Case Study
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 The Abed Rabbo story illustrates many of the basic elements that go into a Goldstone report item. It begins on January 7, 2009, with a tragedy directly related to Hamas' policy of bombing Sderot: they tunneled under the house of a Fatah supporter who lived right across the border from Sderot, and fired on the Israelis. According to the earliest reports, the house was hit from the air, during Israel's unilateral truce.  But by the time journalists had access to Gaza after the cessation of hostilities, the story had become a "lethal narrative," accusing Israel of deliberately murdering little children in front of their parents, and then crushing the ambulance that came to evacuate the wounded. This story impressed numerous journalists, including Tim McGirk who published a lurid version in Time. CAMERA and The Augean Stables, among others, pointed out the extensive contradictions and improbabilities in this narrative of Israeli evil.  But to no avail. When the NGOs got to work, they found Abed Rabbo's account trustworthy. HRW, in it's report on "White Flag Deaths" gave it an important place in their analysis, which brought a detailed rebuttal from NGO Monitor. Goldstone's work, despite the ever greater list of contradictions in the evidence, continues to retail this narrative as reliable, and it was probably one of the incidents that inspired Colonel Travers question to the Palestinian psychiatrist.   On January 5, 2009, reports came that an Israeli bomb (mortar or drone missile) had hit a building in which almost a hundred members of the Samouni clan had taken shelter, and killed from 20-60 members of the clan. The incident was among the most striking of the conflict and produced numerous detailed narratives of the cruel and arbitrary behavior of the IDF.  The current Wikipedia entry reflects almost entirely the Palestinian narrative. In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, the family members gave detailed accounts of the suffering and the incident became a symbol of Palestinian suffering and Israeli cruelty. Jeremy Bowen of the BBC did a Panorama program that gave particular attention to this incident. In all the local accounts, the behavior of the Israelis seems particularly vindictive because the residents are presented as innocent civilians caught in a battle not of their doing. Research on the internet reveals that four members of the Samouni clan were members of Islamic Jihad, and that organization claimed extensive military activity in the Samouni compound on January 5: In a statement issued on January 5, Palestinian Islamic Jihad said that on the evening of January 4 its fighters had fired an RGP from the Zeitun neighborhood at an Israeli tank and had opened fire at IDF soldiers. At 1:20 a.m. on January 5, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad engineering unit detonated a 50-kg. bomb near an Israeli tank not far from the Al-Tawhid mosque near the house of Wail al-Samouni. At 6:30 a.m., the engineering unit detonated a bomb near an IDF infantry unit operating near the Al-Tawhid mosque in the Zeitun neighborhood.23 According to another official Palestinian Islamic Jihad statement, one of its operatives was killed in fighting nearby. His name was Muhammad Ibrahim al-Samouni. Yvonne Green visited the site in late January and reported a large number of contradictions and anomalies in the stories she heard, and she submitted evidence to the Goldstone Commission. The Goldstone Report (#704-42) presents these incidents as the first in section XII: Deliberate Attacks on Civilian Populations.  Their discussion of essentially repeated the Palestinian narrative and they address their credibility specifically: 739. The Mission found the witnesses it heard in relation to the shooting of Iyad al-Samouni to be credible and reliable. It has no reason to doubt the veracity of the main elements of their testimony, which is corroborated by the testimony of the PRCS ambulance driver  |
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