UNIFIL aids Hezbollah terror.
Is UNIFIL a supporter of Arab islamic fascism?
What did you do in the war, UNIFIL?
You broadcast Israeli troop movements.
by Lori Lowenthal Marcus
09/04/2006, Volume 011, Issue 47
The Weekly Standard
DURING THE RECENT month-long war between
Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping"
forces made a startling contribution: They openly published
daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to
Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure
of Israeli troops in Lebanon.
UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in
Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has
been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is
officially neutral.
Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for
all to see precise information about the movements of
Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their
weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF
safety structures within hours of their construction. New
information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was
posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of
specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements
on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers
from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired
in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are
as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.
This war was fought on cable television and the
Internet, and a lot of official information was available in
real time. But the specific military intelligence UNIFIL
posted could not be had from any non-U.N. source. The
Israeli press--always eager to push the envelope--did not
publish the details of troop movements and logistics.
Neither the European press nor the rest of the world media,
though hardly bastions of concern for the safety of Israeli
troops, provided the IDF intelligence details that UNIFIL
did. A search of Israeli government websites failed to turn
up the details published to the world each day by the U.N.
Inquiries made of various Israeli military and
government representatives and analysts yielded near
unanimous agreement that at least some of UNIFIL's postings,
in the words of one retired senior military analyst, "could
have exposed Israeli soldiers to grave danger." These
analysts, including a current high ranking military
official, noted that the same intelligence would not have
been provided by the U.N. about Israel's enemies. Sure
enough, a review of every single UNIFIL web posting during
the war shows that, while UNIFIL was daily revealing the
towns where Israeli soldiers were located, the positions
from which they were firing, and when and how they had
entered Lebanese territory, it never described Hezbollah
movements or locations with any specificity whatsoever.
Compare the vague "various locations" language
with this UNIFIL posting from July 25:
"Yesterday and during last night, the IDF
moved significant reinforcements, including a number of
tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and infantry,
to the area of Marun Al Ras inside Lebanese territory. The
IDF advanced from that area north toward Bint Jubayl, and
south towards Yarun.
Or with the posting on July 24, in which UNIFIL
revealed that the IDF stationed between Marun Al Ras and
Bint Jubayl were "significantly reinforced during the night
and this morning with a number of tanks and armored
personnel carriers."
This partiality is inconsistent not only with
UNIFIL's mission but also with its own stated policies. In a
telling incident just a few years back, UNIFIL vigorously
insisted on its "neutrality"--at Israel's expense.
On October 7, 2000, three IDF soldiers were
kidnapped by Hezbollah just yards from a UNIFIL shelter and
dragged across the border into Lebanon, where they
disappeared. The U.N. was thought to have videotaped the
incident or its immediate aftermath. Rather than help Israel
rescue its kidnapped soldiers by providing this evidence,
however, the U.N. obstructed the Israeli investigation.
For months the Israeli government pleaded with
the U.N. to turn over any videotape that might shed light on
the location and condition of its missing men. And for nine
months the U.N. stonewalled, insisting first that no such
tape existed, then that just one tape existed, and
eventually conceding that there were two more tapes. During
those nine months, clips from the videotapes were shown on
Syrian and Lebanese television.
Explaining their eventual about-face, U.N.
officials said the decision had been made by the on-site
commanders that it was not their responsibility to provide
the material to Israel; indeed, that to do so would violate
the peacekeeping mandate, which required "full impartiality
and objectivity." The U.N. report on the incident was
adamant that its force had "to ensure that military and
other sensitive information remains in their domain and is
not passed to parties to a conflict."
Stymied in its efforts to recover the men while
they were still alive, Israel ultimately agreed to an
exchange in January 2004: It released 429 Arab prisoners and
detainees, among them convicted terrorists, and the bodies
of 60 Lebanese decedents and members of Hezbollah, in
exchange for the bodies of the three soldiers. Blame for the
deaths of those three Israelis can be laid, at least in
part, at the feet of the U.N., which went to the wall
defending its inviolable pledge never to share military
intelligence about one party with another.
UNIFIL has just done what it then vowed it could
never do. Once again, it has acted to shield one side in the
conflict and to harm the other. Why is this permitted? For
that matter, how did the U.N. obtain such detailed and
timely military intelligence in the first place, before
broadcasting it for Israel's enemies to see?
