The picnic was a real blast

The Belmont Club:

Richard Landes revisits the Gaza beach explosion of June 9, 2006 in which 8 Palestinians were said to have been killed, first supposedly by naval shelling from an Israeli warship and then subsequently, when accounts changed, by a 155 mm IDF artillery shell fired from an Army battery. Landes has produced a video in which he argues that a) the deaths were unlikely to have been caused by an Israeli artillery shell and that b) the Palestinians authorities may have been trying to blame Israel for an accident arising an unexploded beach mine.

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According Human Rights Watch these events happened on the beach on June 9, 2006.

According to eyewitnesses, the Ghalya family had gone to the beach earlier that day to have lunch and to swim. They decided to cut short their stay when artillery shells started landing on the beach in the distance. After a shell fell 300 to 500 meters away, `Ali `Isa Ghalya, the father, started to gather his two wives and their children near the road to the beach. They collected their belongings and called a taxi. When two more shells fell about 150 meters away, the men were sitting in one group on the beach, and the women in another. A fourth shell—the one that caused the casualties according to witnesses—exploded between the two groups but closer to the women. Eleven-year-old Huda saw that her mother was injured. “My mother told me to escape,” Huda told Human Rights Watch at the wake organized for her deceased family members. “I went to my father and then I started screaming.”

According to the HRW account, multiple explosions were witnessed by numerous people. They "heard the shells coming". One of the key problems in analyzing the cause of this tragedy is correlating the timing with the IDF fire missions that day. The first question was, when were the civilians on the beach hit? The IDF maintained that the incident "occurred not before 16:57 and not after 17:10". The method used for calculating the time was based on the timestamps of video footage taken by overhead surveillance.

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There is much more with an analysis of the time of the injury and the time shells were falling. It is worth reading in full. What makes me skeptical of the Palestinian account is that it is a Palestinian account. It follows a pattern of a typical Palestinian victim offensive that usually follows any Israeli attempts to suppress Palestinian fire on non combatants.

Just last week when the Israelis flattened Hamas's vacant security headquarters in response to rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, the ever popular wedding party next door ruse was used. It is just uncanny how often the US and the Israeli's "bomb" wedding parties. I have seen multiple allegations of wedding party bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq. They usually throw in some celebratory gunfire when our forces indicate they were taking hostile fire from the location.

The victim offensive is a staple of the Muslim response to return fire and having cried wedding party or beach picnic so many times their credibility is getting pretty thin.