Monday, July 31, 2006
A senior Air Force officer has questioned the
timing of the blast.
Amir Eshel
told Israeli television that Israeli fighter jets targeted the area between
midnight and 1:00am local time.
The first reports of casualties came in several
hours later.
He says the targets were nearby buildings and were
all hit by precision bombs.
The officer says Hezbollah explosives might be to
blame for the deaths.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200607/s1700980.htm
What the Israel Air Force has to report about
this tragedy. From the
While the entire Israeli political echelon
expressed regret for the results of the strike, Air Force Chief of Staff
Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel said
Sunday night that the three-story building had been struck by the missiles a
little after midnight and that it only collapsed seven hours later, at close to
7 a.m.
Eshel
refrained from specifying what had caused the structure to collapse seven hours
after it was hit, but senior IAF officers said Sunday night that the explosion
could have been caused by an unexploded missile or by a Hizbullah-planted
explosive device.
"It could be that there was something
in the building that caused the explosion," Eshel
said.
Eshel said
that close to 150 Katyusha rockets had been fired
from the Lebanese village over the past 20 days. Hizbullah
had hidden rocket launchers, Eshel said, in civilian
buildings in the village. Video footage he presented at a press conference in
Tel Aviv Sunday night showed rocket launchers being driven into the village
following attacks on northern
The dead were old people, women and
children from four families whom residents said had gathered to spend the night
on the ground floor, where they felt they were safe from Israeli attacks. The
bodies of at least 27 children were found in the rubble, said Abu Shadi Jradi, a civil defense
official at the scene.
In 1996,
Olmert's statement Haaretz 31st July 06
The Israel Defense Forces convened a press
conference Sunday evening, admitting that while the IAF did indeed strike the
building in which the civilians were killed, the attack itself occurred near
midnight, while reports of an explosion and the structure's collapse were only
received at around 8:30 A.M.
The air force did resume bombing Qana
at 7:30 A.M., however the strikes were carried out on
targets at a distance of 460 meters from the building.
"The question we don't have an answer to is
what happened between 12 midnight and 8 in the morning," said IAF
Brigadier General Amir Eshel.
Lebanese villagers in Qana who were
witness to the bombing, however, say that the building's collapse occurred in
the wee hours of the night.
Witnesses at the scene corroborated the IDF claim that the
strike on the building, which is located in the Hariva
neighborhood of Qana, was carried out at 1:00 A.M.
After the initial strike, some of the building's residents exited in an attempt
to survey the damage, in effect saving themselves.
A few minutes later, IAF planes struck the building once again,
causing the walls to collapse on the residents who did not vacate, killing them
in the process.
Arab media began reporting on the incident after dawn Sunday,
approximately seven hours after the strike. The reports did not note, however,
that the building collapsed a short time prior to Arab journalists' arrival on
the scene.
IDF Head of Operations Directorate Major General Gadi Eizenkot said the Qana incident "will not loosen our grip," adding
that aerial strikes intended to harm Hezbollah's capability of launching
rockets into northern
Maj. Gen. Eizenkot noted that
Hezbollah operatives fired a total of 150 rockets into
"This is tied to our operations," Eshel
said.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday expressed "deep regret" for the
Israeli air strike that cost scores of life in the south Lebanese village of Qana, but said Israel would not declare a cease-fire until
it had reached the targets it had set at the beginning of the war.
Olmert,
responding to harsh international criticism on the strike, said that Hezbollah
had used Qana as a base for launching hundreds of
rockets at
"From the village and its surroundings, hundreds of Katyusha [rockets] have been fired at
In Israeli media accounts, Olmert was
further quoted as saying that "All the residents [of Qana]
were warned and told to leave. No one was ordered to fire on civilians and we
have no policy of killing innocent people."
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