seven members of the Ghalia family were killed.

In addition, fresh evidence from the US group Human Rights Watch, which offered the first forensic questioning of the army's account, casts doubt on another key claim - that shrapnel taken from the wounded was not from the kind of artillery used to shell Gaza.

– The battle of Huda Ghalia - who really killed girl's family on Gaza beach? by Chris McGreal, 17 June 2006.

Al Khiyam UNIFIL post destroyed 25 July 2006

Israel came under mounting pressure last night to explain why its military ignored repeated warnings and bombed a prominent UN post in southern Lebanon, killing four unarmed international observers.

The four UN soldiers, from China, Austria, Finland and Canada, were taking shelter in a bunker at the white, three-storey building in Khiyam on Tuesday after at least six hours of Israeli bombing and shelling, when it was destroyed by what UN sources say was a precision-guided aerial bomb.

The UN contacted Israeli forces up to 10 times about the strikes. The UN's deputy general secretary, Mark Malloch Brown, made several calls to the Israelis to protest at the shelling and to call for it to stop, he told the security council yesterday.

In response, Israel reportedly promised to halt the firing. An Irish army officer warned the Israelis six times.

Although Israel expressed its "deep regret" yesterday and offered condolences to the families of the dead men, the incident quickly triggered international condemnation. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, condemned the "apparently deliberate targeting" of the UN post.

The attack threatens to disrupt plans to form a multinational monitoring force for southern Lebanon that might end the two-week conflict in the Middle East.

Yesterday the Israeli military admitted hitting the UN post, but rejected accusations that the attack had been deliberate. Officers said the bombing would not stop the its operations in southern Lebanon.

"Following an initial inquiry, it appears that during the operation a UN post was unintentionally hit. The IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] expresses deep regret over the incident and stresses that it would never intentionally target any UN facility or personnel," a military spokesman said. An investigation was under way, he added.

But questions remain about how the Israeli military could have hit such a high-profile, well-marked target so many times. Throughout Tuesday afternoon the UN observers reported 14 strikes near the post, mostly aerial bombs and some artillery shells.

"We reported 14 incidents of near misses, fire close to the position," said Milos Strugar, a UN official in Beirut. Other sources suggested there had been 17 bombs dropped within a kilometre of the position throughout the day.

The Unifil commander, Major General Alain Pellegrini, 59, who has served in international missions in Bosnia and Sarajevo, made several calls to a liaison team within the Israeli military, known as the foreign affairs unit, to say the strikes were dangerously close to his troops.

An Irish army officer in the area also warned the Israeli military six times that their attacks were putting UN observers at risk, Ireland's foreign ministry said yesterday. "On six separate occasions he was in contact with the Israelis to warn them that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff in south Lebanon," a department of foreign affairs spokesman said. "He warned, 'You have to address this problem or lives may be lost.'"

But at 6.30pm four artillery shells landed inside the UN position at Khiyam. "It caused extensive material damage to the building," Mr Strugar said. An hour later, two bombs landed at the site. One fell within the UN position, the other hit the building, killing the four observers. "It completely destroyed the position," Mr Strugar said.

– Israelis ignored repeated warnings before killing UN observers from The Guardian, 27 July 2006.

Qana massacre No. 2 30 July 2006

It was an unremarkable three-storey building on the edge of town. But for two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, it was a last refuge. They could not afford the extortionate taxi fares to Tyre and hoped that if they all crouched together on the ground floor they would be safe.

They were wrong. At about one in the morning, as some of the men were making late night tea, an Israeli bomb smashed into the house. Witnesses describe two explosions a few minutes apart, with survivors desperately moving from one side of the building to the other before being hit by the second blast. By last night, more than 60 bodies had been pulled from the rubble, said Lebanese authorities, 34 of them children. There were eight known survivors.

– 'They found them huddled together' from the Guardian, 31 July 2006.

Israeli standard reply for an atrocity

The Israelis appear to have a standard procedure for spinning an atrocity such as Qana (1996 and 2006) and the Gaza Beach Massacre (2006):

1. Express deep regret at the death of civilians in ….
2. Say “We are not responsible.”
3. Say “We did drop bombs, but we accidently used old maps.”
4. Say “After further investigation, we did drop bombs in the area, but at a different time / place.”
5. Say “The air strike was aimed at destroying Hezbollah / Hamas rocket launchers nearby and civilians were not being targeted.”
6. Trot out an unverified video allegedly showing Hezbollah / Hamas firing rockets from near the site of the bombing.
7. Say “The evidence shows that the explosion was caused by Hezbollah's / Hamas' weapons / munitions stored in the building. It is also possible that Hezbollah / Hamas deliberately blew up the civilians to create sympathy.”
8. Say “We warned the population to leave the area and assumed the area was free of civilians.”
9. Say “We would never target an area where we know there are civilians.”
10. Say “If Hezbollah / Hamas wasn't there, this would never have happened.”
11. Say “The civilians were being used as human shields by the terrorists.”
12. Say “We will investigate the incident.”
13. Say “The photos / videos of the alleged incident were all staged.”