Was the Qana massacre staged?

Scroll down for the latest updates.

The big news this weekend was the Qana massacre. Israel targeted a building in a residential area in Qana, Lebanon, from which, it said, rockets were being fired. It turned out the building was full of civilians. 56 people were killed, including 34 children. Now even Israel’s supporters, including the US, are calling for a cessation of hostilities even though Hezbollah has not returned the kidnapped soldiers, or laid down arms.

But the unspoken question buzzing through the blogosphere Sunday was: was the Qana massacre staged? First were the pictures, smuggled out of Lebanon, of Hezbollah fighters, dressed as civilians, with their artillery and weaponry set up in suburban neighborhoods. These photos lead one to think that Hezbollah is using civilians as shields, just as it did the UN peacekeeping station (Broken link, active August 6, 2006) that was bombed last week.

Then the IDF noted that there was an unaccountable gap between the time the Israelis hit the building, which was midnight, and the time the building collapsed into rubble, which was 8 in the morning. If the Israeli strike did so much structural damage to the building that it would collapse, it would not have stood for so many hours, then, before collapsing.

Sisu asked the question: Why were there no fighting men found among the dead in the rubble? Because when Israel is going to bomb a civilian area that Hezbollah has been firing from, they first drop leaflets warning all the civilians to evacuate. So the question remains, were the fighting men gone because they were warned, but why did they not take the children with them when they left?

Pajamas Media reports on a letter to the editor published in a German newspaper, in which a Lebanese man tells of the time Hezbollah dug a munitions depot in his town, then built a school over it. Here is a translated quote from the letter:

“Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.”

Finally, Powerline noted that just hours after the collapse of the rubble, a 30 foot banner condemning Secretary Rice and Israel was hung amid the protests, just in time to make good visuals for the cameras covering the Qana strike. Don’t banners of that size, complexity, and quality take more than just an hour or two to produce, they asked.

All of these questions taken together leads to one other question: Did Hezbollah stage the Qana massacre to turn world opinion against Israel, since they cannot win the war any other way?

***
Update: Ynet News has a great article up detailing all the speculation in the American and UK blogosphere about Hezbollah either staging or milking the Qana massacre; they have linked to quite a few more instances than I noticed.

***
Update: A Lebanese hospital is reporting the casualties from Qana number 28, not 56. Did Hezbollah just double the numbers to the press to make Israel look worse? Did no press people check the numbers?

***
Update: Now Reuters is doctoring news photos to make the damage Israel is inflicting on Beirut look worse than it is (more here). Pajamas Media has all the latest with Reutersgate. With Hezbollah and the MSM working hand in glove to run a propaganda campaign against Israel, do not believe what you read or see in the news, people.