There is a breathtaking piece of investigative journalism in Haaretz‘s magazine today by Shay Fogelman on the most cursed event (in Israel’s view) of the Gaza onslaught two years ago: the mortar attack on the Jabaliya refugee camp on January 6, 2009 that killed between 34 and 43 civilians gathered near a UN school in al-Fakhoura Street.
The piece begins unforgettably with a portrait of Lina Hasan, a 10-year-old girl killed in the attack when she was going out to buy candy. The horrifying images of carnage outside a school stirred international outrage and helped to establish the factfinding mission that would lead to the Goldstone Report. The words “Family Massacre” occur as a drophead in the Haaretz account– and describe the mortar dropped on the Deeb family house, killing 11 of 16 family members.
The thrust of the Haaretz report is clear: yes there were Hamas operatives in a nearby orchard, but the most reliable accounts of Palestinian firings undermine the Israeli official accounts — a claim of “mortal danger” to Israeli troops 2 miles north– and leave unanswered questions about why the Israelis would fire four mortar shells into an area teeming with civilians. The Israeli investigations of the incident are completely unconvincing in Haaretz’s view. Note that the investigator the IDF provides to Haaretz for an interview claims that the mortar attacks were in the morning, when they took place near 4 in the afternoon, approaching dusk.
Though yes, Fogelman appends an afterword concluding that Israel did not deliberately target civilians in the incident (displaying merely shocking negligence and disproportion) and that the IDF’s sense of “feeling threatened and persecuted” by international pressure has kept it from investigating the episode in any meaningful way.
Here are some excerpts of the report:
In regard to the location of the Palestinian mortar unit, the officer says, “We know that it is outside the school, at a distance of 80-100 meters from it, in an orchard. If someone had said to me, ‘Listen, there is a crowd there, all the schoolchildren are standing next to that place,’ and mortar fire against me had continued, I would not have opened fire at the place. By the way, it’s not certain that that would be the right thing from the military viewpoint, but that’s what I would have decided….[B] because we understood that it was far enough from the school and that this barrel was firing repeatedly – not one or two shells – authorization was given to return fire.”
However, a very different picture emerges from many testimonies given by paratroopers who took part in the incident and from a large number of previously unpublished documents obtained by Haaretz Magazine. None of the soldiers who were interviewed for this article and none of those who gave testimony to Breaking the Silence – an organization of veteran soldiers seeking to raise awareness of the reality of life in the occupied territories – described similar feelings of mortal danger. Many of them do not even remember coming under mortar fire. Moreover, some of the operational logs and military reports summing up the Gaza operation also make no mention of Palestinian mortar fire at the paratroopers in Al-Atatra.
A previously unpublished report drawn up by the fire coordination unit of Southern Command, based on the spotting of mortar and missile fire from the Gaza Strip, indicates that all the shells fired by Palestinians from the area of Jabalya refugee camp landed inside Israel, far from where the paratroopers were located. One landed near Sapir College in Sderot, the report states, another in Begin Square in Sderot and the others in open areas, mainly around nearby Kibbutz Gevim.
Another document obtained by Haaretz – “Summary of Major Events,” a routine daily report drawn up by the operations section of the Gaza Division detailing all the incidents of the past day – lists all the cases in which the [sraeli] paratroopers in Al-Atatra [2.5 miles away] came under fire on January 6, not only from mortar shells. According to this report, only four cases of firing took place in the hours that preceded the mortar attack by the IDF (which took place at about 3:45 P.M. ) – at 8:41 A.M., 9:06 A.M., 11:59 A.M. and 12:38 P.M. True, five soldiers were wounded lightly in the first of the four instances, and the division’s log states, “Light arms and mortar shells fired at our forces.” But later it turned out that all five soldiers were wounded by the light-arms fire, not by a mortar shell, as all the later summaries for that day also note.
Another daily summary, drawn up by the operations branch of the Gaza Division, also states that during the whole of that day, a total of four mortar shells were fired at Israeli forces in the northern sector of the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, the shells landed near a Golani Brigade force that was operating in the sector, and not near the paratroopers. In sum, none of the reports and events logs obtained by Haaretz states that mortar shells were fired that day from Jabalya at the paratroopers in Al-Atatra. Incidentally, the senior officer, who made it clear at the start of the interview (which was arranged through the IDF Spokesman’s Unit ) that he is well informed about the details and that he witnessed “the event from end to end,” insisted on two different occasions that it occurred in the morning. Even when he was shown army documents stating that the Israeli mortar shells landed in the street close to 4 P.M., along with soldiers’ testimonies to the same effect, he continued to insist: “Morning. Near midday.” It is also noteworthy that on the January day on which the incident occurred, sunset was at 4:52 P.M., meaning that the mortars were fired toward the onset of twilight.
