19 April 2011

Qana Massacre 15th anniversary, never forget


"It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong."

Amnesty:

"On the basis of all the information available, Amnesty International believes that the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound, although the motives for doing so remain unclear. The IDF have failed to substantiate their claim that the attack was a mistake. Even if they were to do so they would still bear responsibility for killing so many civilians by taking the risk to launch an attack so close to the UN compound.

This conclusion is based on a number of facts (set out below in detail), including the precision and reliability of the IDF’s “target acquisition” systems; the timing of the attack; and the sequence, type and dispersion pattern of the shells fired. Taken together, these facts strongly suggest that the bombardment of the UN compound was not the result of an “artillery scatter” of stray shells which overshot the Hizbullah mortar, as claimed by the IDF, but was the result of a separate barrage of shells aimed at the compound itself."

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