Truth: the first casualty of war in Gaza

No war has ever demonstrated more clearly than the recent Gaza war the accuracy of the saying of the late Senator Hiram Johnson, “the first casualty when war comes is the truth.[1]” Not only is the general impression created by the reporting of the international media and the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA), that Israel devastated Gaza and killed large numbers of Gaza civilians during its counter-terrorist operation of December 2008-January 2009, false;[2] but the specific stories of Israeli atrocities circulated by the media and UNWRA are equally false. This is the conclusion that has emerged from a careful reading of several reports by independent-minded Western journalists who have visited Gaza and investigated the atrocity stories “on the spot,” as well as from the painstaking and careful investigations of the Israel Defense Forces Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), headed by Lt.-Col. Moshe Levi.[3]

Levi’s research has been carried out with great thoroughness and integrity by an Israeli officer who has taken the allegations of Israeli atrocities seriously and has researched each of them meticulously, often consulting with officials of the Palestinian Authority in order to obtain more information about them. Indeed, the CLA is still investigating several of the atrocity stories and has yet to issue reports on them, even though it would have been in Israel’s public relations interest to have issued immediate denials of the these stories. Its findings thus cannot be dismissed as mere Israeli propaganda.[4]

Here we have time and space to examine only a handful of the more sensational of the Israeli atrocity stories and compare them to the facts in each case that have emerged from the subsequent investigations:

Media Story: Israel bombed a UN school that was being used as a shelter by Palestinian civilians, and killed 43 civilians, many of them children, who were sheltering in the school.

This is how the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs, in a statement issued on January 7, described an Israeli attack alleged to have been carried out on the previous day: “43 persons were killed following an attack on a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school transformed into a refugee site for displaced persons.” The day before, “John Ging, UNRWA’s operations director in Gaza , had accused Israel of deliberately carrying out a ‘horrific’ attack by targeting its school and claimed Israel knew it was targeting a U.N. facility. Following the U.N. claim, the whole world condemned Israel over what was perceived as a blatant attack on a school” (RTT News)[5]

Later investigations have shown that Israel never bombed the school, or even the grounds around the school, as initially reported; rather, Israel shelled a Hamas mortar firing position on a street corner some distance away from the school. The civilian death toll from the Israeli shells was three, not 42 as was alleged by UNRWA and widely reported by the international media. Nine Hamas fighters were also killed, which supports the Israeli investigators’ conclusion that what an Israeli tank gunner had hit, with three shells, was a Hamas military position, not a civilian facility or building.

That the school building was never hit by Israeli fire was first demonstrated on January 29 by Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Patrick Martin, who investigated the event “on the spot.;” Martin’s report even includes a map of the area, showing that the Israeli shells fell on a street corner some distance away from the school. Teachers at the school told Martin that no one in the building had been killed by Israeli bombs or shells, although they asserted that “a few” people on the school grounds suffered injuries.[6] Another reporter, Yvonne Green from Britain, also visited the scene, where she could see that the school building was undamaged:

Seeing Al-Fakhora [School] made it impossible to understand how UN and press reports could ever have alleged that the UNWRA school had been hit by Israeli shells. The school, like most of Gaza , was visibly intact. I was shown where Hamas had been firing from nearby, and the Israeli missile’s marks on the road outside the school were unmistakable. When I met Mona al-Ashkor, one of the 40 people injured running toward Al-Fakhora - rather than inside it as widely and persistently reported - I was told that Israel had warned people not to take shelter in the school because Hamas was operating in the area, and that some people had ignored the warning because UNWRA previously told them that the school would be safe. Press reports that fatalities numbered 40 were denied. [7]

The IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration completed and released to the Jerusalem Post the results of its investigation of the alleged school massacre on February 15,: it not only confirmed that the Israeli shells had exploded some distance away from the school, but also established that the total death toll from the IDF fire was less than a third of the number given out by UNRWA and the media, and that three-fourths of those killed had been Hamas soldiers, not civilians. The CLA’s findings dovetailed with what the school’s teachers had told Patrick Martin: that three of the school’s students had been killed in the attack, but while they were outside the school grounds, not inside them.[8] Hamas’ exploitation of children to assist them in their “work” is notorious, and may well explain the presence of three schoolboys at the Hamas firing position[9]

Eventually the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, and even John Ging of UNRWA, admitted that their story that Israel had bombed the UNRWA school was false. However, Ging had the effrontery to claim that the false report originated with Israel, not him![10]

Israeli surveillance aircraft have repeatedly photographed Hamas gunmen firing rockets and mortars from the grounds of, or very close to, this UNRWA school as well as others. Several of these video recorded sequences have been released by the IDF for broadcast by YouTube, where it is possible for everyone to view them.[11] Despite this flagrant abuse of the school and its children as human shields by the Hamas aggressors, the Israelis managed to avoid striking the school with their return of fire. But because of the late release of the IDF’s response to the school massacre report, Israel did not avoid the damage to itself inflicted by Hamas’ and UNRWA’s false accusations.

