Murdered UN peacekeepers had contacted Israeli troops
Israel’s foreign minister and other spokespeople have categorically denied that Israeli forces would ever deliberately target UN troops and positions, yet as details emerge the killing of four UN observers increasingly looks to be an intentional act.
The circumstances do not support Israel’s claim that the killings were accidental. First, the geography is small and well-known to Israeli military planners as their tanks, troops and aircraft have maneuvered in, mined, and occupied southern Lebanon many times.
The UN’s UNIFIL forces have conducted operations in the region since 1978. The UN observation zone is not a big expanse—the strip of land from the Mediteranean Sea all along the approximately 50 kilometer-long common border with Israel extends between 5 to 15 kilometers deep into Lebanon.
Nearly 30 years ago as UNIFIL began its long mandate, troops from the Canadian signal corps in 1978 established “Camp Pearson” in the south western coastal city of Naqura. The UN soldiers killed this week were hunkered down in an outpost near Khiam, located roughly 60 kilometers away from that first Canadian post, as the crow flies, in south eastern Lebanon, a scant 5km away from both the Israeli and Syrian borderlines and the armies that lay beyond.
This is not the first time the Israeli military have been accused of intentionally targetting UN forces in the area. Some 261 (including the latest) UNIFIL members have been killed since 1978, a number directly at the hands of the IDF.
In this latest incident the UN observers even warned the IDF, multiple times, that their shells were hitting their outpost and shelter, yet the shelling continued apace. Ultimately a precision-guided Israeli missile murdered the UN observers and put a stop to the warnings from the pesky UN observers.
UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says. [BBC – Israel troops ‘ignored’ UN plea]
If neutral United Nations forces sheltering in their well-known, brightly-marked, UN outpost can be murdered by the IDF despite taking every precaution, what chance do ordinary civilians have?