The fog of war lifted

The BBC at the time it happened.

Strike at Gaza school ‘kills 40’
…
The UN officials said they regularly provided the Israeli military with exact co-ordinates of their facilities, and that the school was in a built-up area.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply dismayed” that despite these efforts, three UN-run schools had been hit by nearby Israeli strikes.

The Israeli military said that, according to initial checks, its soldiers had come under mortar fire from militants inside the al-Fakhura school.

“The force responded with mortars at the source of fire,” it said in a statement. “Hamas cynically uses civilians as human shields.”

It later reported that two well-known members of a Hamas rocket-launching cell had been among those killed at the school, naming them as Imad and Hassan Abu Askar.

The Washington Post reported:

The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation.

“We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza,” said John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.

The incident — one of the single most deadly during Israel’s 11-day offensive — underscored the dangers Palestinian civilians face as thousands of Israeli soldiers fight their way across Gaza against an enemy that does not wear uniforms or operate from bases, but instead mingles with the population.

The Post’s report deserves credit for acknowledging that Hamas does not conform to the laws of war, but the reporting generally took the tone of “both sides are wrong.” And the Post’s reporters failed to identify Hamas’s tactics as violations of international norms.

The New York Times headlined its article on the attack Grief and Rage at Stricken Gaza School

But Al Fakhura, set in the northern part of the densely packed Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City, is in a crowded neighborhood full of Hamas fighters. Israel said that a preliminary investigation showed that mortar fire from the school compound prompted Israeli forces to return fire. The Israeli mortar rounds killed as many as 40 people outside the school; Palestinian hospital officials said Tuesday that 10 of the dead were children and 5 were women.

Residents of the neighborhood said two brothers who were Hamas fighters were in the area at the time of the attack. The military identified them as Imad Abu Asker and Hassan Abu Asker, and said they had been killed. But the residents also said the mortar fire had not come from the school compound, but from elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The Times noted the presence of terrorists among the civilians but didn’t give the level of detail that the Washington Post provided. Still the Times failed to explicitly report that Hamas’s embedding of fighters among the civilian population was a war crime.

In a column where he defended the coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas by his paper, the New York Times, Clark Hoyt gave the following background:

When Israeli bombs killed dozens at a United Nations school on Tuesday, it was too dangerous for the newspaper’s Palestinian stringer, Taghreed El-Khodary, who has worked for The Times for seven years, to go to the scene. She went instead to a hospital, where an official told her that 40 were killed, including 10 children and 5 women. The head surgeon and an ambulance driver said 45 were dead. United Nations officials, who were not on the scene, said 30 were killed. The Times emphasized the hospital’s count of 40.

And as we now know, that death toll was inflated.

Now Israel has released the results of the IDF’s investigation into the conduct of its troops during the war against Hamas. Here are the results of its investigation into the strike at the school.

335. The following illustrative examples demonstrate both the process of investigation undertaken thus far in Israel with respect to certain incidents involving U.N. facilities, and the application of the proper legal standards to the facts currently available. As discussed above, the Law of Armed Conflict turns not on the simple fact that certain sites were damaged in the course of battlefield operations, but rather on whether military forces targeted military objectives, and whether in doing so they took into account considerations of proportionality, in weighing the possibility of incidental (but unintended) harm to civilian facilities or persons.
(i) UNRWA School in Jabaliya (Fahoura School): 6 January 2009
336. In this incident, which occurred on 6 January 2009, IDF mortar shells landed outside a school being used as a UNRWA shelter. No mortar rounds hit the school itself, but landed in the road outside the school and at a nearby compound, resulting in flying shrapnel that reportedly injured several people inside the school, and killed or injured others nearby.
337. The IDF’s ‘investigation of the incident found that, on 6 January 2009, an IDF force operating in the El-Attatra-Jabaliya area came under an effective barrage of 120mm mortars launched from a site about 3.5 km. from the force. The launching site was situated only 80 metres west of the UNRWA school. The mortar attack lasted for almost an hour, with one mortar being fired every few minutes. As reported in the media, local residents later confirmed that mortar fire was coming from the vicinity of the school.
338. Soon after the source of fire was detected, a scouting unit was dispatched to confirm the location. Approximately 50 minutes after the mortar attack had begun, two independent sources cross-verified the location of the mortars. Only subsequent to this, and after verification of a safety margin of at least 50 metres between the target (i.e., the identified source of mortar fire) and the UNRWA school, did the force respond to the ongoing barrage, by using the most accurate weapon available to it — 120mm mortars.
339. The IDF force that was under attack fired four mortars, about 5-10 minutes after the cross-checked identification of the source of fire, and while Hamas mortars were still being fired towards the forces. The IDF response succeeded in stopping the Hamas mortar attack. Indeed, as a result of the response, five Hamas operatives were killed. The effectiveness of the mission in achieving its military objective is thus indisputable.
340. The IDF acted to defend the lives of soldiers under fire, in order to stop continuing mortar attack. The defensive action targeted an identified source of mortar fire which represented a concrete and immediate threat to the force. The IDF executed the responsive fire with as much precision as possible, given the available munitions. Indeed, the fact that all the Israeli shells landed outside the school grounds demonstrates the care Israel took not to hit the school itself, consistent with its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict.

I suspect by now, most people who are questioned about the attack on the school, will respond that 40 people were killed. That’s what they read in the newspapers with no significant followup.

The Israeli investigation more or less confirmsthe correctness of its initial response. (Though in response to some charges, the IDF did allow that it may have made a mistake.)

I know the boast of the news industry made by Phil Graham, that it is the first rough draft of history. A rough draft, though, requires many corrections. News people nowadays aren’t much concerned with correcting mistaken first impressions or as Yaacov Lozowick, in his synopsis of his summary (Google Doc) of the IDF’s findings, writes:

Self anointed human rights organizations, followed by much of the media, have cast Israel as a serial transgressor against international law. The most recent case of this was Israel’s incursion into Hamas-controlled Gaza in January 2009, which was widely portrayed as criminal from inception to smallest detail. Defenders of Israel’s actions, generally not well versed in the minutiae of international law, have allowed themselves to be wrong footed, claiming that facts are wrong, or mooting the unacceptability of international law itself if it forbids Israel to defend its citizens.

The State of Israel has now published its legal and factual rebuttal. The authors of the report emphatically embrace international law and insist that its principles guide the IDF as it trains, plans, executes and investigate; they demonstrate all these actions on the case of the Gaza incursion.

The report is serious and learned, which means it is open to discussion and disagreement. Yet such a discussion must be informed and reasoned – precisely as much of the criticism leveled at Israel isn’t.

In his classic postmortem of Israel’s 1982 war against the PLO in Lebanon, Lebanon Eyewitness, Martin Peretz began:

MUCH OF WHAT you have read in the newspapers and newsmagazines about the war in Lebanon– and even more of what you have seen and heard on television–is simply not true.

Remarkably, 27 years later, though the specifics have changed, outrageous charges against Israel’s military operations persist, and are accepted not just into the “first rough draft” but into the accepted narrative. Maybe it’s time for the media and those who depend on it to engage a little self reflection.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.