ICAN INFO – Was the UNWRA School Really Bombed?
February 2, 2009 – 9:11 amHere is an e-mail alert from ICAN – Israeli Citizens Action Network:
Is the real truth about Gaza now coming out bit by bit. Patrick Martin from Canada’s Globe and Mail on Jan 29th, reporting from Jabalya claims the UNWRA story is false. Is this going to be another Mohammad Al Dura story?
Martin reports that most people remember the headlines: “Massacre Of Innocents As UN School Is Shelled; Israeli Strike Kills Dozens At UN School” and that the press heralded the tragic news of Jan. 6, when mortar shells fired by advancing Israeli forces killed 43 civilians in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The victims, it was reported, had taken refuge inside the Ibn Rushd Preparatory School for Boys, a facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people’s minds, was not quite accurate.
Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, make it clear: While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.
Stories of one or more shells landing inside the schoolyard were inaccurate.
A teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: “Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead.” “Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”
Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front. “There were only three,” he said. “They were all out here on the road.”
News of the tragedy travelled fast, with aid workers and medical staff quoted as saying the incident happened at the school, the UNRWA facility where people had sought refuge. Soon it was presented that people in the school compound had been killed. Before long, there was worldwide outrage.
John Ging, UNRWA’s operations director in Gaza, acknowledged in an interview this week that all three Israeli mortar shells landed outside the school and that “no one was killed in the school.”
“I told the Israelis that none of the shells landed in the school,” he said.
In its daily bulletin, the World Health Organization reported: “On 6 January, 42 people were killed following an attack on a UNRWA school …”
The UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs got the location right, for a short while. Its daily bulletin cited “early reports” that “three artillery shells landed outside the UNRWA Jabalia Prep. C Girls School …” However, its more comprehensive weekly report, published three days later, stated that “Israeli shelling directly hit two UNRWA schools …” including the one at issue.
Such official wording helps explain the widespread news reports of the deaths in the school, but not why the UN agencies allowed the misconception to linger.
Stuart Palmer
Director
Blog www.haifadiarist.blogspot.com
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