Two members of the Al Dalu family, Mohammad and Raneen Al Dalu were found under the rubble four days after the Israeli military airstrike that killed nine members of the same family, Gaza, November 22, 2012. (Photo by: Anne Paq/Activestills.org)
It’s tough to keep up with the Israeli military’s spin.
Israel is changing its story about the airstrike that killed 10 members of the al-Dalou family and two others–again. Israeli military spokeswoman Avital Leibovich told Ma’an News Sunday that she has not identified the target the Israeli air force was trying to strike, and refused to to say who the target was in an interview.
This explanation goes back on what the same military spokeswoman told a different news agency: that the intended target of the November 18 airstrike was a man named Muhammad al-Dalou, who was a Hamas “terror operative” who also worked for the police in Gaza. But after Human Rights Watch cast doubt on the official Israeli story as to who al-Dalou was and said that the strike violated the laws of war, it appears that Israel is now changing its story again.
I summarized Israel’s changing explanations in an earlier post:
At first, the Israeli military claimed they were targeting the commander of Hamas’ rocket launching operations, a man supposedly named Yihia Abayah. But the al-Dalou family knew nothing of this person.
After it became clear that the strike had wiped out an entire family, Israel’s story was scrutinized. Haaretz reported November 18 that the air force “mistakenly bombed the home of one of [Rabiah’s] neighbors, Mohammed a-Dallo, killing 10 members of his family and two of his neighbors. Rabiah seems to have survived the attack.”
But Israel shifted its explanation again. The latest comes courtesy of Israeli army spokeswoman Avital Leibovich. The strike was deliberate, Leibovich told the Agence France-Presse in a story published November 27. AFP reports that “Mohammed Jamal al-Dallu, 29, a member of the Hamas police unit charged with protecting important people, was…killed in the strike, and the Israeli army said on Tuesday that he was the target of the raid.” Leibovich told AFP that “the father was a known terror operative affiliated with the military wing of Hamas” and that “there was no mistake from the IDF. It’s tragic when a terror operative is hiding among civilians but unfortunately it is part of Hamas and Islamic Jihad tactics.”
Human Rights Watch released the results of its investigation into the al-Dalou strike, and they concluded that the attack was a violation of the rules of war. And while Israeli military spokeswoman Avital Leibovich claimed that Muhammad al-Dalou was a “terror operative” with Hamas, the Human Rights Watch report says otherwise.
“Members of the Dalu family and neighbors interviewed separately said that Mohamed al-Dalu was not a member of any Palestinian armed group,” the report states. Furthermore, “the website of the al-Qassam Brigades regularly posts the names and biographies of its killed fighters, including 20 men from the eight days of fighting in November, but as of December 6 it had not posted any mention of Mohamed al-Dalu.” There’s also the fact, as Human Rights Watch reports, that al-Dalou’s police commander said that he “had worked every day during the latest fighting, and that he was not a member of any armed group.”
Ma’an News Agency went back to the Israeli army after the Human Rights Watch report was released. Here’s their account of the interview with Leibovich:
Questioned by Ma’an twice in the past week about the strike, Leibovich denied she had identified Muhammad al-Dalou as the target.
“What I said is that the targets we picked were not innocent civilians,” she said last Sunday.
Declining to comment on whether the intended target was killed, or the target’s name, she explained: “In this large scale operation there are many sites targeted, sometimes you can’t know ahead or you don’t know the result.”
Asked again for the target’s name after Friday’s HRW report, Leibovich told Ma’an: “Not everything is known at this point.”
Meanwhile, she continued to describe the target as a Hamas militant “who used the house as a hiding place.”
Leibovich said an army investigation was ongoing, and noted the al-Dalou family home was just one of over 1,500 sites hit during the war.
When asked if the al-Dalou strike might be prioritized as an incident for investigation due to the high civilian casualties, she said “we are looking at the operation as a whole, there are different types of investigations, different areas … with the airforce, intelligence.”
So Leibovich is now denying that she told Agence France Presse that the target of the strike was al-Dalou–even though that’s exactly what she said, according to the news agency. The Israeli military has a lot of questions it needs to answer when it comes to this case. 12 people, including four children, were killed. And given the constant changes in Leibovich’s and the Israeli military’s story, journalist and human rights researchers need to scrutinize any explanation very closely.
That’s her way of confessing that the IDF commited a war crime.
Four different stories? My, my! An embarrassment of riches! So much hasbara.
Makes one wonder — is the spokesman denying that the target was THIS PERSON (Muhammad al-Dalou) or THIS BUILDING? Did the world-famous-surgical-precision-guided-missile-aimers get the wrong physical target? Or the wrong guy? Or what?
And could it be that the guided-missiles are “surgical” (that is, they precisely hit their physical target and no more than their physical target), BUT that the cheerful folk who decide what physical target to destroy have no particular precision or narrowness of target at all?
And then there is the question of destroying a building full of people in order to assassinate one person; one person who at the moment at least was presumably not attacking Israel or its citizens or army [this is called the question of proportionality, I think].
One should examine how Israel uses terms “terrorist” and “not innocent civilians”.
On the eve of the attack on Mavi Marmara ministers were calling the passangers “terrorist” and they were duly killed. Now IDF calls journalists and cameramen “terrorist” and kills them. And diplomatic efforts in UN are called “diplomatic terrorism”, and so is a possible legal action in ICC, “legal terrorism”, so we may expect attacks on diplomats and lawyers.
IDF claims that they destroyed 1500 “terrorist targets”, and according to various announcements, anything in Gaza qualifies.
Destroying a multifamily (or large family) house because one of the inhabitants is a policeman is high tech savagery. Destroying a media building because of a “terrorist antenna” or a possible “presence of a terrorist” is slightly less savage because killed and maimed were adult males rather than babies, but actually there is no difference.
Why would anyone believe Israel’s account of its own war crimes, and this pathetic story-changing is evidence of its feeble, ridiculous and non-credible continual whitewashing of IDF thuggery and lethal violence, crimes which are never punished, never mind admitted. They are so stupid you can only conclude that they couldn’t care less what idiotic stories they feed the suckers at press bureaus, as long as they are distributed. I suppose they take comfort in the fact that American senators will faithfully regurgitate almost any pack of lies, as do most of the mainstream media, to keep their sponsors happy.
One small sliver of light – 5 Broken Cameras has made the documentary feature Oscars short list:
http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2012/20121203.html
Prepare for the hasbara campaign and torrent of lies to undermine it.
Jake: Oh, please, don’t kill us! Please, please don’t kill us! You know I love you baby. I wouldn’t leave ya. It wasn’t my fault!
Mystery Woman: You miserable slug! You think you can talk your way out of this? You betrayed me.
Jake: No, I didn’t. Honest… I ran out of gas. I… I had a flat tire. I didn’t have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!