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Saturday 19 April 2014 - 07:00

Qana massacre – Another Israeli war crime –

Story Code : 374386
Qana massacre – Another Israeli war crime –
Of 800 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge in the compound, 106 were killed and around 116 injured. 

The attack occurred amid heavy fighting between the Israeli Defence Forces and Hezbollah during Operation Grapes of Wrath. A United Nations investigation later stated it was unlikely that the Israeli shelling was a technical or procedural error. Israel categorically rejected the findings of the UN report concerning the incident.

In April 1996, a cease-fire that had ended the July 1993 fighting between Hezbollah and Israel broke down. During the five weeks of fighting between March 4 and April 10, seven Israeli soldiers, three Lebanese civilians and at least one Hezbollah fighter were killed. 

By 14 April, 745 people were occupying the United Nations compound at Qana. More than 800 were there on April 18. 

Robert Fisk wrote of Qana massacre, “It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
 
In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.
 
"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area", a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
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