An Israeli military investigation has blamed the killing of seven members of a Palestinian family including five children on a Gaza beach, on a landmine planted by Hamas or other buried explosive, not shelling by the army.
But Palestinian leaders described the army’s conclusions as a cover-up and a former Pentagon analyst, sent by a United States human rights group to investigate the deaths, said the military had ignored evidence that left little doubt the family and an eighth casualty were killed by a stray Israeli shell.
The Palestinians accused the army of rushing to clear itself to save Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, embarrassment as he tours Britain and other European countries to win support for his plan to draw the Jewish state’s final borders by annexing part of the West Bank.
Television pictures of 10-year-old Huda Ghalia crying on the beach over the bodies of her dead father, step-mother and five siblings on Friday had threatened to derail Olmert’s public relations drive and severely embarrassed the army at home. Olmert initially said he regretted the killings, but in London on Monday he sought to distance Israel from responsibility.
On Tuesday the Defence Minister, Amir Peretz, said a military investigation had ruled out any possibility the army was involved. ”The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces,” he said.
The military says that it fired six shells on to and around the beach where Huda Ghalia’s family died, and one of them fell about 100 yards away, but by coincidence another explosion — probably a mine planted by Hamas or a buried shell — occurred in the same area at the same time. The military backed its claim with analysis of aerial photographs, shrapnel and intelligence that Hamas had mined beaches to stop Israeli forces landing, although it is not known to have used such a tactic before.
The head of the Israeli inquiry, Major General Meir Klifi, also said that shrapnel taken from two wounded Palestinians treated in Israeli hospitals was not shell fragments. ”There is no chance that a shell hit this area. Absolutely no chance,” he said.
But an expert sent by the New York-based Human Rights Watch to investigate the death of the family has concluded that there is little doubt they were killed by an Israeli shell dropping from the sky.
”All the evidence points to the fact that it couldn’t have been a mine,” said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon adviser on battlefields who led the US military’s battle damage assessment team in Kosovo and worked for its intelligence wing, the Defence Intelligence Agency.
”You have the crater size, the shrapnel, the types of injuries, their location on the bodies. That all points to a shell dropping from the sky, not explosives under the sand,” he said.
The army says an eight-minute gap between when the last shell was fired and when the Palestinians were killed means there is no connection. However, there is a dispute over the timings, with the Palestinian ambulance service logging an emergency call just before Israel says it stopped firing shells.
The army also says that aerial pictures of the blast crater show it is more likely to have been made by a mine under the sand than a explosion from above. But after investigating the scene, Garlasco concluded that the army’s explanation was deeply flawed. Among the new shrapnel he collected at the scene was a piece stamped with the figures: 155MM.
”The 155mm shell is what Israel uses in the howitzers that regularly shell northern Gaza,” he said. ”The Israelis have been postulating that it’s a land mine. I’ve been to hospital and seen the injuries. The doctors say they are primarily to the head and torso. That is consistent with a shell exploding above the ground not a mine under it. If it were a mine or kids playing with an old shell you would expect severe leg injuries as well, even legs blown off.”
Doctors also said that the shrapnel pulled from the survivors included copper used to case or line shells.
Garlasco said the crater where the family was killed closely resembles others scattered the length of the beach caused by Israeli shells. Each is lined with a white power left by the explosion.
”To say you have five or six rounds in an area and coincidentally there’s a land mine next to it and it goes off at the same time is asking a lot,” said Garlasco.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, accused the Israelis of a cover-up. ”The Israelis should have admitted what they did and apologised. They know who did it and we know who did it. They want to escape responsibility because it was a severe embarrassment to the military at home and the prime minister when he is abroad. The pictures followed him to Europe,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â