Media Story: Israel Bombed a Hospital, Forcing the Evacuation of Its Patients.

Here the IDF investigation concluded that the hospital in question, al Aksa in Gaza City , had not in fact been bombed or in any other way attacked by Israel . A few Israeli shells did strike a warehouse located several blocks from the hospital, which was owned by the hospital and used to store supplies for it; Israeli soldiers had returned fire that was directed at them by Hamas fighters who had occupied the warehouse and who were using it as position from which to fire on the Israelis. Hospital and UNWRA officials never informed the Israelis that the warehouse was owned by the hospital and used to store its supplies, even though the Israelis had on several occasions asked the UN agency to provide them with the location of all such facilities, in order to avoid damage to them.[12]

A separate investigation conducted by the U.S. media monitoring organization CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), also concluded that the hospital had not been harmed by the Israeli military. In support of its finding, CAMERA has published a photograph of the hospital taken after the fighting was over, showing it to be completely undamaged. This did not prevent many major media outlets from reporting that the completely intact building had burned to the ground! The international media widely circulated a photograph of a slightly damaged building that it incorrectly identified as the hospital; according to CAMERA, it is actually the building next door.

The hospital administration had dramatically ordered the evacuation of all patients while the fighting was going on in Gaza; this was widely reported in the international media, together with photographs of the event. It was much less widely reported that all of the patients were moved back into the hospital within five days. The reason for the evacuation, to the extent that there was one, was that a water pipe servicing the building had been damaged during the fighting, not that the hospital itself had been bombed. According to a little noticed bulletin released by the International Red Cross, the patients were returned to the hospital once the damaged sewer pipe was repaired.[13]

Several Gazans interviewed by a reporter for Newsweek confirmed that Hamas gunmen had been firing at the Israelis from positions close to the hospital and its warehouse:

Asked if there were any militants firing from the hospital or the Red Crescent buildings, hospital director general Dr. Khalid Judah chose his words carefully. “I am not able to say if anyone was using the PRCS buildings [the two Palestine Red Crescent Society buildings adjacent to the hospital], but I know for a fact that no one was using the hospital.” In the Tal-al Hawa neighborhood nearby, however, Talal Safadi, an official in the leftist Palestinian People’s Party, said that resistance fighters were firing from positions all around the hospital. He shrugged that off, having a bigger beef with Hamas. “They failed to win the battle.” Or as his fellow PPP official, Walid al Awad, put it: “It was a mistake to give Israel the excuse to come in.”[14]

Media story: Israel bombed the UN headquarters in Gaza and burned it down.

In reality, fragments of Israeli shells aimed at Hamas terrorists who were firing at the Israelis accidentally struck a gas tank and warehouse on property owned by UNRWA—not the “UN headquarters,” as most of the international media alleged. The UNRWA relief administration’s offices were undamaged. The total casualties reported by UNRWA to have occurred in its “compound”—three wounded, but none killed—would almost certainly have been much higher had the UN administrative center had been hit. Although UNRWA sources apparently led the media to report that the “UN headquarters” had been bombed, the actual wording of UNRWA’s initial press release about the incident referred only to Israeli tank shells landing “inside the UNRWA complex,” or “compound,” in Gaza, and setting fire to a warehouse.[15]

While the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration has yet to issue a report on this alleged attack, Israel’s Minister of Social Welfare, Isaac Herzog, who is coordinating Israel’s relief efforts to help Gazans displaced or injured by the fighting, gave this account of it:

“The incident is still under investigation, but it seems that there may have been a sequence of events where gunfire was shot at Israeli soldiers from the adjacent premises,” he said at a press conference at the Erez crossing. The IDF fired back, and shrapnel from that return volley went over the fence and into the compound, where it set ablaze some of the gas supplies that UNRWA had stored there, he said[16]

According to the Jerusalem Post, a “senior officer in the IDF Spokesman’s Unit” added that “ground troops were responding to fire which placed them in mortal danger.” Another “senior IDF source” also told the newspaper that “The IDF’s current information pointed to Hamas fighters shooting from within or near the UN buildings.[17]”

Confirming the Israeli version of the event, an Arab resident of Gaza, calling himself by the nickname “Abu Issa” to protect himself from Hamas retaliation, told Italian reporter Lorenzo Cremonesi of Corriere della Sera that Hamas gunmen had been attacking Israeli soldiers in the immediate vicinity of the UNRWA compound:

Practically all of the tallest buildings in Gaza that were hit by Israeli bombs, like the Dogmoush, Andalous, Jawarah, Siussi, and many others, had rocket launching pads on their roofs, or were observation decks for the Hamas. They had also put them near the big UN warehouse, which went up in flames[18]

Media Story: Israel Bombed a Private House Used as a Bomb Shelter by Large Numbers of Arab Civilians and killed scores of innocents.

