Gaza beach incident - Another Jenin?
Posted by Jae Senn on June 14, 2006
World News headlines for the past few days have been screaming at Israel for the Gaza beach incident. Typical of liberal news outlets, Israel was lynched and pronounced guilty based on reports and allegations from "Palestinian sources" even as investigations were underway.
Through it all, I feel a sense of pity for Israel. Hamas and Palestinians are known to lie and cook up evidence to demonize Israelis.. even when they are the aggressors, they can spin the media such that they appear to be the victims, and Israel have initiated an unprovoked attack against civilian targets willfully.
In reality, the opposite is true - Hamas and other Palestinian militants actively target Israeli civilians, and they regularly use Palestinian civilians as human shields.
So, here’s the story so far. Qassam rockets were launched into Israel from the Gaza strip, killing and injuring some Israeli civilians. Of course, the mainstream news media have somehow forgotten that this incident sparked off the Israeli artillery response. In an attempt to destroy the Qassam rocket sites, the Israeli military launched an artillery attack against the sites from where these rockets were fired, and the offensive was backed up by an Israeli naval gunboat.
During the exchange of fire, an Israeli artillery shell was alleged to have landed on the Gaza beach, killing and injuring innocent Palestinians in the process. Immediately, the media jumped at it and made it sound like Israeli launched a deliberate attack on beach-goers.
There are a few uncomfortable questions regarding this chain of events. Among them:
1) The Israeli military response was targeting a Qassam rocket site in the vicinity of the beach. Why would Hamas militants station their weapons sites among civilians if not for the purpose of exploiting them as human shields?
2) The Israeli military has shown the trajectories of all six shells fired by them, and all the shells are accounted for, and none of them landed on the beach. It’s like saying I have six bullets in my gun, but somehow a bystander was killed by a seventh bullet, supposedly from my gun.
3) Palestinians actively rejected initial investigations, and fouled up the site of the incident so much that no proper investigation could be launched. All the evidence has been tampered with, and no independent investigation was allowed.
4) In the pictures of the incident site, the damage inflicted on the beach was not consistent with an explosion from an artillery shell. There was no characteristic crater, the injured and dead were too close apart rather than being thrown far apart by an exploding artillery shell, etc. The beach chairs, slippers, etc were still on the beach, and not blown away.
5) Pictures of a little girl crying for her father was taken from 3 different angles, almost immediately after the incident (which revealed no tell-tale signs of an artillery explosion). How did the Palestinian media get there so fast? Or did they always have cameras on standby? Or could it be.. the scene was staged? (Which is hardly surprising).
Furthermore, Israel had the grace to immediately apologize for the incident, and offered medical aid, and launched a full-scale investigation into the incident. The outcome of their investigations, however, concluded that their military was not responsible. One would say that the Israeli inquiry would be biased, but here’s some other information:
1) Israel was targeting the Qassam sites based on aerial videos taken from their reconnaisance drones, and they also had video of the incident as recorded from the gunboat. The IDF had mentioned that with these secure video recordings, they concluded that the explosion was caused by Hamas, not the IDF.
2) The explosion on Gaza beach occurred 15 minutes after the Israeli military position ceased their firing.
The IDF investigation has raised the possibility that the beach was mined, and it was a Hamas landmine that caused the explosion. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, oddly enough, said that IDF claims about finding landmines on the beach is odd. Omaha, anyone?
It’s too early to establish a conclusion surrounding the event, but it’s too late to undo the damage done by the anti-Israel propaganda machine.
Palestinians still have not learned from the Al-Durah, ‘Martyrs Junction’ and Jenin incidences, where they exploited foreign media to the hilt to generate sympathy at the expense of truth. People from the non-liberal and non-mainstream media outlets regularly see how Palestinians lie and create fake stories and situations to make Israel look bad.
For those of us who are more interested in hearing both sides of the tale, documentaries such as Pierre Rehov’s Road to Jenin would be an excellent start. It would be pretty hard to get our hands on this documentary, but it’s well worth it.
If this incident is eventually proven to be Israel’s fault, there’s no difference from how it stands right now - the world has already judged Israel to be guilty. But if it is proven that Israel is innocent and the Gaza beach incident is the fault of Palestinians themselves, will Hamas and other Palestinian groups have the grace to apologize to Israel and take responsibility? It will be a cold day in Hell if that ever happens.
