UN's Annan accuses Israel of deliberate attack
dontcowerfromthetruth
Israeli bomb kills UN observers
Four United Nations peacekeepers have been killed in an Israeli air
strike on an observation post in southern Lebanon, the UN has said.
A bomb struck the post occupied by the peacekeepers of the Unifil force
in the Khiam area, it said.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said he was "shocked" at the
"apparently deliberate targeting" of the post.
The attack came as Israel said it would control an area in southern
Lebanon until international forces deployed.
The force will be discussed at crisis talks to be held in Rome on
Wednesday.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be at the talks after
ending her tour of the Middle East on Tuesday.
More than 380 Lebanese and 42 Israelis have died in nearly two weeks of
conflict in Lebanon, which began after Hezbollah captured two Israeli
soldiers in a cross-border raid on 12 July.
Protest
The UN in Lebanon says the Israeli air force destroyed the observer
post, in which four military observers were sheltering.
It said the four, from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, had taken
shelter in a bunker under the post after it was earlier shelled 14
times by Israeli artillery.
A rescue team was also shelled as it tried to clear the rubble.
"I am shocked and deeply distressed by the apparently deliberate
targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN Observer post in southern
Lebanon," Mr Annan said in a statement from Rome.
Unifil has been operational in the border area since 1978 and is
currently 2,000 strong.
In other military action:
The Israeli army said it had killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Abu
Jaafar, in fighting in southern Lebanon
Earlier the UN had said Israeli forces were now in control of the town
of Bint Jbeil after fierce fighting and were moving on the village of
Yaroun to the south
Israel resumed air raids on Beirut, with explosions heard in southern
suburbs - a Hezbollah stronghold
Hezbollah maintained fire of Katyusha rockets into Israel, killing a
15-year-old Arab-Israeli girl in the northern Israeli village of Maghar
and striking Haifa with a large salvo
Hezbollah said 27 of its fighters had been killed as of Monday, but the
Israeli military said it had killed "some dozens".
Truce call
Earlier, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz had said a "security
zone" in southern Lebanon would be maintained "under the control of our
forces if there is not a multinational force".
He said: "We have no other option. We have to build a new security
strip that will be a cover for our forces."
He did not specify whether Israeli troops would remain there but
insisted they would "continue to control [Hezbollah]" in their
operations.
Israeli government sources have estimated the width of the zone at
anything from three to 10km (1.9-6.2 miles).
An unnamed Israeli official quoted by Reuters news agency said between
10,000 and 20,000 international peacekeepers would be needed.
BBC defence and security correspondent Rob Watson says Israeli details
on the zone - and how it will be secured - are far from clear.
Israel is acting with tremendous restraint, were they targeting
civilian populations there would be thousands upon thousands dead
Steve Gross, US
He says it is possible Mr Peretz is trying to put pressure on the
international community to deliver the peacekeeping force.
The idea of the multinational force will be high on the agenda of
foreign ministers who meet in Rome on Wednesday.
Earlier, Ms Rice had expressed concern for the suffering of "innocent
people" in the fighting during her tour of the Middle East.
She met Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and later Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas.
Mr Abbas called for an immediate end to "aggression against the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank" and for an "immediate ceasefire" in Lebanon.
Ms Rice said the only solution was a sustainable and enduring peace.
Her words were reinforced later by US President George W Bush who said:
"I support a sustainable ceasefire that will bring about an end to
violence... Our mission and our goal is to have a lasting peace, not a
temporary peace."
In his meeting with Ms Rice, Mr Olmert said he was "very conscious" of
the humanitarian needs of Lebanon's civilians, but insisted Israel was
defending itself against terrorism.
Ms Rice highlighted the need for Israel to consider the humanitarian
needs of both Lebanon and the Palestinian people and the need for a
durable peace.
She said: "It is time for a new Middle East, it is time to say to those
who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail;
they will not."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5215366.stm...
Forwarded:
The UN's Kofi Annan has just mentioned in a press conference (which I
am sure you already aware of unless you have already gone to bed) that
Israel deliberately attacked the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon (this has
the making of a major international incident with the dead UN
peacekeepers being from Europe and China as Annan has mentioned that
Israel deliberately sought out to kill these UN peacekeepers).
