". . . Israel deliberately shelled a United Nations compound in Lebanon last April in an attack that killed more than 100 civilians.
In a strongly worded statement, the London-based human rights group said the killings during Israel's "Grapes of Wrath" operation against Hizbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon were in clear breach of the rules of war.
Amnesty also accused Hizbollah of breaking international law with its rocket attacks on civilians across the border in Israel, but the main thrust of the Amnesty statement was highly critical of Israel.
Amnesty said it had carried out field investigations with the aid of a high-ranking military expert in Israel and Lebanon into the attack on the Qana compound. . .
Amnesty said in its statement: "The available information indicates that the Israeli Defense Forces intentionally attacked the U.N. compound, despite Israeli claims that the attack was a mistake."
A U.N. report into the shelling concluded last May that it was unlikely the attack had been a mistake, but the report's findings were rejected by the Israeli government.
"The horrific nature of the events at Qana has only been made worse by the Israeli government's refusal to own up to its responsibility,'' Amnesty said.
"Even if it was a mistake -- and Israel has failed to show that it was -- the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) would still bear responsibility for taking the risk to launch an attack so close to the U.N. compound."
Amnesty also accused Israel of the unlawful killing of six civilians when an Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance taking victims out of the war zone.
Amnesty said it found no evidence to back Israel's explanation that the vehicle was being used by Hizbollah.
Similarly, Amnesty rejected Israel's assertion that it had only attacked a house, killing nine people, because Hizbollah members had run inside.
"Such killings must be investigated, those responsible for abuses punished and the victims compensated,'' Amnesty said.
How did such atrocitry happen? Here is Ari Shavit - from all we can tell,
an Israeli reporter straight out of the trenches. He filed the following,
translated from Hebrew in "Liberation" of May 21, 1996 and titled
"Cana: 102 Faceless Dead."
"We killed 170 people in Lebanon, most of whom were refugees, during the month of April, 1996. Many of them were women, old people and children. We killed 9 civilians, one a 2 year old girl and one, a centenarian, in Sahmour, on April 11th. We killed 11 civilians, including 7 children, in Nabatyeh, on April 18th. In the UN Camp in Cana, we killed 102 people.
We made sure to inflict death from a distance. In a very secular manner, without the archaic idea of sin, without the antediluvian worry to consider man in the image of God, and without the primitive proscription, "You shall not kill!"
Our solid alibi is that we are responsible for nothing, that the responsibility falls on Hezbollah. A most doubtful alibi. For when we decided to launch a massive attack on the civilian region of South Lebanon (while Israel ran no vital risk), we decided, ipso facto, to spill the blood of X number of civilians. When we decided to drive half a million people out of their homes and to shell those who remained behind (while in Israel, we did not have one single victim), we decided, in fact, to execute several dozen of them. This (alibi) allowed us to make such cruel decisions without seeing ourselves as rotten.
We killed them because the increasingly wider gap between the sacrosanct character that we attribute to our own lives and the more limited character we give to theirs, allowed us to kill. We believe, in the most absolute manner, with the White House, the Senate, the Pentagon, and the New York Times on our side, that their lives do not have the same weight as ours. We are convinced that with Dimona (Israel's atomic site), Yad Vashem and the Shoah Museum in our hand, we have the right to compel 400,000 people to evacuate their homes in 8 hours. And we have the right, at the end of 8 hours, to consider their homes as military targets. And we reserve the right to rain 16,000 shells on their villages and their populations. And we reserve the right to kill without any guilt feelings.
But all this cannot alleviate the gravity of the massacre, Israeli style, and our responsibility for its execution. For it is perpetrated, in general, in places to which we give free range to immoderate violence.
The shelling of Cana was executed according to the rules, orders and objectives of operation, "Grapes of Wrath." There is something wrong in these rules, orders and objectives. Something that is no longer human. Something that touches on the criminal.
And all of us, without exception, were an integral part of this machine. The public supported the media, who supported the government, who supported the Chief of Staff, who supported the inquiry officer, who supported the officers, who supported the soldiers who fired the three shells that killed 102 in Cana.
Nothing can prevent Cana from becoming an integral part of our biography. Because, after Cana, we did not denounce the crime, we did not want to subject the affair to the eyes of the law, we merely wanted to deny the horror and go on with our current affairs. That is how Cana is part of ourselves -- like one of the features of our face.
As the massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein (in the Cave of the Patriarchs on Muslims while praying) and the crime committed by Ygal Amir (like the reactions to them) were manifestations of rotten seeds in the heart of the national-religious culture, the massacre of Cana is no less extreme a grain of rottenness in the heart of secular Israeli culture: its cynicism, brutality, instrumentalism, egocentrism of the powerful; this tendency to blur the frontier between good and evil, between permitted and prohibited; this tendency not to require justice, not to care about truth.
The manner in which contemporary Israel has functioned during and after Cana shows that modern, rational Israeli life conceals a terrifying aspect. . . "
Well, it is never too late to repent. The Simon Wiesenthal Center of
Tolerance thus has its work cut out. In the name of our dead, we invite
them to start getting busy.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Our law teaches us that the wealth of the future will be according to the measure of the sacrifices of the past."
From "Gazeta de Vest," a Romanian Nationalist publication