…. Taken as a whole, the testimonies and other evidence show that the first three mortar shells landed in the middle of Fakhoura Street, just meters from the UNRWA school. The fourth shell hit the porch of the home of the Deeb family – at least 50 meters away from the place where the Palestinian mortar squad could have been operating.
Photographs that were taken in the course of a classified internal investigation conducted by a highly regarded international human rights organization whose reports are generally reliable, show shrapnel and the tail ends of shells that were found on the street and in the home of the Deeb family. The report of the investigation, which was obtained by Haaretz Magazine, also locates the places where the Israeli shells fell according to map coordinates based on GPS technology. The findings closely match the Goldstone Report and the testimonies taken from Gaza residents for this article. They show that the four IDF mortar shells fell a few dozen meters apart, across a total distance of 160 meters. The “aiming point” – the average strike point of the shells – is about 150 meters from the site of the Palestinian mortar squad according to both the senior officer and the report of the General Staff.
Video footage shot within seconds of the incident on Fakhoura Street leaves no room for doubt about where three of the shells struck. The footage shows a busy street with buildings all around….
the paratroopers apparently had direct eye contact with the area of the Fakhoura School, at a distance of only 1,600 meters, and in that case could see that the area was bustling with people. With binoculars, they could also identify relatively easily the armed individuals and distinguish them from the dozens of civilians on the street. This raises serious questions about the decision to use mortar fire…
a number of pilots who took part that day in Operation Cast Lead and were interviewed for the article vehemently rejected the allegation that the air force was unavailable for the mission. According to one of them, “We maintained a constant presence in all the combat sectors. And even if there was a technical hitch with one of the [aircraft], or someone left the area in order to rearm, there were always backups.” Moreover, the combat logs from that day describe a number of events in which paratroopers on the ground guided helicopters and aircraft to targets, sometimes even to eliminate a wall or other barrier, certainly against armed individuals…
The Israeli response to the Goldstone Report stated that the military advocate general had “also found that the IDF’s choice of weapons was appropriate under the circumstances. The Israeli forces employed a burst of four Keshet 120 mm mortar rounds, fired in quick succession. The Keshet mortar contains advanced target acquisition and navigation systems.” This description of mortar shells is hardly consistent with reality. As anyone who has ever fired a mortal shell knows, the shell plummets like a stone from the sky and cannot navigate itself to the target. No evidence exists either in the professional military literature or in the catalogs of the leading manufacturers of mortar shells that these weapons “contain advanced target acquisition and navigation systems.”…
The military advocate general found that the IDF response had been “measured” and “proportional,” a finding that is difficult to accept given the result in practice: the death of dozens of civilians. Israel’s response to the Goldstone report stated, “Israel acknowledges that, while the strike was effective in removing the threat to Israeli forces, it also resulted in the regrettable loss of civilian lives … [T]he MAG reiterated the recommendation of the special command investigation to formulate more stringent definitions in military orders to govern the use of mortars in populated areas and in close proximity to sensitive facilities.”
The IDF does not elaborate about the “more stringent definitions” that were drawn up concerning the use of mortars in populated areas in the wake of the Fakhoura Street incident. It’s a pity that many civilians had to die to prompt the IDF to redefine what should have been self-evident. Beyond this, it might have been expected that the paratroopers who fired the mortars would be more cautious in choosing the mode of response, target and weapon, even without a formal order. True, they fired at Hamas combatants who were operating in the area, and hit a few of them, but what effort did they make to avoid harming innocent civilians? In response to a query from Haaretz Magazine, the IDF Spokesman chose not to address specific claims and not to reply to questions about the seeming contradictions between the comments of the senior officer and those of the military advocate general.
This is journalism to fill your eyes with tears and your mind with questions. Why has no American newspaper undertaken this kind of inquiry, when day after day we are subjected to hectoring about the Goldstone “reconsideration”? Why is this all on Haaretz’s shoulders? Where are the American Jewish groups to lend support to brave Haaretz? Why is the New York Times bureau chief in the middle of this story a man with an Israeli wife and a son in the Israeli armed forces– a position that forced the Times correspondent in Gaza, Taghreed El-Khodary, who surely could have matched this Haaretz report with on-the-ground reporting, to quit her job in embarrassment?
These are historic times, dire times that have called on the best that journalists have to offer. Fogelman along with Roni Efrat and Rayad Zuabi have risen to the challenge. I pray that the New Yorker, which praised Haaretz’s contribution a few weeks back in a 10,000-word article, will give the newspaper some reinforcement here, and do its own investigation of the orders during Cast Lead, and subsequent investigations.