Israel has a track record of deliberate attacks such as with the USS
Liberty ( http://www.ussliberty.org ) and Qana as well.. CNN's
Christiane Amanpour mentioned Qana this now but said that it was a
'mistake' which is pure BS... Did you see the following write-up about
Qana from my prior email send?:
With regard to what Israel is currently doing in Lebanon, take a look
at the following (pages 141-144 from Bamford's 'A Pretext for War'
book):
...About the same time, beginning on April 11, 1996, a series of shock
waves rumbled through the Muslim world as a result of Israel's massive
bombardment of Beirut and southern Lebanon, which Israel had by then
been occupying for fourteen years. Known as "Operation of Grapes of
Wrath," it was the first time Israel had attacked Beirut since Ariel
Sharon's ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. According to Israeli
writer Israel Shahak, the real purpose of the attack was to capture as
much Lebanese territory as possible.
"It is quite obvious," wrote Shahak, "that the first and most important
Israeli aim to be established in the 'Grapes of Wrath' is to establish
its sovereignty over Lebanon -- to be exercised in a comparable manner
to its control over the Gaza Strip."
Two days after it began, on April 13, ambulance driver Abbas Jiha from
the village of Mansouri was busy rushing patients wounded in the
fighting to a hospital in the town of Sidon. On his return to Mansouri,
panic had broken out and explosions were taking place. People began
pleading for him to take them to Sidon. Jiha quickly squeezed four of
his children into his ambulance along with ten other people, including
a family, and began driving toward Sidon.
Suddenly, an Israeli helicopter began chasing his ambulance. Minutes
later, two missiles were fired, one of which exploded through the rear
door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it sixty feet
through the air. Thrown clear, Abbas Jiha began running toward the
flaming heap of twisted metal. "My God, my God," he screamed, shaking
his fist at the sky, "my family has gone." In all, six people were
killed, including Jiha's nine year-old daughter and his wife.
Israeli officials later admitted the ambulance had been targeted but
claimed, falsely, that the vehicle was owned by Hezbollah and was
transporting one of the group's fighters. Jiha had no connection with
terrorist groups, and the thought that Israel could target an ambulance
packed with innocent people, including many children, outraged Muslims
throughout the Middle East.
On April 18, one week into Operation Grapes of Wrath, a reporter for
London's newspaper The Independent was traveling in southern Lebanon
with a United Nations convoy. Robert Fisk, Britain's most highly
decorated foreign correspondent, spent a quarter of a century covering
the Middle East and was the recipient of the British International
Journalist of the Year Award seven times, including for 1996. As the
vehicles were approaching the small village of Qana, Fisk could hear
the sound of artillery, he recalled.
The convoy had stopped at Qana that morning and noticed it was crowded
with about eight hundred refugees. They had been transported there for
their safety by armored UN vehicles from nearby villages that had come
under Israeli bombardment. When the convoy finally arrived in Qana
shortly after two in the afternoon, fire was everywhere and proximity
shells were bursting in the air. Antipersonnel weapons designed to
explode about two dozen feet above ground, they would shower down
razor-sharp shrapnel, butchering anyone beneath.
"It was a massacre," wrote Fisk in a front-page story. "Israel's
slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive -- 206 by last
night --- has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will
forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on
Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year old
girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier
yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 -- the youngest
was a four-day-old baby -- when Israeli helicopter pilots fired
missiles into their home."
The Israeli government later claimed the attack on the UN refugee camp
at Qana was a mistake. But a formal, top-level United Nations
investigation came to a different conclusion. "It is unlikely" that
Israeli gunners simply erred, said the report, and demanded that Israel
pay $1.7 million in damages. "Contrary to repeated denials," said the
report, "two Israeli helicopters and a remotely piloted vehicle were
present in the Qana area at the time of the shelling." Amnesty
International also conducted an investigation of the massacre, and they
concluded "that the IDF [Israeli Defense Force} intentionally attacked
the UN compound."
Arieh Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz,
noted: "How easily we killed them [in Qana] without shedding a tear. We
did not denounce the crime, did not arrange for a legal clarification,
because this time we tried to deny the abominable horror and move on."
And the international edition of Time magazine noted, "Around the
Middle East... Qana is already a byword for martydom. The southern
Lebanese village figures as a shrine drawing up to 1,000 pilgrims a
day: busloads of schoolchildren, Cabinet ministers from Beirut, even a
daughter of Iran's President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Black
banners overlooking rows of graves decry the 'barbarity' of Israel."
While largely ignored by the American press, the massacre at Qana was
front-page news in London, much of Europe, and throughout the Middle
East, where the story continued for days. Already burning with hatred
for America and Israel, the pictures of headless Arab babies and other
grisly photographs that appeared throughout the media were likely the
final shove, pushing bin Laden over the edge and leading him to
dedicating his life to war against what he would call the Israeli -
United States alliance. From then on, he would often use the massacre
at Qana as a battle cry, and it would become the match lighting the
fuse that would eventually lead to the World Trade Center on a Tuesday
morning five years later....