Israel Matzav

Was the 'Qana massacre' a hoax? The truth matters!

Now I'm asking the question outright: Was the 'Qana massacre' a hoax?

Last night, yesterday morning and Sunday, I posted doubts that the IDF and several bloggers have raised regarding what really happened at Qana. Those doubts related to the sudden appearance of a 30-foot high banner of US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice just a couple of hours after the so-called massacre, and the lack of an explanation for an eight-hour gap between the time that the building was bombed and the time that it collapsed. Also on Sunday, I quoted a Lebanese blogger who implied that Hezbullah was not allowing cranes to come and pry bodies out of the building. That assertion takes on increased importance below.

This morning, blogger Confederate Yankee notes a couple of other oddities: the roof of the supposedly bombed building was still intact in the pictures, and the dead bodies in the pictures appear to have been dead for much longer than the period of time between the supposed building collapse and the when the pictures were taken. Confederate Yankee backs up the accusations with pictures. The pictures are not for the especially squeamish (I would not want my younger children seeing them), but for those who really want to understand what's going on, they're must viewing. Here's some of what he has to say about the evidence:

There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning? [Some of you may recall that I asked the same question here. CiJ]

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did.

While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted. [Recall that I reported early on Sunday from a Lebanese blogger that Hezbullah was not allowing cranes to be used to pull people out of the rubble. CiJ]

There was little blood, CNN’s Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. Their limbs appeared to have stiffened, from rigor mortis. Neither were effects that would have resulted from an Israeli attack hours before. These were bodies that looked like they had been dead for days.

Viewers can judge for themselves. But the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial Israeli bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to "plant" bodies killed in previous fighting — reports in previous days indicated that nearby Tyre was used as a temporary morgue — place them in the basement, and then engineer a "controlled demolition" to fake another Israeli attack.

The well-documented use by Palestinians of this kind of faked footage — from the alleged shooting of Mohammed Dura in Gaza, scenes from Jenin of "dead" victims falling off gurneys and then climbing back on — have merited the creation of a new film genre called "Palliwood."

Blogger Riehl World View speculates as to where the bodies that were used in Qana might have come from:

A full day before an air strike in Qana currently making headlines around the world, the Mayor of Tyre prepared a mass grave for 32 bodies killed in the area during the course of the recent conflict. Early Red Cross reports from the scene in Qana indicated only 27 bodies. Ironically enough, if you add 32 and 27 you arrive at the number of Qana dead reported by the press today. Current reports seem to fluctuate between 56 - 60.

It's been reported that the media coverage and the recovery effort didn't begin until the next morning. During that gap, the very same refrigerated trucks that held the dead from Tyre made their way to Qana. The question is, were they empty given some analysis which questions the times of death. See Confederate Yankee.

Additionally, there appear to be discrepancies in the reporting from Qana. We're told the building didn't collapse until morning. Yet, one observer claims to have been blown out of the building from the third floor during the night, only to rush right back in and witness the massacre.

...

Some photographic evidence (click images to enlarge) also makes the site look more like a bomb shelter than the basement of a poor tobacco farmer's home, as is being reported. Statements from survivors document that Qana is home to hard-line Hezbollah members and their families. The town is located at a critical juncture of five roads just north of the southern plains of Southern Lebanon and the elevation represents a prime location for the launching of rockets ever more deeply into Israel.

It seems at least possible that the victims were mostly comprised of the families of Hezbollah fighters and one body which wasn't uncovered for mass display appears to be in fatigues.

It has to be considered that the Qana strike may well have killed a number of civilians and Hezbollah fighters with the number of civilian dead being augmented by bodies from Tyre. But no official report I have seen documents more than 27 bodies at this time, while the MSM is reporting as many as sixty.

Read both articles in their entirety.

Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:44 AM