Israel has decided it's taken enough PR damage over its obliteration of an entire Palestinian family at the beach on Friday, and so it's now chosen to do what it does best: lie. The Israeli government is now claiming that the Ghalia family was not killed by the Israeli military's (admitted) shelling of the beach, but was instead killed by a mine--which they of course claim was placed there by Hamas.
This is familiar territory for the Israelis. When Israeli soldiers gunned down Mohammed al-Dura as his father tried vainly to shield him, Israel immediately claimed that he'd actually been killed by Palestinian gunfire.
When an Israeli soldier shot Tom Hurndall in cold blood as he was trying to protect children, the Israeli military initially made the stunningly absurd claim that Tom had been wearing "tiger fatigues" and was shooting at the Israelis--despite readily available photos of him both before and after the shooting, wearing the bright orange vest that was intended to warn the Israeli military of his presence.
So the Israelis are just reading from their standard script again. As usual, though, the problem is reality:
Numerous onlookers said that the fatal shell was the third in a series of about five, the first two landing just north of the picnic site and prompting the Ghalia family and other bathers to begin packing up.
The Times found two other identical fresh craters nearby, roughly where the witnesses indicated. After carrying out an independent inspection, Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with Human Rights Watch, said yesterday that he was “quite certain” that the Israeli findings were wrong.
Mr Garlasco, a former Pentagon official and specialist in battle damage assessment, produced shrapnel that he recovered from the beach marked “55MM”.
“It is highly likely that it was an artillery-delivered 155mm shell,” he said. Mines tended to cause lower body injuries, whereas most of the victims suffered head and upper torso wounds, he added.
“We have to look at all the possibilities, but all the evidence points to a 155mm shell fired by the Israelis as what killed the Palestinians on the beach.”
There's much more in the official press release by Human Rights Watch regarding the incident, including this:
According to readings from a Global Positioning Satellite taken by Human Rights Watch, the crater where the victims were killed was within the vicinity of the other artillery craters created by the IDF's June 9 artillery attack and was the same shape and size. One crater was 100 meters away from the fatal crater, and the rest were 250 to 300 meters away.
Some Israeli officials have suggested the explosion may have been caused by a mine placed by Palestinian militants, rather than one of their artillery shells, despite the fact that they cannot account for the final landing place of one of their six shells.
So the Israelis expect us to believe that although they were in fact shelling the beach, and although they can't account for one of the six shells they fired, and although the blast craters are all identical, the Ghalia family was actually killed by a Hamas mine--which somehow managed not to explode all day long as people were trampling all over it, but by an extraordinary coincidence just happened to go off at the same time and in the same area that the Israelis were shelling the beach. It's a testament to Israel's power and influence that such a threadbare story is being treated with anything but contempt.
But reality has never posed much of a problem in the past for Israel or its supporters. The first two pages of Google results for Mohammed al-Dura are all by Israel supporters questioning the event--sometimes going as far as claiming that the boy never existed (which would doubtless come as a big surprise to the widow of the ambulance driver who was killed while trying to save him and his father). And if you look up Tom Hurndall's name along with "tiger fatigues" you'll find dozens of references to this ludicrous fabrication, but precious few articles noting the fact that the soldier who made the claim later admitted he'd lied about it. So I have no doubt that this latest Israeli fantasy will be eagerly adopted by its armies of supporters, whose sole purpose when discussing yet another Israeli atrocity is to deflect the blame--whatever the facts may be.
Comments