|
‘THE REAL GAZA WAR’
Colonel Tim Collins investigates
SUMMARY
OF POINTS MADE IN A FEATURE REPORT CARRIED BY BBC NEWSNIGHT on TUESDAY,
JANUARY 19, 2010.
To view BBC write-up and see BBC video click here.
Colonel Tim Collins led his Royal Irish Regiment as the vanguard
of British forces capturing Basra in southern Iraq in 2003, after making a
famous speech urging "victory with honour”. He had previously
served in the elite British forces unit the SAS. Now training local security personnel in
conflict zones worldwide, his combat experience included years battling the
IRA in his native Northern Ireland, as well as military postings in Bosnia
and central and southern Iraq. The Colonel had never been to Israel
or Gaza before.
He was filmed in the Gaza Strip and Israel late in 2009 by
CONFLICTZONES.
ALL
QUOTES IN THIS ARTICLE WERE BROADCAST IN THE PROGRAMME.
(Within
this article sentences or phrases marked with [ ] are explanations not
contained in the actual broadcast report.)
Inside the Gaza Strip – subjected to a short but bloody war
against Israeli forces that ended in January 2009, and under the
control of the Islamist militant movement Hamas - Colonel Tim Collins drove
up to a massive roadside poster.
“It shows the Legoland town of Sderot [southern Israel] being
bombarded by unguided weapons,” said the Colonel. “[Responding to] this is
what the Israelis say the attack was all about. But this poster
wasn’t produced by an Israeli PR company. It was paid for by Hamas,
and they’ve got their badge on it – showing a war crime by any standard.”
The main target for the rocket fire depicted in the Hamas
roadside billboard had indeed been the small Israeli border town of
Sderot.
Late at night, the Colonel
managed to rendezvous inside the Gaza Strip with men who fired rockets
across the border into Israel. The
Colonel was being driven by Abu Haroon, a bearded fighter from a sub-group
of Fatah called the Abu Rish Brigade.
At the rocket men’s makeshift base inside a refugee camp, Abu Haroon and his men produced a rocket
and started dismantling it. “TNT [a
high explosive] was spilling out of the back of it,” recalls the Colonel,
“and I was particularly nervous when they put a badly-constructed home-made
fuse on top of the device, making it a live weapon, then brandished a
detonator.”
Abu Haroon made it clear that
these rockets were “simple” devices that could not be accurately
targeted. “We don’t know where these
drop,” he told the Colonel. “Because there are no electronics here. Not big shooting rocket like Israel says
about it.” Expressing the hope that
conflict will end and that “the
children can grow up without ever having known the war that Abu Haroon and
his men have known, God willing,”
Colonel Collins left and was driven back to his hotel in Gaza City.
In the southern Israeli town of Sderot, British-born Tottenham-supporting
police officer Micky Rosenfeld showed the Colonel gaily-painted
bomb-shelters into which the town’s 30-thousand citizens would flee to
relative safety [every time they heard a piercing “Red Alert” siren].
The Colonel noted that fragments [of metal ball-bearings stuffed into
rocket-heads] had ripped holes even into the thick metal walls that
surround the bomb-shelters. “That’s vicious,” Colonel Collins said. “If
that hits your flesh it would tear you up.”
Thousands of rockets and
mortars had fallen during the eight years before Israel launched its
assault on the Gaza Strip at the end of 2008, Colonel Collins was
told.
“Growing up in Belfast during
The Troubles, I can sympathise with them.
It’s no way to live … \These were by and large people who had
decamped from an Islamic society in north Africa and found themselves
living on the front-line,” Colonel
Collins said, [referring to Jews from Arab north Africa who had come to
Israel in the 1950s and had often settled in small towns in the country’s
under-developed south.] “Growing up in Belfast during The
Troubles, I can sympathise with them.
It’s no way to live.”
Behind the town’s police
station was a collection of the remnants of rockets that had struck the
town. Colonel Collins picked up a
rusting rocket casing. “It can’t be accurate, because it’s heavy and
imprecise – so this is an indiscriminate weapon,” Colonel Collins remarked. Police Chief Inspector Rosenfeld told him
how he believed the rocket-firers sometimes managed to target their missiles
-- by listening to Israeli radio which revealed where the first rocket or
rockets had hit, and then adjusting their sights to make the next ones more
lethal.
Rosenfeld also showed him the
remnants of the much-more-advanced Grad rockets, which he said had been smuggled
to the armed Palestinian groups via a number of countries through tunnels
under the Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt. Twenty of these had hit cities further up
the coast or far further inland during three days at the start of the
Gaza-Israel war, he said. Israel
feared that if it failed to act, Palestinian militants in Gaza would over
time be able to smuggle in or develop rocketry that could hit further and
further away until missiles reached the main Israeli city of Tel Aviv.
Later, in Bet Hanun, northern
Gaza Strip, the Colonel examined the remains of a deserted and destroyed mosque
-- one of several that had been smashed during the Gaza-Israel war. Inside the now deserted mosque, Colonel
Collins looked up at a gaping hole left by an air strike. “The allegation was that this was used as
a storage facility for weapons,” said the Colonel as he tramped about the
ruined structure. “I have to say that what was commonplace in Iraq also
seemed to be evident in Gaza as well.
Down in the cellar of the mosque there was clear evidence of
secondary explosions. It’s my
opinion that the only thing that could have caused this was that explosives
were stored here.”
The Colonel also went to the
scene of possibly the most well-publicised tragedy of the war. A tank had fired two rounds into an
apartment block. The shells struck a
bedroom and killed three daughters and a niece of a local doctor, Ezzedeen
Abualaish. Colonel Collins found the
scene “heart-rending”, but when he painstakingly found the exact spot from
which the tank, perched on a hillside overlooking Gaza City, had fired two
rounds, he was able to work out what the Israeli tank-gunner would have
been able to see.
“The civilians had been
evacuated into Gaza…. I have to say that it would be difficult from this
range, even through optic sights, to make out clear targets. So you would only see shadows.” However the Colonel said firing a main
armament-round without actually identifying the target was “questionable”. [An
Israeli military investigation in 2009 concluded that the gunner had
believed there were Palestinian fighters moving around in what he and his
commander thought was an abandoned building. The doctor had been telephoned
by an Israeli military officer days before advising him and his family and
all inhabitants to leave the building, the report stated.]
On his way out of the Gaza
Strip, Colonel Collins passed alongside a plethora of roadside pictures and
billboards plastered with the faces of young men killed in years of
conflict with Israel, each shown in a heroic pose wielding a weapon. “Some call them ‘legitimate targets’,
others call them ‘martyrs’. They’ve certainly been ‘martyred’ to suit
someone’s agenda. In my view, like in Ireland, it’s a waste of young
lives.”
As Colonel Collins walked
towards a heavily fortified checkpoint to exit Gaza, he reflected on his
visit. “The real victims here are
the people of Gaza, and the people of Sderot, who’ve been used like cattle,”
he said. “In my humble view that’s the real crime.”
Photos and video shown on this website courtesy
of CONFLICTZONES
info@conflictzones.tv
|