Lori Lowenthal Marcus is president of the
Zionist Organization of America, Greater Philadelphia
District.
C Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard,
All Rights Reserved.
What did you do in the war, UNIFIL?
You broadcast Israeli troop movements.
by Lori Lowenthal Marcus
09/04/2006, Volume 011, Issue 47
The Weekly Standard
DURING THE RECENT month-long war between
Hezbollah and Israel, U.N. "peacekeeping"
forces made a startling contribution: They openly published
daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to
Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure
of Israeli troops in Lebanon.
UNIFIL--the United Nations Interim Force in
Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has
been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978--is
officially neutral.
Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for
all to see precise information about the movements of
Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their
weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF
safety structures within hours of their construction. New
information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was
posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of
specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements
on the order of Hezbollah "fired rockets in large numbers
from various locations" and Hezbollah's rockets "were fired
in significantly larger numbers from various locations" are
as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.
This war was fought on cable television and the
Internet, and a lot of official information was available in
real time. But the specific military intelligence UNIFIL
posted could not be had from any non-U.N. source. The
Israeli press--always eager to push the envelope--did not
publish the details of troop movements and logistics.
Neither the European press nor the rest of the world media,
though hardly bastions of concern for the safety of Israeli
troops, provided the IDF intelligence details that UNIFIL
did. A search of Israeli government websites failed to turn
up the details published to the world each day by the U.N.
Inquiries made of various Israeli military and
government representatives and analysts yielded near
unanimous agreement that at least some of UNIFIL's postings,
in the words of one retired senior military analyst, "could
have exposed Israeli soldiers to grave danger." These
analysts, including a current high ranking military
official, noted that the same intelligence would not have
been provided by the U.N. about Israel's enemies. Sure
enough, a review of every single UNIFIL web posting during
the war shows that, while UNIFIL was daily revealing the
towns where Israeli soldiers were located, the positions
from which they were firing, and when and how they had
entered Lebanese territory, it never described Hezbollah
movements or locations with any specificity whatsoever.
Compare the vague "various locations" language
with this UNIFIL posting from July 25:
"Yesterday and during last night, the IDF
moved significant reinforcements, including a number of
tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and infantry,
to the area of Marun Al Ras inside Lebanese territory. The
IDF advanced from that area north toward Bint Jubayl, and
south towards Yarun.
Or with the posting on July 24, in which UNIFIL
revealed that the IDF stationed between Marun Al Ras and
Bint Jubayl were "significantly reinforced during the night
and this morning with a number of tanks and armored
personnel carriers."
This partiality is inconsistent not only with
UNIFIL's mission but also with its own stated policies. In a
telling incident just a few years back, UNIFIL vigorously
insisted on its "neutrality"--at Israel's expense.
On October 7, 2000, three IDF soldiers were
kidnapped by Hezbollah just yards from a UNIFIL shelter and
dragged across the border into Lebanon, where they
disappeared. The U.N. was thought to have videotaped the
incident or its immediate aftermath. Rather than help Israel
rescue its kidnapped soldiers by providing this evidence,
however, the U.N. obstructed the Israeli investigation.
For months the Israeli government pleaded with
the U.N. to turn over any videotape that might shed light on
the location and condition of its missing men. And for nine
months the U.N. stonewalled, insisting first that no such
tape existed, then that just one tape existed, and
eventually conceding that there were two more tapes. During
those nine months, clips from the videotapes were shown on
Syrian and Lebanese television.
Explaining their eventual about-face, U.N.
officials said the decision had been made by the on-site
commanders that it was not their responsibility to provide
the material to Israel; indeed, that to do so would violate
the peacekeeping mandate, which required "full impartiality
and objectivity." The U.N. report on the incident was
adamant that its force had "to ensure that military and
other sensitive information remains in their domain and is
not passed to parties to a conflict."
Stymied in its efforts to recover the men while
they were still alive, Israel ultimately agreed to an
exchange in January 2004: It released 429 Arab prisoners and
detainees, among them convicted terrorists, and the bodies
of 60 Lebanese decedents and members of Hezbollah, in
exchange for the bodies of the three soldiers. Blame for the
deaths of those three Israelis can be laid, at least in
part, at the feet of the U.N., which went to the wall
defending its inviolable pledge never to share military
intelligence about one party with another.
