This article should have appeared in the Melbourne Age as a retraction for the calumnies it passed for publication when the event originally occurred [DUPED!] but the editor of the Age didn't speak up because ...
Instead it appeared in The Australian today.
ISRAEL DISPUTES CIVILIAN TOLL NEAR UN SCHOOL
In the initial version of the incident, based on Palestinian sources, the casualties were said to have been inside a UN school in the Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City. This proved to be wrong when UN officials acknowledged that no shell had hit the school. However, Israel was still accused of having caused the deaths of civilians.
"I know that no one was killed in the school," a senior UN official was quoted as saying.
"But 41 innocent people were killed in the street outside the school. The state of Israel has to answer for that.
"What did they know and what care did they take?"
An answer to that question has been furnished by Colonel Moshe Levi, head of the Israel Defence Forces' Gaza Co-ordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which normally deals with the transfer of aid to the Gaza Strip through Israeli crossing points.
With the onset of the war, Colonel Levi and his staff began compiling a list of casualties in Gaza, as reported by Palestinian health officials, and comparing the names with those on its own list of Gaza residents and its registry of militants.
In a 200-page report recently issued, the CLA identifies more than 1200 Palestinian fatalities by name and gives their Palestinian identity numbers, the circumstances in which they were killed and the militant group, if any, with which they were affiliated.
The report concludes that about one-third of the total fatalities were civilian, and not two-thirds, as Palestinian sources claimed.
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2 comments:
Who was the Age editor who let the Backman story through?
I heard a rumour about that too. Have they disclosed who the person is?
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