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TEL AVIV, Aug 2: An Israeli military probe into the assassination of Hamas’s top commander found an intelligence failure led to the deaths of 13 civilians in the F-16 missile strike on the militant’s house, the army said on Friday.
Salah Shehada, the commander of Hamas’s armed wing, his deputy, and 13 civilians — including nine children — were killed when the Israeli fighter slammed a one-ton missile into his Gaza City home on July 22.
Shehada’s wife and a daughter were among the dead.
Most of the casualties lived in adjoining houses damaged by the guided missile that flattened Shehada’s house. The attack was criticized by the international community including the United States, which called it “heavy handed”.
“The operation led to the elimination of a major terrorist who had been pursued by the security forces for a long time,” the army said in a summary of the probe’s conclusions.
“However, the inquiry found lapses in the information and assessments regarding the proximity of innocent people to Salah Shehada,” it said in a statement.
Israeli television said among the faults uncovered in the probe was a lack of intelligence information collected on the target and a failure to analyse available information correctly.
The army said the timing or methods of the strike would have been changed if civilian deaths were seen as likely. Military officials have said that several other attacks on Shehada were cancelled at the last minute due to the proximity of civilians.
The attack caused the highest civilian death toll since Israel adopted a policy of targeting and killing militants after a Palestinian uprising began in Sept 2000.
Haim Ramon, a senior politician in the centre-left Labour Party, joined a chorus of domestic criticism of the attack to charge that civilian deaths could have been avoided if the cabinet had been party to the decision-making process.
LICENCE TO KILL: Syria ridiculed the UN report on Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp as a US-inspired fraud, and warned on Friday it would encourage Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to slaughter Palestinians.
A U.N. report released on Thursday dismissed Palestinian charges that Israel committed a massacre during its attack on the camp in late March after a devastating suicide bombing, faulting both sides for putting civilians in harm’s way.
The report avoided the word “massacre” and said that 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians died in Jenin, where U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen called the conduct of Israel’s army “disgraceful” and “morally repugnant”.
“The report on the Jenin camp massacre is the worst forgery of truths put forth in statements by the U.N. envoy and verified for the aid agency by Palestinian refugees and international correspondents,” said an editorial broadcast on Syrian state radio.—Reuters
