There's yet more debunking here (and here) of the Israeli alibi that the Ghalia family in Gaza was wiped out by a Hamas mine rather than an Israeli artillery shell, this time focusing on Israeli claims that the times shown on surveillance tapes prove that it couldn't have been Israel's shelling of the beach that killed the family. One key point in the Israeli version of events is that the first ambulance didn't arrive at the beach until 5:15pm--but reality again rears its ugly head:
The written hospital admission registration book at Kamal Odwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, where the dead and some of the most seriously wounded victims of the explosion were taken, times the arrival of the first eight victims as being at 5.05pm, 10 minutes earlier than when the army said last week the first ambulances arrived at the scene.
An ambulance driver based at the hospital, Khaled Abu Sada, who said he was the second to arrive at the scene, said he received mobile telephone confirmation of an emergency from a colleague working for the Palestinian Red Crescent at 4.45pm or 4.46pm, set off at 4.50pm, arrived at the scene at around 5pm and returned to the hospital after picking up one dead child and three women, two of whom were close to death, at 5.10pm.
So unless the Palestinians have managed to invent time travel, another pillar of the Israeli lie has just crumbled. I found the argument over the surveillance tape timestamps amusing for another reason: as any good computer geek knows, most clocks will go horribly awry unless they're synchronized through some mechanism like the network time protocol, and I doubt that would be the case with these surveillance cameras. So even accepting that Israel didn't misrepresent or doctor those timings, they're unlikely to be reliable anyway.
But my favorite part of the article is this quote from IDF spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal: "I have never known a more detailed and thorough investigation than this." This in reference to an investigation that took, oh, about two days to complete. Then again, I'm sure he's right--that probably is as detailed and thorough an investigation as the IDF has ever done when it was just some dead Palestinians involved (or is likely to do in the future).
Of course, the very fact that the discussion of this event is now focusing on such minutiae as hospital timestamps, rather than the tragedy of a destroyed family, represents a real victory for Israel's (consistent, standard, oft-repeated, morally bankrupt) strategy.
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