Qana - Questions Are Raised

As you can see from the cover of Humanité, the French press has no reticence in assigning blame to Israel. The Israeli army itself thought it had committed these killings as a result of the night bombing of the village of Qana (also called Kfar Qana) and called off the air strikes, at least temporarily. However last night, Guysen Israel News published the following statement about what might have actually happened:

On the night of July 26, Tsahal bombed the village of Kfar Qana in Southern Lebanon. It was from this site that, in recent days, Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets aimed at localities in Northern Israel.

For several days the Israeli army had been warning the inhabitants, whom Hezbollah uses as human shields, to leave the region. These warnings, broadcast on the radio and through tracts distributed by the Air Force, apparently were not heard.

Chief of Army Operations, General Gadi Eisencott, indicated that 150 rockets had been fired from Kfar Qana. "We distributed the tracts and broadcast the announcements in the media. The inhabitants of Southern Lebanon have been warned to distance themselves from any terrorist organization and rocket-firing locale. I am very sorry that civilians have been killed, we did all we could to avoid it," he added.

However according to the first findings in the investigation being carried out by Tsahal on the destruction of the building, it appears that the Israeli army led its offensive in the middle of the night. But the building collapsed around 8:00 a.m. The casualties: 60 dead, 37 of them children.

According to the Israeli Air Force, several explanations might explain the time difference between the attack and the collapse of the building. The first is that Hezbollah itself blew up the building. Another is that the building remained standing in a weakened state and did not collapse until 8 hours after the attack by Tsahal.

The Air Force nonetheless confirms that another attack was launched in the area around 7:30 a.m. on buildings situated more than 500 meters from the one that collapsed. It seems then unlikely that this strike was the one that triggered the tragedy.

Be that as it may, the IDF investigators are not ruling out any possibility and are extremely cautious about the results of their inquiries that "are only just beginning," they pointed out.

But an even stranger question has been raised regarding the children who were killed. A reader of France-Echos, who says she is a qualified nurse, has pointed out that the children in the photos appear to be handicapped, from the positions and appearance of the limbs. If you go to the website, you will see several (painful) photos of dead children, all of whom seem to have similar arm and leg positions. The theory is that Hezbollah got rid of some unwanted handicapped children, making it appear that they were victims of Israeli bombings. I need not warn anyone with judgment that this is pure speculation, and at this point impossible to prove. Regard it as a theory until we know more (if we ever do). Here are excerpts of what she says:

I am a registered nurse, with long years of experience with multiple-handicapped children and with older dependent persons. During the nightly news Sunday night, on TF1 TV, about the young victims of Qana, my attention was drawn to the abnormal posture of a dead child on a stretcher.

This child's arm was turned upward with the hand totally turned down. This posture is typical of the tendon contractions that occur in multiple-handicapped bed-ridden children, or those in a wheel-chair. I examined as best I could the other corpses shown in the report, and I was surprised to note that each one of them had signs of being handicapped (feet turned inward, knee and hand deformities...)

Monday on France 2 morning news I saw another photo (the one on the cover of Humanité) that made the front pages, that of a child, in the arms of an adult, with deformed legs spreading apart at the knees, also typical of the multiple-handicapped.

The probability that the families in the building had several handicapped children and that all these children were killed, and that all the published photos are only of these children, is the probability of winning the lottery.

However, the probability that Hezbollah killed two birds with one stone by unloading an unwanted burden, all the while pretending they were innocent victims seems much more credible to me.

Marriage between close relatives and very young mothers are factors in birth defects. The practice of such marriages among Muslims produces large numbers of handicapped children...

One last note: another reader of FE says that Euronews Channel 3 indicated there were handicapped children in the shelter (I presume this is the collapsed building) but later official sources (TF1 TV and AFP) said that only the bodies of children from TWO families were removed, with no mention of handicaps.

So, if I make any sense of this (I'm not sure that I do), the only PHOTOS we have are of handicapped children. There WERE handicapped children in the building. The bodies of ONLY two families' children were removed from the building (or from a section thereof). This would imply that those two families had many handicapped children, not very likely, but not impossible.

So, the bottom line is that handicapped children were killed by somebody and thrown in with the others to increase Israeli responsibility in the death of children.

As I said, we must be careful...