|
Questions from Ricki Hollander of CAMERA to Judge Goldstone which Goldstone refuses to answer; here about the Al Maqadmah Mosque incident.
Questions regarding the al-Maqadmah mosque and the military use of mosques
During the Brandeis debate, you cited the firing on the al-Maqadmah Mosque as another attack that affected you and convinced you that Israel had intentionally targeted civilians. You described with complete certitude – despite Israel's denial – that civilians who had gathered for prayer inside a mosque were intentionally targeted during a large (combined) service by a missile fired "by IDF ground forces." (You even corrected your use of the qualifier "presumably" to present this definite accusation.) There was no question, you said, of any secondary explosions that would suggest the mosque had been booby-trapped or used to store explosives.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
The Goldstone Report's analysis of the attack on al Maqadmah mosque. Footnotes in the original are numbered 458-64.
E. The attack on the al-Maqadmah mosque, 3 January 2009
1. The facts gathered by the Mission
822. The al-Maqadmah mosque is situated near the north-west outskirts of Jabaliyah camp, close to Beit Lahia. It is located less than 100 metres from the Kamal Idwan hospital, in the al- Alami housing project. At least 15 people were killed and around 40 injured – many seriously – when the Israeli armed forces struck the entrance of the mosque with a missile.
823. The Mission heard five eyewitnesses who had been in the mosque at the time it was struck. Two of them had been facing the door as the explosion occurred. Three of them had been kneeling facing the opposite direction and had been seriously injured. The Mission also heard from a number of relatives of those who died in the attack and has seen a number of sworn statements signed by them testifying to the facts they witnessed.[1] The Mission also heard again from three witnesses it had interviewed earlier at the public hearings in Gaza. Finally, the Mission reviewed information received from TAWTHEQ.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
After the Brandeis debate in which Goldstone emphasized the impact of the Maqadmah Mosque incident, Halevi, who has already published important work on the issues involved in Goldstone's investigation, revisits the case. He explains Goldstone's astonishing conclusions based on his evidence, as the result of a politically-correct approach that cannot acknowledge that Hamas used mosques for military purposes. Thus, despite the fact that 7 out of 15 deaths at the mosque were known Jihadis, Goldstone insists on his lethal narrative that Israel deliberately struck a peaceful mosque during prayer and killed 15 innocent civilians.
Jonathan Dahoah Halevi questions reliability of reports on Gaza mosque attack
Jonathan Dahoah Halevi
On November 5, 2009 there was a confrontation at Brandeis University in Massachusetts between the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dr. Dore Gold, and Judge Richard Goldstone. It dealt, among other things, with the affair of the Maqadmah mosque in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, about which two contradictory versions exist, that of Israel and that of the Goldstone Committee’s Report.
The Goldstone Report about Operation Cast Lead accuses Israel of an air strike on the mosque on January 3, 2009, which caused the deaths of “at least 15 Palestinians” who were in it at the time. During the confrontation with Dr. Gold, Goldstone claimed that 21 Palestinians had been killed, and he presented the attack as a salient example of Israel’s policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians. However, Israel issued official documents stating that its Air Force did not attack the mosque and that the dead had been killed in fighting the IDF.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
The events according to the written Report:
»822. The al-Maqadmah mosque is situated near the north-west outskirts of Jabaliyah camp, close to Beit Lahia. It is located less than 100 metres from the Kamal Idwan hospital, in the al- Alami housing project. At least 15 people were killed and around 40 injured – many seriously – when the Israeli armed forces struck the entrance of the mosque with a missile.«
The written report makes it very clear: The mosque was struck by a missile fired by the IDF.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
From Israel Matzav
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
On destroying weapons-laden mosques
This is from the New York Times article on the Goldstone report:
Israel repeatedly accused Hamas of using mosques to shelter armed men or munitions, and a report by Israel said an attack against the Maqadmah mosque in Jabaliya had killed six known militants.
But the Human Rights Council report said the attack came during evening prayers, when some 300 men and women were in the mosque, and killed 15 people. There were no secondary explosions to indicate the presence of an arms cache.
If Israel wanted to destroy a mosque suspected as an arms cache, it should have done so in the middle of the night, Mr. Goldstone said.
If Israel destroyed a mosque full of weapons with more than 300 people inside, and only 15 people died, they must have done something to ensure that there would not be a large number of casualties. Something about this story doesn't make sense (it's paragraph 348 in the Goldstone report).
And if the 'Palestinians' were sleeping in the mosque every night (which they probably were), when would Goldstone propose that it be attacked? Of course, since Goldstone says in paragraph 36 of the report that he doesn't believe mosques were used to store weapons anyway, maybe it doesn't matter.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
Jonathan Halevi on the testimony concerning what happened at the al Maqadmah Mosque. The contrast between the testimony about innocent civilians wrongly targeted, and the far-reaching evidence for combatant activity is striking.
Statements from the al-Silawi Family
Three members of the al-Silawi family were interviewed by the commission: Moussa al-Silawi (91, blind), Sabah al-Silawi (Moussa's wife), and Mouteeh al-Silawi, a Hamas official.2 The most detailed statement was that of Mouteeh al-Silawi, deputy director of the Hamas administration's Muslim religious endowments ministry for the northern Gaza Strip, who said he was giving a sermon when the mosque was attacked. He claimed that there was no military activity in the Ibrahim al-Maqadma mosque or around it during the attack. Worshippers came to the mosque seeking a safe haven on the assumption that it was a secure place. The evening and night prayers were said one after another to prevent unnecessary movement of worshippers outside the mosque. Israel committed a war crime in violation of international law by attacking civilians in a mosque.
The commission members asked: What is the name of the mosque and where is it located? What was the date of the event? Was a warning given before the attack? When was the mosque built? Were the people killed the supporters of families? Was there a noise before the explosion and what damage did it do? How many people were killed and wounded in the attack? How many people were in the mosque when it was attacked? How far is the mosque from the nearest hospital? Does the hospital have a sufficient quantity of medical equipment and are its services sufficient?
They also asked: Under what conditions are the two prayers [evening and night) joined? Do more people come when prayers are joined? Was this the first time the prayers were joined? When does the evening prayer begin and when does it end? When prayers are joined, exactly how much time elapses between them? When, during the confrontation, did the mosque begin joining the prayers? Was January 3 the first day the prayers were joined?
Many of the questions were irrelevant and unconnected to the circumstances of the event. The commission members did not ask about armed men in the mosque, whether it was used for military purposes or incited worshippers to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel. They did not ask if there were weapons in the mosque, if armed men were operating near the mosque, whether Hamas and its Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades controlled the mosque and used it to recruit operatives, or the identity of the casualties and their organizational affiliation (including members of the al-Silawi family).
An examination of freely accessible Palestinian sources shows that the casualties in this incident were terrorist operatives and included members of the al-Silawi family, who were represented to the commission as innocent civilians.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
Case Study 