UNIFIL has just done what it then vowed it could
never do. Once again, it has acted to shield one side in the
conflict and to harm the other. Why is this permitted? For
that matter, how did the U.N. obtain such detailed and
timely military intelligence in the first place, before
broadcasting it for Israel's enemies to see?
Lori Lowenthal Marcus is president of the
Zionist Organization of America, Greater Philadelphia
District.
C Copyright 2006, News Corporation, Weekly Standard,
All Rights Reserved.
posted by Ibrahamav at 7:31 AM
1 Comments:
November 24, 2006
"The Children were Shouting. I Still Can't Sleep Remembering Their Screams"
A Prayer in Paradise
By GIDEON LEVY
The kindergarten teacher is lying on a stretcher, covered with blood. The minibus is parked alongside. From somewhere to the left, the army cannon is firing shells. The children are lying on the ground next to one another. That is how one of the children described the morning when they were driving to their kindergarten in Beit Lahia and an Israel Defense Forces shell or missile--the army spokesman refuses to say--exploded several meters away and mortally wounded the teacher before their eyes.
Two high school-students on their way to school, Ramzi al-Sharafi, 15 and Mohammad Ashour, 16, were killed in the bombing. And this week the children of the Indira Gandhi kindergarten buried their teacher, Najwa--which means "prayer" in Arabic--the mother of two toddlers, who lay in a coma for about two weeks in Gaza's Shifa Hospital.
Almost nothing was written in Israel about the shelling of the minibus carrying 20 y! oungsters. It happened two days before the shelling that killed 22 residents of neighboring Beit Hanun, at the height of Operation Autumn Clouds. By a miracle the missile/shell did not hit the minibus directly, but landed at a distance of 15 meters from it.
The traumatized children from the kindergarten have not recovered. This week they marched, bearing wreaths and signs they had drawn in memory of their beloved teacher, in the mourning procession to Najwa Khalif's home; the adults interred her in the Beit Lahia cemetery.
Indira Gandhi Hamuda, the owner of the new kindergarten, an impressive 35-year-old woman, says that during the past months she used to tell the children that the Israelis don't kill children, only those who fire Qassams, and that they had nothing to fear as long as they didn't go up to the rooftops. Last week one of the children asked: "You told us that the Israelis don't kill children, but only the Qassam launchers, so why did they shoot at our minibus?"
What can you say to a four-year-old who saw his kindergarten teacher lying covered with blood alongside their minibus? That the firing on the minibus was meant to prevent Qassams, which! have only intensified since then?
The reply of the IDF spokesman: "On November 6, the IDF attacked a cell of Qassam-launchers in the Beit Lahia neighborhood of Sheikh Zayed, whose members had come to pick up the launchers from which rockets had been fired the previous night in the direction of the western Negev. At the time of the attack, no uninvolved persons were identified in the vicinity of the terror cell. The IDF regrets all injury of uninvolved persons. Very unfortunately, the terror organizations habitually launch rockets at Israel from within residential areas, and thus sometimes unintended injury to civilians caught in the cross-fire is unpreventable."
In the wretched Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia the latest casualties are lying. You see them groaning in their unmade beds, surrounded by relatives. This one was working in the field, this one was innocently walking when the fire caught them. These are the lucky ones. The seriously wounded have ! already been transferred elsewhere.
Meanwhile a wounded man is being rushed to a local clinic--an elderly farmer, who was brought in on a donkey cart, an improvised ambulance, straight from the field after an army tank fired at him. His daughter runs after the cart, screaming. The explosion was heard all over. Passersby carry the old man into the clinic.
The IDF tanks and bulldozers are a few hundred meters from us; the road is already torn up and it is no longer passable. "The IDF at work" as the media phrase it.
A child arrives at the clinic, holding two casings from ammunition fired from an Apache helicopter. Not far away is a mourners' tent for Taher al-Masri, a 16-year-old boy who was killed the day before.
For a moment, Beit Lahia looks like a pastoral village, and then suddenly it becomes a focus of fear and loss. Who knows that as well as the children of the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, with its colorful Mickey Mouse signs? Mickey also appears on the slide in the pleasant yard with its decorative plants. The! re are not many kindergartens in Gaza as well kept as this one.
Indira Gandhi? The father of the owner of the kindergarten fell in love with the admired Indian leader and decided to name his daughter after her. (He also named one of his sons Hassan, after the king of Morocco, and another son Hussein, after the king of Jordan.) Some people call the woman Indira, some call her Gandhi, and some call her Indira Gandhi. A yellow garbage can, a gift from Germany, stands at the entrance, adjacent to the town's strawberry fields.
