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Nations United Against Israel

While Israel checks, world condemns

BBC reporter claims to know source of fire that killed seven Palestinians


By Stan Goodenough
June 11, 2006

Seven members of an Arab family were killed in an explosion on a Gaza Strip beach Friday afternoon. The victims included a mother and father, two babies and a teenager.

Exactly what blew up on that beach on the balmy Muslim day of rest is unclear.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz has called for a thorough investigation:

?We have a total obligation to protect the citizens of Israel. I admit that we indeed take risks when planning and executing operations, but this is a grave incident and it shall be thoroughly probed.?

But Israelis were already apologizing before the investigation even got underway.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev told foreign journalists that if the deaths were caused by negligence on the Israeli side, heads would roll.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert himself issued an apology for the killings, expressing his ?deep regret? over the deaths.

Olmert?s daughter was among an assortment of left-wing Israelis who marched in protest in Tel Aviv, calling for Peretz and senior IDF officers to be tried in the Hague for ?war crimes? against the ?Palestinians.?

In its early stages, the probe ordered by the Defense Minister far ruled out the possibility that the explosion was caused by a shell or missile fired by either an Israeli naval vessel or an Israeli Air Force plane.

Now being checked is the possibility that an IDF artillery shell fired in retaliation for Kassam rocket attacks against Israeli targets may have gone astray. The IDF has reported that a number of shells were sent towards the northern Gaza Strip. However none of those fired landed in the area where the explosion apparently took place.

The experts appointed by Peretz are also exploring the possibility that Israel had nothing to do with it; that the explosion was Arab-initiated ? caused by a Kassam rocket, a mortar, or a dud bomb that went off while it was being handled.

Kassam rockets and bombs have detonated among the ?Palestinians? in the past. On Saturday afternoon a Kassam landed in a Gaza refugee camp, wounding a number of people.

For the Palestinian Authority, however, any cooperation with Israel in such an investigation is out of the question.

IDF sources say PA officials have refused to disclose the precise position or the exact time of the explosion. They will also not reveal what kinds of wounds were caused.

All they are doing is accusing Israel of carrying out a deliberate massacre ? a charge supported by the antisemitic journalists of the BBC, among others.

One such is the British corporation?s Gaza-situated reporter James Reynolds. His voice thick with anger, he ignored the Israeli investigation completely.

Speaking into his camera on the beach where the shelling reportedly took place, he states as fact that an Israeli weapon caused the deaths.

Apparently (though he does not make any such claim) he was standing right there when it came whistling in. And he could see far in the distance its point of origin.

Reynolds was clearly parroting ?Palestinian? accounts ? something BBC (and other) reporters have done frequently in the past ? as when they accused Israel of carrying out genocidal mass murder in Jenin a couple of years ago.

Fed by unscrupulous reporters of this ilk, foreign leaders were quick to condemn Israel for the attack ? again, before any investigation had barely been started.

The French Foreign Ministry slammed Israel for being ?disproportionate? in its response to aggression against Israelis.

Egypt said Israel?s behavior was ?unacceptable? and had contravened international law.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett repeated the lie-as-fact when she issued a statement expressing her government?s concern over the killings Friday.

?We are deeply concerned by reports of the deaths from Israeli shelling of civilians, including children, on a Gaza beach this afternoon,? she said.

?The killing of innocent civilians is utterly unacceptable and we urge the Israelis to undertake an investigation into this incident. I will raise this with my Israeli counterpart when I see her on Monday."

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