This problem with the latest from Reuters lies in the caption, not the image. And no, it wasn’t taken at one of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day events.
Lebanese children take part in a vigil in front of the United Nations House in Beirut, Lebanon April 18, 2006. The vigil was held to mark the 10th anniversary of an Israeli massacre in south Lebanon in which 101 people where killed when Israeli forces bombed a U.N. shelter in the village of Qana in 1996. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi
But as Soccer Dad responds:
What happened in Qana ten years was a tragedy. Or even an outrage. Residents of Israel, at the time had to flee their cities by the thousands due to shelling from Hezbollah. Hezbollah subject to no constraints by either their own morals or the UN was bombarding Israel with impunity. On April 18, 1996 Israel retaliated against a Hezbollah bombardment. What the IDF didn’t know until it was too late was that the Hezbollah positions were in and around a UN compound. A number of Israel shells missed their target and hit a building into which 800 people had fled. Over 100 were killed.
(One of the charges against Israel was that it knew where it was shelling because a drone had been over the area prior to the shelling was shown to be false by an Israeli videotape of the drone. Still the charge persisted. The Israeli gunners were responding to mobile terrorists.)
Israel was blamed for a massacre. In fact the ineffectual UN troops were second to Hezbollah in culpability. But for Reuters, I guess that this blood libel was too good to pass up.
The reference to a massacre also appears in these other Reuters captions: 1, 2, and 3. At least AP and AFP put the word “massacre” in quote marks.
