Israel vermoorde doelbewust Spaanse VN vredessoldaat

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A Spanish UNIFIL peacekeeper killed three weeks ago by an Israel artillery shell following Hezbollah’s missile attack on an Israeli army convoy appears to have fallen victim to the Hannibal Protocol – the controversial Israeli policy of preventing the kidnapping of a soldier even at the expense of his life.

The deadly incident has left some UNIFIL officers convinced that Israel deliberately targeted one of their positions to “punish” the peacekeepers for not taking greater action against Hezbollah’s activities in the southern border district.

No Israeli soldiers were abducted in Hezbollah’s Jan. 28 attack. But the retaliatory shelling – a mix of mortar rounds and 155mm high explosive and white phosphorous artillery shells – was unusual in blanketing both sides of the Blue Line in a 3-kilometer arc from the village of Ghajar to the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills.

Unlike past retaliatory bombardments which target the sources of Hezbollah fire north of the Blue Line, the shelling around Ghajar indicates that the Israelis were attempting to hit a possible kidnap squad retreating to Lebanese territory with captive soldiers.

During Israel’s bombardment, the observation tower in a Spanish UNIFIL position at Abbasieh, 1 kilometer east of Ghajar, took a direct hit from an artillery shell, killing Cpl. Francisco Javier Soria Toledo.

“We can’t say they made a mistake ... the rounds were getting nearer and nearer and eventually they hit it,” a UNIFIL officer said, adding that the U.N. position had been bracketed by artillery rounds before it was struck.

The Hezbollah team that fired the missiles was not targeted at all, possibly because the Israelis seemed to be unaware of the source of fire and also because the priority in the confusing minutes after the attack commenced was to ensure that no soldiers were kidnapped. Hezbollah conducted an operation in November 2005 to kidnap Israeli soldiers from Ghajar, but was unsuccessful.

The Hannibal Protocol was devised in the late 1980s in response to Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers from Kounin near Bint Jbeil in 1986. Israel tends to pay a high price for the return of its kidnapped citizens which makes them a valuable commodity for its enemies. The remains of the two soldiers were swapped in 1996 for 45 detainees from Khiam prison and the bodies of 123 resistance fighters. The doctrine decrees that all measures must be taken to ensure that a soldier does not end up in the hands of the enemy, even if he should die in the process.

The Israeli military applied the Hannibal Protocol in the hours after Hezbollah kidnapped three soldiers from the Shebaa Farms in October 2000. Several vehicles were attacked by helicopter gunships around Shebaa, wounding 20 civilians. The protocol was invoked again on July 12, 2006, after Hezbollah snatched two soldiers from across the Blue Line near Aita Shaab. Armored vehicles crossed the Blue Line in hot pursuit only to fall into a deadly ambush. A total of eight dead soldiers and two more kidnapped that day spurred the Israeli government to escalate the border clash into a war.

As new details emerge of Hezbollah’s Jan. 28 missile ambush, it is clear the operation was meticulously planned and skillfully implemented.

The attack was Hezbollah’s response to the deaths of six of its fighters and an Iranian general in an Israeli drone strike on the Golan Heights 10 days earlier.

The Hezbollah team, equipped with two Kornet anti-tank missile launchers, was hidden above the Hasbani river gorge about 1 kilometer south of Arab Louaize village. The location grants good eastward views across the flat grassy plain to the foot of the Shebaa Farms hills. The assumption is that the team was in place for possibly more than a day, waiting for a target of opportunity to emerge. That target arrived at 11:30 a.m. on Jan. 28, when a convoy of military vehicles was spotted heading south.

The distance between the Hezbollah team and the target was in excess of 4.7 kilometers, the upper end of the Kornet’s 5.5 kilometer range.

Due to the distance, the team decided to fire two missiles simultaneously at the same target, the second vehicle in the convoy, doubling the chances of a strike. If they had fired at separate vehicles and missed, the element of surprise would have been lost, reducing the odds of causing casualties.

In fact, both laser-guided missiles struck the target. The first missile smashed into the rear of the vehicle and the second penetrated the passenger door, instantly killing the two occupants, an officer and a soldier. “That both missiles hit is amazing shooting at that distance,” a military observer said.

It takes around 25 seconds to load a Kornet launcher, ample time for the surviving members of the convoy to immediately exit their vehicles and seek cover. The third missile hit the third car in the convoy while the fourth struck a stationary civilian mini bus that had been traveling in the opposite direction. The passengers had already abandoned the vehicle. The fifth and sixth missiles missed.

The Israeli retaliatory bombardment began some 20 minutes later. Toledo, the Spanish peacekeeper, was killed shortly afterward.

Andrea Tenenti, UNIFIL’s spokesman, said the investigation into Toledo’s death was ongoing and that the results would soon be handed to the Lebanese and Israeli authorities as well as the U.N. in New York.

Israel has repeatedly accused UNIFIL of failing to curb Hezbollah’s alleged military activities in the southern border zone. In late December, UNIFIL commander Maj. Gen. Luciano Portolano was quoted as saying that the peacekeepers had “no evidence” of Hezbollah weapons in the border district. That statement prompted an anonymous Israeli officer to complain two days later that Hezbollah was conducting “intelligence-gathering operations” along the Blue Line every day, “often under UNIFIL’s noses.”

UNIFIL has a long history of suffering casualties at the hands of Israeli artillery and airpower. Four U.N. observers were killed in an Israeli air attack on their post in Khiam in the 2006 war. A French U.N. observer was killed in 2005 beside the Shebaa Farms by an Israeli tank round. The most notorious incident was in April 1996 when Israeli artillery shells hit the Fijian battalion headquarters in Qana, killing 107 civilians. A U.N. investigation subsequently concluded that it was “unlikely” the Qana shelling was a mistake.

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Op maandag 23 februari 2015 00:42 schreef Zolder het volgende:
Ik word echt moe van al die mensen die hun eigen "nieuws" creëren over onderwerpen die ze aangaan

Laat me raden TS: jij bent moslim?