What Did Happen at Qana?
This afternoon I took a look at accounts of the IAF air strike on Qana, then examined the efforts of the right-wing or pro-Israeli commentators (depending on the term you prefer) to impeach those accounts. The latter group has gotten a lot of mileage today out of PhotoshopGate. And sure enough, the ex-Reuters stringer sure made inept use of the" clone tool." But even more inept, I discovered, have been the efforts to explain away the Qana tragedy.
What follows are the opening paragraphs of a three-part post on my professional blog. You can follow the rest of it there.
I've become curious about the various attempts to spin the Israeli attack on Qana which occurred shortly after midnight on July 30. So I conducted a LEXIS/NEXIS search, which yielded 279 hits (some of them duplicates), and then looked for accounts by journalists who actually visited Qana. Excerpts from these reports are given below, arranged in reverse chronogical order. They disagree a bit as to the exact number of dead, but none lend plausibility to the IDF's speculation -- eagerly seized upon in some quarters -- that the building was damaged but did not collapse for another eight hours.
The great majority of articles turned up by the LEXIS/NEXIS search were either op/ed pieces, defending or condemning the Israeli strike; or speculations as to what the attack would mean from a political and diplomatic standpoint.
Robert Fisk, Slaughter in Qana, The Independent Online, August 6.
Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were"hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.
***
Peter Wilson, Inside a Death House, The Australian, August 4, 2006
AS Fatima Hashim lay down beside her two sleeping daughters on a thin mattress, she did something many anxious young mothers do the world over.
She listened closely in the dark to make sure that her toddler, also called Fatima, 3 1/2, was breathing, then gently touched the warm chest of her 18-month-old baby, Rokaya, to find a heartbeat.
Yes, they were sleeping peacefully. She stretched out on her back beside Rokaya and tried to sleep. Outside she could hear occasional explosions from Israeli missiles but she was tired because it was 10pm, a couple of hours past her normal bedtime.
The three dozen children who were spread out on mattresses on the floor had almost all been asleep for two hours and the 30-odd adults among them were as tired as Fatima. Members of two extended families, they'd spent two weeks sheltering together in the basement of this house in a hilltop village in the middle of the conflict in southern Lebanon, and the strain had left everybody worn out.
When she did get to sleep, she rolled on to her left side, facing away from Rokaya.
Three hours later, at 1am, an Israeli missile brought the unfinished two-storey house down on top of them, turning their basement refuge into a smothering, bone-crushing trap. The two children Fatima and Rokaya choked to death, their mouths full of sand and dust, as their mother lay trapped beside them listening to them trying to breath.
Continued at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age