The more I see about the timeline in Qana, the more I doubt the story being told to us by the world's media. Katherine Shrader and Kathy Gannon of AP make the strike and its effect seem immediate:
A three-story house on the outskirts of Qana was leveled when a missile crashed into it at 1 a.m. Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead. It was worst single strike since Israel's campaign in Lebanon began on July 12 when Hezbollah militants crossed the border into Israel and abducted two soldiers.
But we know that the immediacy of the collapse given in this timeline to be a false construct. Many hours before this AP story was released, the IDF had already reported that the building did not collapse until 8 A.M. Shrader and Gannon did not question the rather unique makeup of the families hardest hit in the attack (my bold):
Israel suspended air attacks on south Lebanon for 48 hours starting early Monday in the face of widespread outrage over an airstrike on a house that killed 56 Lebanese, almost all of them women and children. [jump to page 2] Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead. [snip] In Qana, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in out of the mangled wreckage of the building. Bodies were carried in blankets. Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered in the house for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the strike brought the building down. "I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said 13-year-old Noor Hashem, who survived, although her five siblings did not. She was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.
34 children. 12 adult women. Not a single adult male among them. How strangely asexual these "civilian" families seem to be. The men were elsewhere as under-reported elsewhere:
In Qana this morning, the Katyusha squads took their rocket launchers and rockets from inside the buildings, fired off the rockets at Israel and then rushed back inside.
It seems increasingly probable that the Shalhoub and Hashem men were likely members of Hezbollah, involved in launching the very rockets at Israel that called in the counter-battery fire that killed their families that were hiding deeper in the building.
It also seems possible that the deaths of the Shalhoub and Hashem women and children came not as a result of the initial Israeli air strike, but because of secondary explosions more than seven hours later, explosions that would seem to be consistent with ammunition and rockets "cooking off."
Based upon the evidence emerging, it seems more plausible than not that Hezbollah men were responsible for the deaths of Hezbollah women and children, and over-exploited that fact for media consumption.
Somehow, this more plausible scenario gets little play from Shrader and Gannon and the rest of the media.
It must be the CNN effect.
Cross-posted to