The British reporter Yvonne Green investigated this alleged Israeli massacre “on the spot” after the war. She reports her observations on the scene this way:

I WAS TOLD stories at Samouni Street which contradicted each other, what I saw and later media accounts. Examples of these inconsistencies are that 24, 31, 34 or more members of the Fatah Samouni family had died. That all the deaths occurred when Israel bombed the safe building it had told 160 family members to shelter in; the safe building was pointed out to me but looked externally intact and washing was still hanging on a line on one of its balconies. That some left the safe building and were shot in another house. That one was shot when outside collecting firewood. That there was no resistance - but the top right hand window of the safe building (which appears in a BBC Panorama film Out of the Ruins” aired February has a black mark above it - a sign I was shown all day of weaponry having been fired from inside. That victims were left bleeding for two or three days.

I saw large scoured craters and a buckled container which appeared to have been damaged by an internal impact (its external surfaces were undamaged). Media accounts of Samouni Street don’t mention these possible indications of explosive caches (although the container is visible on media footage). The Samouni family’s elder told me during a taped interview that he had a CD film of the killings. As far as I’m aware, no such film has been made public. He also told me that there are members of his family who have still not been found.

The media have manufactured and examined allegations that Israel committed a war crime against the Samounis without mentioning that the family are Fatah and that some of its members are still missing. They have not considered what might flow from those facts: that Hamas might have been active not only in the Samouni killings but in the exertion of force on the Samounis to accuse Israel .[19]

The evidence that Ms. Green describes, suggesting that the casualties at the al-Samouni compound might have been caused by an “internal” explosion inside the house, is reinforced by the fact that such “work accidents,” a result of the Gaza terrorist groups practice of manufacturing and storing explosives in densely populated residential areas, have been very common in Gaza for years, and have caused hundreds of casualties.[20] The Israeli operation in Gaza would have provided an excellent opportunity to “cover” such an incident by blaming it on Israel. The other possible explanation suggested by Ms. Green for some of the Samouni losses, that Hamas may have inflicted them as a reprisal for the Samouni’s allegiance to Fatah, is strengthened by numerous media reports that Hamas took advantage of the distraction created by Israel’s operation to kill, maim and torture many Fatah members, whom it accused of being “collaborators” with Israel.[21]

With regard to the number of casualties at the Samouni house, a Gaza named Masoda Al Samoun [a member of the allegedly bombed family] told Lorenzo Cremonesi that

When the bomb landed on their houses [the Al Samoun family] reported that they had 31 dead. And this is how they were registered with the officials of the Health department which is controlled by Hamas. But then, when the bodies were effectively recovered the sum total was doubled to 62 and this is how they are computed into the final balance.[22]

Yes, the truth was the first casualty of the Gaza war; Israel’s reputation, already bleeding for years, was the second. Can the wounds inflicted on either of these innocent victims ever be healed?

John Landau contributed to this article

Footnotes:
[1] Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty.
New York : Harcourt, 1975; vii.
[2] http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.2468/pub_detail.asp
[3] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304831643&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
[4] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304831643&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter; www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304788705&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull ; http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304788684&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[5]
http://www.rttnews.com/ArticleView.aspx?Id=846813&SMap=1
[6] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090129.wgazaschool29/BNStory/International/home ; http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Did_IsraelShell_a_UN_School_The_Truth_Exposed.asp
[7] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1235898327903&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[8] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304788684&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull ; www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304788705&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304833139&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull ; http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090129.wgazaschool29/BNStory/International/home .
[9]
http://www.pmw.org.il/Bulletins_Jan2009.htm
[10] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090129.wgazaschool29/BNStory/International/home ; http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Did_Israel_Shell_a_UN_School_The_Truth_Exposed.asp
[11]
http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/hamas-uses-schools-and-ceasefire-to-shoot-rockets-at-israel/13864006 ; http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/hamas-uses-schools-and-ceasefire-to-shoot-rockets-at-israel/13590241 ; http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/hamas-rockets-during-cease-fire-and-from-schoolyard-8-jan-09/13678752 ; http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/idf-vlog-update-hamas-terrorists-in-un-school-capt-benjamin-rutland-6-jan-2009/13678773 ; http://www.mefeedia.com/entry/mortar-bombs-shot-from-un-school-in-gaza-29-oct-2007/13678763 .
[12] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304831643&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter .
[13] http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=2&x_article=1599
[14] http://www.newsweek.com/id/180691/output/print ; http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Gaza_Doctor_Says_Death_Toll_Inflated.asp
[15] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hWVWNvaYOLbOduOExnxo3vz4n21Q
[16] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1232292898771
[17] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1232292898771
[18] http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/01/28/cremonesi-article-in-english/
[19] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1235898327903&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[20] http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/gaza_120608e.htm
[21] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/130208 ; http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/news/article.php?id=3545 ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_OGhj43GAE ; http://www.pmw.org.il/Bulletins_Jan2009.htm
[22]
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/01/28/cremonesi-article-in-english/

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