Posted on 07/24/2002 12:03:33 AM PDT by HAL9000
Amid scathing international criticism of the Gaza air strike that killed the commander of the military wing of Hamas but also killed 13 civilians including nine children, senior officials said Wednesday that had Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Benjamin 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.On Tuesday, hours after the Monday night Air Force bombing that targeted Hamas military chief Saleh Shehadeh, Sharon termed the operation a "great success", although he voiced regret at the deaths of innocents.
But late on Tuesday, the IDF and the Shin Bet security service opened an investigation into the Air Force raid.
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.
Only four of those killed were in the house itself. The other victims were in neighboring buildings. Shehadeh's deputy was also killed in the bombing.
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 is to convene his "senior steering committee" of top ministers Wednesday morning to discuss further contacts with the Palestinians.
"Israel did not know that there were civilians in Shehadeh's house," state-run Israel Radio quoted Sharon as telling aides in a closed meeting overnight. "Had it known this, it would have found another way to hit him."
Unnamed officials told the radio that a "major intelligence blunder" had occurred prior to the decision to destroy the building. They said neither Sharon nor Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer had been told that there were civilians in the target structure.
Israeli media Wednesday quoted intelligence authorities as saying that they knew that Shehadeh's wife and daughter were in the building when the decision was made to drop a guided one-ton bomb on the structure.
But Ben-Eliezer's office said the defense minister told the cabinet, "according to the information which we had there were no civilians near him and we express sorrow for the injuries to them."
At the same time, there appeared to be confusion within the military over the extent to which intelligence officials had known that civilian casualties might result form the assassination strike.
Major-General Giora Eiland, chief of military planning director, appeared to echo Sharon's remarks in telling the Associated Press that the operation to kill Shehadeh had been canceled several times because the Hamas commander hd been in the presence of civilians .
"If we knew that this would be the result, of course, we wouldn't have taken this operation," Eiland said. Israel had intelligence that Shehadeh was planning several large-scale terror attacks, including setting off a huge bomb under a bridge used by settlers in Gaza and landing suicide bombers on an Israeli beach by boat, Eiland added.
Leading international criticism of the assassination, U.S. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said: "This heavy-handed action does not contribute to peace." He added that the message had been conveyed to Israel by the American embassy in Tel Aviv.
Dovish Labor MK 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."
The decision in principle to kill Shehadeh was made months ago by Sharon, Ben-Eliezer, and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who was not directly involved in giving the final nod for the air raid.
Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, who took up his post this month, got a sharp lesson in how much backing he can expect from the political leadership.
When the extent of the disaster in Gaza became evident in Jerusalem, the Prime Minister's Office and the Defense Minister's bureau issued statements saying the operation had been approved on the basis of intelligence provided by the IDF that there were no civilians in the area.
Arriving home from London Tuesday morning, Ben-Eliezer said he had canceled 6 to 8 earlier operations planned to kill Shehadeh, precisely because there was the chance civilians would be hurt.
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."
Not a chance in freaking hell.
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