Tuesday, August 01, 2006

More Questions On The Building Collapse In Qana

Further discrepancies keep piling up in connection with the collapsed building in Qana, allegedly as a result of Israeli missiles.

Besides the original questions about the time discrepancy, a number of other inconsistencies have been uncovered as well, as described by Israelinsider.com:

1. According to Brigadier General Eshel, as recently as two days previously, the building area had been used by the terrorists for storage or firing of weapons--not a likely place for dozens of women and children to use.

2. The roof of the building was intact and Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that despite a larger crater next to the building, the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

3. Why would the civilians, who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building, not leave after the post-midnight attack--and instead just go back to sleep and have the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

4. According to NPR, residents of the building had left and the victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the building that night because they were 'too poor' to leave. Who were they?

5. Hezbollah claims that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, yet the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre who were called over had no problem getting there.

6. Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning, after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by a lack of equipment. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

7. There was little blood, and CNN's Wedeman noted that the victims appeared to have died while asleep--apparently sleeping through thunderous Israeli air attacks.

8. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

9. 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.

10. The faces of the victims were ashen gray. While medical examination clearly is called for to arrive at a definitive dating and cause of their deaths, they do not appear to have died hours before. The bodies looked like they had been dead for days.

Israelinsider puts all the pieces together and sees where they lead:
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.
But the key is whether media or anyone else is willing to take an active role in clarifying what really happened or take a passive role and accept the version that is being offered by Hizbollah.

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1 comment:

Soccer Dad said...

And as Stephen Spruiell observed (based on Richard Engel) there were no men among the dead.