As Hamas vowed to avenge Israel's killing of Saleh Shehadeh, the commander of its military wing and 14 other Palestinians, including nine children, Israel said it had intended to kill only Shehadeh. "According to the information which we had there were no civilians near him and we express sorrow on the injuries to them," Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Israel's Cabinet, according to a statement from his office.
Unnamed Israeli officials told Israel Radio that a "major intelligence blunder" had occurred prior to the decision to destroy the building, where Shehadeh stayed. They said neither Ariel Sharon nor Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer had been told that there were civilians in the target structure.
Senior military sources said the military believed erroneously only one other person was in the building with Shehadeh, fellow Hamas member Zahar Salah Abuhsein. Besides Shehadeh and Abuhsein, Shehadeh's wife and a daughter were killed in the building, said the sources. They said the other victims were probably killed in adjacent buildings, which the planners of the air strike had believed would not be seriously damaged.
Military sources said the central defect in the operation was the decision to use an F-16 warplane, which dropped a one-ton bomb on the house in which Shehadeh was staying, a structure in the heart of a densely populated residential area.
Israeli officials suggested the military underestimated the damage that would be caused to nearby buildings, where many people were hurt. In an assessment presented to the political echelon prior to the decision to attack, security authorities said the bomb would have a "minor effect" on nearby buildings.
Senior officials said Wednesday that had Sharon and Ben-Eliezer known that innocents were in the vicinity of the attack, they would have put off the assassination of the man who headed Israel's most-wanted list, Haaretz reported.
On Tuesday, hours after the night bombing, Sharon termed the operation a "great success." But late on Tuesday, the Israeli army and the Shin Bet security service opened an investigation into the raid, according to Israeli press reports.
Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said that the assassination operstion had been put off several times in the past, when intelligence data showed that the operation would put civilians at risk. "Anyone who thinks or imagines that the prime minister, the defense minister, or the army chief of staff would have decided on and approved carrying out this attack in this place knowing that this would harm innocent people, simply has no idea what he is talking about."
Sharon convened his "senior steering committee" of top ministers Wednesday morning to discuss further contacts with the Palestinians.
Dovish Labor leader, Yossi Beilin, currently in Washington, said he believed Israeli leaders would have cancelled the raid rather than harm ciivilians. "But this does not lighten the severity of the act itself. The very fact of cerrying out 'liquidations' in a democratic country in which there is no death penalty, is very, very questionable, and must be limited to cases in which we are really intervening in a 'ticking bomb'. This, regrettably, was not the case here," Beilin said.
"Democratic countries generally do not do things of this nature, and the price we are paying today among the best of our friends is very, very high, and is superfluous."
For his part, Israel’s President Moshe Katsav said Wednesday of the casualties that "it truly pains the heart to see children that were killed and seriously injured. That was not our intention. That is not us. This is not our policy. Mistakes happen, and this was a mistake,” he added. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
