Remember Qana!

Yes, but for the reason that it was a nigh fabrication

The most blatant example was the incident in Qana, where Israel responded to heavy Hezbollah rocket attacks with an air raid. One of the buildings was hit and collapsed, causing a number of deaths and injuries. Within hours, HRW blasted a press release in which Executive Director Ken Roth claimed that the "Israeli military is treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone, relating to the strike on Qana, killing at least 54 civilians, more than half of them children." HRW then launched a campaign charging Israel with war crimes, with nine separate “reports” and op-eds, as well as press conferences.


HRW’s campaign was echoed in media headlines, creating intense international pressure, and leading Prime Minister Olmert to declare a “48-hour suspension of aerial activity pending an investigation...” A unilateral halt in military action due to unverified NGO allegations was unprecedented, allowed Hezbollah forces to regroup, prolonging the war, and probably costing many lives.

Yet, as our research reveals, HRW had no credible evidence for its claims. Roth, HRW researcher Lucy Mair (who had written propaganda for Electronic Intifada before joining HRW) and others far from the battleground, had inflated civilian casualty claims and erased the Hezbollah attacks that constituted the real war crimes as well as legal justification for Israeli actions. To create the façade of “fact finding”, the initial HRW statement referred to “researchers” in Lebanon, but they provided no names or means to verify HRW’s claims. Later reports either provided no sources or attributed allegations to “witnesses” who could well have been Hezbollah allies or operatives. The allegations that Israel had criminally and deliberately bombed Lebanese civilians were unsourced and false.

As the contradictions emerged, HRW’s Mair admitted that the Lebanese Red Cross had reported 28 dead, including Hezbollah “martyrs,” but HRW chose to continue its false accusations against Israel.

That was an example of

it is clear that when HRW and Amnesty issued their initial condemnations of Israel, usually within a few hours of the incident, the organizations had little or no information about the central issues of military necessity and the nature of casualties. And later reports with altered condemnations were based more on conjecture than substantive research.

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