(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - * Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's foreign media advisor Ra'anan Gissin said Sunday that Friday's tragedy on the Gaza beach may indeed be similar to the shooting of Mohammed al-Dura in 2000. While the Palestinians originally pinned the blame on Israel, it has since turned out that al-Dura may have been killed by Palestinians. * Gissin said that Israel should immediately have raised doubts after Friday's incident about the Palestinian version of events that placed the blame squarely on Israel. * "We jumped to conclusions before the evidence, and we immediately assumed that it was probably an Israeli shell," Gissin said. "But we don't know that for a fact. The Palestinians moved in and destroyed all the evidence. People should be asking themselves, 'why?'" * "Now we have a classic case where there is no real evidence, and all we have is a picture of a crying girl on the beach," Gissin said. "Nobody knows how the people there were killed. If it was an Israeli shell, why didn't the Palestinians invite the press to see the remnants of the shell?" * Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev explained that the violence in Gaza is a result of Palestinian extremist groups continuing to launch rockets on Israel even though Israel pulled out of Gaza ten months ago.
2006-06-12 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive