By now we are all too sadly familiar with the outlines of the story. A group of refugees from other villages in the south of Lebanon had gone to Qana and took shelter from Israeli bombardment in the basement of a 3 story house. In addition to the bombardment, the Israelis targeted a house alleged to have been used to hide rockets. In the very early hours of Sunday morning a bomb struck next to the house the group were sheltering in. In a gruesome echo of the miracle of turning water into wine, their breathing air turned to dust and rubble.

Now one of perhaps most contentious claims is that Hezbollah get the local population to hide arms, the clear inference being that co-ertion is used. The reality on the ground is that the Party of God's military wing is seen as the people who drove the Israelis out of the country. The implied separation of the two roups is also misleading, these are not "insurgents" being shipped over the border from Syria or Iran. Hezbollah's strength grew from the previous Israeli invasions and the keenest supporters came from the very areas being fought over now. You cannot drive Hezbollah out of the area south of the Litani river without driving the population out as well.  Here though we get to the first of the line of deceits that the Israelis have put out about Qana. Rockets are very rarely fired from near the home that was hosting them. These are mobile weapons designed to be carried on pickups and small vehicles and, in guerilla warfare, not fired from the same position all the time. You certainly do not always use the bit of derelict land next to the mosque as your permanant launch site if you want to stay around very long.

Here is where we get IDF's first muddlying of the waters. Their claim that Hezbollah was supported by three sets of grainy military video footage. One of these show dark blips risingfrom a negative townscape, impossible to locate and could quite frankly be a complete fake.

Placing the blame on Hezbollah  is the next tactic. Our student friends at GIYUS have the orders ready for the troops (late I might add)

Talkback where it counts - The tragic Qana Incident

Help the world see Hezbollah for the terror organization it is - talkback and comment on these blogs which discuss the Qana incident. Discuss Hezbollah's cruel use of civilians as human shields to their bombings of Israel and their refusal to allow civilians to leave as well as prevent UN officials to enter to aid civilian population.

Send people to the following sites for pictures proving Hezbolla's scare tactics:

Pictures showing Hezbolla's fighters hiding in civilian areas
Hezbolla preventing civilians from leaving fighting zone
Hezbolla's declared mission is to free the middle east of Jews

The pictures of the fighters hiding turns out to be a piece from the Austraian Sunday Herald Sun which claims to have photos showing

images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons.

This turns out to be a set of three photos on a slide show. One shows a swarthy middle-eastern type brandishing what looks like a Kalasnikov automaic weapon beld together with rubber bands with a telescopic sight perched on top. The other two show a group surrounding a truck with a antiquated looking heavy machine gun mounted on it. Launcing rockets from Beirut, as imagined, would of course be lucky to reach the Litani, let alone Israel.

The claim about Hezbolla preventing civilians leaving is a one paragraph article in the ynet site which reads in its entirety:

The IDF has found that Hizbullah is preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon. Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages Hizbullah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hizbullah have broken out. (Hanan Greenberg)

Which is one report of an IDF claim from the 17th July. Could it be that this is all part of the cover story already being put in place in the event of any embarassing accidents?

The piece about Hezbollah turns out to be a rabidly anti-muslim piece in the Christian Science Monitor declaring a history of Palestinian anti-semitism by Alan Dershowiz whose tenor can be judged from the sign off:

The fight against Hizbullah is a fight against anti-Jewish, anti- Christian, and humanistic values. If Hizbullah terrorism is not stopped in southern Lebanon, it will be coming to a theater, church, or synagogue near you

So why would the IDF be laying the backstories discrediting Hezbollah by claiming they stop refugees. Robert Fisk in today's Independent gives a clue to what was stopping the people leaving:

All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel's onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun ­ close to the scene of Israel's last military incursion at Bint Jbeil ­ and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.

The BBC's Jim Muir gives what we might call the New Orleans reason - those left behind are too frail, sick or elderly to move or simply cannot afford the petrol or taxi fare to get out along the unsafe roads.

Sunday also saw one of the stanger attempts to deflect responsibility away from the IDF. Robert Fisk in his piece found a survivor who could tell exactly when the ding started

I found Nejwah Shalhoub lying in the government hospital in Tyre, her jaw and face bandaged like Robespierre's before his execution. She did not weep, nor did she scream, although the pain was written on her face. Her brother Taisir, who was 46, had been killed. So had her sister Najla. So had her little niece Zeinab, who was just six. "We were in the basement hiding when the bomb exploded at one o'clock in the morning,'' she said.

All the other western reporters on the spot tell the same story. The shelter collapsed when a bomb went off next to it around 1am. Yet on Sunday the IDF was putting out a completely different story and of course the doubts it raises have been used on Kos and no doubt other boards. Here is the IDF version as reported by ynet

 An IDF investigation has found that the building in Qana  struck by the Air Force fell around eight hours after being hit by the IDF.

"The attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear," Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the incidents at Qana.

Eshel and the head of the IDF's Operational Branch, Major General Gadi Eisnkot said the structure was not being attacked when it collapsed, at around 8:00 in the morning.

The IDF believes that Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse.

Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed. "It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.

"I'm saying this very carefully, because at this time I don't have a clue as to what the explanation could be for this gap," he added.

So here we have this curious claim. The "structure" took 7 hours to collapse after the bomb hit it. You can blame Hezbollah because they left explosives which blew up to 7 hours after a bomb went off next to them. Either that or maybe, they speculate, it was badly damaged but managed to stay up for that time. Either way, the implication is, the deaths therefore must have happened much later than all the eye witnesses claim. So what does this say about Nejwah Shalhoub and the rest of the adults looking after the children nd old people in the shelter?

Are we really being asked to believe that the group would continue to shelter in a partially bombed building next to a cache of high explosive? Or hang around in a rickety building waiting for it to collapse? To what end? To set the IDF up for criticism when their children and loved ones perish under the collapse? This bizarre claim is incomprehensible and puzzling.  By our leaders failure to stand up to Bush and Olmert and demanding a ceasefire, our countries are complicit in these deaths. We owe a duty to Nejwah Shalhoub to clear her of this foul slander from the IDF.  We have the same duty to her brother rother Taisir and her sister Najla. We also owe a another duty to them and her niece Zeinab, who was six. We owe it to  Mehdi Hashem, aged seven and Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 ­whose name, aged and place of death, Qana were written on their plastic shrouds. We owe it to Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one whose body bounced on the shoulder of the Lebanese solder recovering it as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In fact we owe it to all the 56 men, women, children and babies for who a place of safety became a tomb. That duty is to record the facts of their deaths and nail the lies of those who would use it to justify their agression.