The Israeli government has now picked up on the story of what they’re calling “the school” in Gaza (which I wrote about yesterday). It concerns the UN’s apparent “reversal” of its position over an incident during the war in which 43 people died.
The Israeli prime minister’s spokesman, Mark Regev, this morning drew attention to the UN’s “clarification” over this incident in an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme.
It’s the first time that the Israeli government itself has talked about this clarification in the international media. Because what happened in Jabaliya on 6 January is something I’ve looked into in detail, I’d like to clarify a couple of points myself.
Israel is apparently seizing on a minor error buried in an online publication by a UN agency. Other observers who’ve followed this little row believe this rather manufactured controversy is serving as a smokescreen, diverting attention from a much more serious incident that occurred on the last day of the war at another UN-run school just 800 yards up the road in which children were killed and others badly burned by white phosphorus.
Mr Regev, among other Israeli spokespeople, has suggested in the past that the UN was not entirely impartial in this conflict.
To recap: Israeli mortars, reportedly aimed at a Hamas rocket-launching team, slammed into a street crowded with civilians on 6 January. The mortars stuck within yards of the UN-run Jabalya Prep Girls’ School which at the time was sheltering 1,368 refugees from the conflict.
The Israel Defence Force initially claimed the militants had been firing from inside the school, then changed its position to say they’d been firing “in the vicinity of the school.”
The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – the UN’s lead-agency in Gaza, which administers the schools and looks after one million Palestinian refugees – said from the outset that the mortars hit outside the school.
But another UN agency, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in one of its reports on daily incidents, erroneously stated that the mortars had actually hit the school. This prompted a clarification from OCHA earlier this week and an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The Israeli prime minister’s spokesman, Mark Regev, in his interview on Today at 08.40 this morning was asked about the morality of the conflict and the killing of civilians. In response, Mr Regev said it is “important to investigate everything we did.”
He quickly added that “it is important that other organisations also look into what happened and how they played a part in the conflict, negatively.”
“What do you mean?” he was asked.
“Well like the United Nations,” he ventured, “that said they were 99.9 per cent sure about what happened at the school, put out a correction earlier this week saying the Israeli shells didn’t actually hit inside the school.”
Mr Regev’s statement was not challenged.
But it was misleading, a salvo in the public relations war that’s still raging nearly three weeks after the conflict stopped.
UNWRA, the agency which has always maintained the mortars hit outside the school, also said at the time that it was “99.9 per cent sure” there were no militants inside the school.
The other agency, OCHA, had made a mistake in its daily report on 7 January. The notion that it was a genuine mistake (and not a politically motivated untruth) is reinforced by that fact that OCHA had reported correctly on the previous day that the shells hit outside the school.
The Israeli government has had less to say about another incident at a nearby UN school just up the road which occurred on 17 January. At 6.45am, four airburst white phosphorus shells exploded above the playground of the Beit Lahiya primary school, in which 1,600 civilians had taken refuge. It was the last day of the war.
While women and children were evacuating the buildings in panic (and we obtained mobile phone footage documenting all this), an artillery shell slammed into a first floor balcony, killing two boys, Bilal and Mohammed, blowing the hand of their mother and the legs off their 19-year-old female cousin. Here’s a link to my report of this incident.
I reached the school on 19 January and I saw the white phosphorus for myself. An Amnesty International investigator said there was prima facie evidence of a war crime. Mr Regev told Channel 4 News on 22 January that Israel was investigating allegations it had used white phosphorus in civilian areas, something which is illegal.
UNRWA has demanded an independent investigation into this incident. As the OCHA report into it pointed out: “A total of more than 50 UN facilities sustained damage since 27 December. There are no bomb shelters in the Gaza Strip, and no alarm systems to warn of impending bombardment.”
Presumably this is one of the incidents which Mr Regev says it is important that the IDF investigates.
Today we contacted the IDF. They confirmed the 6 January incident was indeed still under investigation. They added:
“Regarding the alleged incident on the 17 of January: The IDF has no information on the alleged incident. However, it is well known that the area of Beit Lahiya, located in the northern Gaza Strip, is in close proximity to Israeli territory and is therefore used extensively by Hamas for launching rockets and shells at Israeli citizens.
“Hamas is also known to use civilian structures, including schools, for its terrorist attacks, thereby actively using children as human shields.”
As far as we can ascertain, the incident involving the phosphorus bombs at the Beit Lahiya school is not the subject of any investigation.