July 30, 2006

Qana death toll rising

This is an update on an earlier post. According to the BBC, the death toll at Qana has risen to 54. It was 40 when I blogged it this morning.
Reports from the southern Lebanese town of Qana have described a scene of carnage, with rescue workers continuing to pull bodies from the ruins of a civilian building.

Early on Sunday morning, as BBC correspondents arrived at the site of the deadliest Israeli strike so far in this conflict, frantic efforts to find survivors were already under way.

Displaced families had been sheltering in the basement of a house in Qana, which was crushed after a direct hit.

The Israeli strike killed at least 54 people, more than half of them children.

The BBC's Jim Muir said that for some of the rescuers, experienced as they were, the emotional impact of finding so many dead children in the ruins was too much.

"As I arrived, they were carrying out on a stretcher the limp body of a young boy of about 10. Many other children were pulled out of the rubble lifeless," our correspondent said.

"That's a Red Cross rescue worker sitting here in the sunshine just sobbing - he's so overcome with
I honestly didn't know what had happened when I posted about this this morning. I kept hearing about it at the demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Then I googled Qana. See how many sites came up. I've mentioned it several times on this blog. Something I noticed when I googled it was Wikipedia, which is the first general list website to appear after the "google news" items. I checked Wikipedia's entry for Qana and it showed the earlier atrocity from 1996. Peres had it bombed, as I recall, for electioneering purposes.(I'm not 100% sure though) 106 people were killed then, in a UN compound.

Now look at the Wikipedia entry for Qana:
Qana is a village located southeast of Tyre, Southern Lebanon. It has been the location of two separate incidents in which the Israeli Defense Forces caused civilian deaths during military operations (Operation Grapes of Wrath and the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict):

* 1996 shelling of Qana - On April 18, 1996, amid heavy fighting between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah during "Operation Grapes of Wrath", a Fijian UNIFIL compound in the village was shelled by Israeli artillery, killing 106 civilians and injuring around 116 others who had taken refuge there to escape the fighting. Four UNIFIL soldiers were also seriously injured.[1][2]
* 2006 Qana airstrike - On the 30 July 2006, a double airstrike on the town that Israel claimed had been frequented by mobile rocket units, killed at least 54 (including 34-37 children) and injured many others when an apartment building collapsed.[.
Did you see that? An entry in an online encyclopaedia on Qana even takes today's horrors into account. Even more remarkable is the fact that the entry for 1996 runs a purely zionist line, making the atrocity look like an accident or a crossfire thing. But today's entry has nothing resembling a zionist excuse. It seems that the zionists haven't worked out their story yet, but they're working on it.

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