There are 260 children enrolled in this kindergarten, from Beit Lahia, Beit Hanun, the Jabalya camp and the surrounding area. They are divided into groups in colorful rooms decorated with murals--children aged four and five, learning reading, writing, arithmetic and English, between 7:30 A.M. and noon. Only about one-tenth of the parents were able to pay the tuition: NIS 300 a year. Children of the fallen and of prisoners attend free of ch! arge. The entrances to several of the classrooms are covered with grat ing and sheets of plastic, and have no windows. Indira does not have the money to complete construction of the new facility, and most of the parents have no money to pay.
For eight years the kindergarten wandered among various premises, until this year it moved to this spacious and attractive structure. Every morning the children who live far away are transported in two Volkswagen Transporters, one blue and one yellow; the blue one was the one involved in the incident. Now the two minibuses bear signs in memory of the teacher who was buried Sunday, when we arrived.
There is firing in the background. The kindergarten is almost empty; most of the children joined the mourning procession for their teacher. Indira's daughter, Hadil Hamuda, 14, is watching over the handful of children who have stayed. This morning she went to school, but after half an hour, when the tanks came loudly rolling in, the teachers decided to send the students home.
A bird is hopp! ing on the sand in the kindergarten. Naim al-Rahal, a smiling young man of 23, the driver of the blue minibus, made his usual rounds on that Monday two weeks ago. At 6:50 A.M. he arrived at the Sheikh Zaid neighborhood and waited for one of the children who came downstairs late. The minibus was already full, 20 children and three teachers. They didn't go to Beit Hanun that morning because it was dangerous. Teacher Najwa Khalif was sitting in the middle seat with her young son Wasim, 3, on her knees and her daughter Manar, 5, beside her.
While he was still waiting for the child who was late, the driver suddenly heard a deafening boom. He says that the shock waves sent the minibus flying. He started the engine and tried to escape. The child who was delayed did not manage to board and Al-Rahal saw him running after the bus shouting, unable to catch up. After the driver drove away, he noticed that Najwa was bleeding from her neck and head, and that her head was leaning ! sideways. It turned out that two shells had penetrated the window and hit her. She was already unconscious and the blood was dripping onto Wasim who was sitting on her knees. "The blood spilled onto the little children, onto their briefcases and onto the books," he recalls.
Al-Rahal quickly drove toward the nearest hospital, Al-Ouda, while the children's screams filled the vehicle. "The children were shouting. I still can't sleep remembering the screams," he says.
The children haven't been sleeping since then, either. Immediately after the incident, dozens of frightened parents came to the kindergarten to see what had happened to their children. The place was filled with little cries of grief--not only from the children who had been witnesses. They were all sure that the teacher was dead, but Indira tried to lift their spirits and told them she would recover from her wounds. Then she was forced to close the kindergarten for five days. Some of the children have not returned since then, others still refuse to travel in the minib! us; one child asked his parents to move next to the kindergarten so he won't have to travel in the bus.
It's been two weeks since the incident and Indira tells of children who still don't utter a word all day long, and of kindergarten teachers who still burst out crying.
The sound of a passing helicopter or tank makes everyone in the kindergarten nervous now. The driver, Al-Rahal, says that today he saw the boy who came downstairs late and ran after the minibus, after the shelling, hiding behind the kindergarten building. It turned out that he had wet himself and was embarrassed to board the minibus en route home.
"Before this they would see an Apache and say, 'Here's an Apache,'" says Indira. Since the incident the children have been using dough only for making weapons. Beforehand there were some who made dough rifles, but now they're all doing it," she says. Even the girls.
Najwa Khalif worked in the kindergarten for three years. Here is a ! picture of her surrounded by children, and there is her classroom with miniature plastic chairs in a variety of colors, arranged carefully around the little tables, with drawings on the wall: a mother duck and her ducklings, 2 apples + 1 = 3. In the first days after her death they divided the children in her class among the other classes, but now they already have a new teacher, a substitute. During the two weeks when Najwa was fighting for her life they held daily prayers for her welfare in the kindergarten.
On Sunday morning, when they learned that she had died, Indira gathered all the kindergarten children and told them not to be angry, because she had gone to paradise.
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