More On Alleged Ambulance Attacks

Update: Charles at lgf thinks the ICRC is covering up the evidence. I knew the image in question was gone but assumed it was part of a rotation. That the others are all still there is a bit more curious.

I was looking over Tim Blair's posts tonight and came across this:

We also visited Ahmed Mohammed Fawaz, whose lower left leg had been amputated and whose severe burns ironically had saved his life by sealing blood vessels and arteries. His son writhed in pain nearby, his stomach riddled with shrapnel and the rear of his scalp opened up.

Below is a video clip from the hospital that next day, are these consistent? And there's more below.

Now see this, from yet another journalist:

QASIM Chaalan thought he had died in the burning haze of the missile strike.

But it gradually dawned on him that he was still there, inside the ambulance. He still felt his body and, opening his eyes, could still see.

"Each of us treated ourselves. There was no light," said Kassem Shaalan, a medic from Tyre.

This via Tim:

Shalin was lifting the rear ramp of the ambulance when the missile hit. His colleague was stepping into the side door. The concussion wave from the missile easily dispersed through the open spaces. Shalin was protected as he fell under the ramp.

By the time patients and ambulance crew reached Tyre, Mr Fawaz was unconscious after losing one leg, and suffering severe fractures to the other. His son had lost part of a foot, and his mother's body was riddled with shrapnel. Mr Joudi had shrapnel wounds in his left arm, and Mr Shaalan cuts to the face and leg.

Here the ambulances were stopped:

By Nader Joudi's reckoning, the ambulances had been stopped for barely two minutes. Two patients had been loaded: Ahmed Mustafa Fawaz, who had been hit by shrapnel in the stomach, and his son, Mohammed, 14. The volunteer attendant was just easing Jamila Fawaz, 80, inside and setting up a drip when the missile struck. He managed to get the old woman and the child outside, but there was no way to reach Mr Fawaz. "It was horrible," Mr Joudi said. "He was screaming, and we couldn't do anything."

Here via Tim, they were moving and veered off the road:

Mr Shalin was spared more serious injuries by the armoured vest he was wearing and the driver’s canopy that protected him from a direct hit … he remembers nothing after the flash and bang of the missile then the crunch of the crash as his ambulance veered off road.

According to this, same source, Shaulan, different journalist, we're told:

"The night of July 23 we were called to rescue a family whose home was bombed," Kassem Shaulan, a 28-year-old medic with the Lebanese Red Cross in Tyre told IPS. "Just as I finished loading the three injured people in my ambulance, it was struck by a rocket and all of us were injured....

There was an old man on a stretcher in the ambulance who lost his leg from the bomb," Shaulan said. "And a child with us is now in coma. The third person is critically injured."

And here:

An elderly woman patient was relatively unscathed, but Mohammed Mustafa Fawaz, 46, was in the intensive care unit, the stump where his right leg used to be swollen and bleeding. His son was semiconscious in the room next door, suffering from a concussion and internal injuries.

Here he stated they were rushing due to the sounds all around:

The swap only took two minutes — both Red Cross crews had done this before and the whine of a drone and rumble of passing Israeli jets overhead were further incentives for haste.

But not according to this via Tim:

“There was not a sound in the sky before the explosions. And after that there was a battle for the next hour."

here

"There was a boom, a big fire and I was thrown backwards. I thought I was dead," Shaalan recalls. He opened his eyes and checked himself to see if he was hurt. One of his colleagues, Nader Joudi, was standing, but the third member of the team, Mohammed Hassan, was unconscious.

A medic, Qasim Chaalan, said he thought he had died after the first missile hit. Piece by piece, he noticed that he was still there, inside the ambulance.

here

In Sunday's attack, Chaalan was thrown backward while the other medics rushed to pull the wounded from the smashed vehicle. As they pulled the child out, the Israelis struck again, blowing up the second ambulance.

This is what has always troubled me the most about the ambulance story, you can Google a dozen stories and get a dozen versions. Bad journalism? Bad sources? Either way, it amounts to bad press for Israel, which begins to look like the point of this whole story in the end. How can any of this alleged fact checking be trusted?

Comments

[saint]

Apologies for the mulitple trackbacks. Typepad is not behaving for me lately.

[rwilymz]

Why, 'x', I'm impressed. Cynicism instead of petulance.

Yes indeedy; failure to fully integrate it's minority populations -- conquests rather than immigrants -- contributed heavily to Rome's fracturing. Bilingualists take note.

It became too much work to actually integrate its legions, so each province raised its own army -- of provincials, and led by provincials using their own standards -- also contributed much.

Although swapping one state religion for the next isn't necessarily a step backward, christianity was awful strident in its first several centuries. The whole "virgin birth" thing came about from a squabble between the eastern bishops and the western bishops and contributed a lot toward the east-west split and the formation of the eastern roman-byzantine empire.

And to think, Greater Arabia could have been the undisputed seat of knowledge and culture after the fall of Rome in the 5th century except that they, too, discovered religious fundamentalism in the 7th century and ultimately handed the reins right back to Europe.

Look sad and say "d'oh" Achmed.

[xxx]

And I wonder if this was part of what killed off Rome and Byzantium.
-----------------------------------------------------

I don't know about Byzantium, but would say that when Rome stopped actually "romanizing" its newly minted barbarian Roman citizens, stopped bothering to adequately train its army, started lowering standards all around from how much gold was in money to the rules for being a Roman, and oh yeah, that whole Christian thing they got going toward the end where they stopped believing in logic, engineering and started shutting down related institutions that had been in existance for thousands of years...

Well hey, that's how you forget domes, plumbing, concrete and 3 point perspective for a thousand years.

We are well on the road to our own version of Rome's fall.

[rwilymz]

"I must have missed the part where Israel officially declared war against Lebanon though"

"Official" declarations of war are, like "official" ribbon cuttings on the new office complex, irrelevant.

International law only recognizes "state of war", at which point certain protocols are supposed to go into effect. If you, the bystander -- or bysitter, in the case of the hunkered 'netter -- are waiting for "official" proclamations before you can consider something legitimate, you'll be waiting a long time and wasting much energy denouncing reality as not having played by the rules which you've just invented.

.

Frankly, pinging the local host for spending too much time rationalizing why an insult is okay, while piously declaring it's not, just means that both of you are wasting your time.

The whole thing is an exercise in elevating kindergarten neenering to High Stakes. Everybody would get smacked if I was in charge -- and could use corporal punishment. When my kids call each other names [and I hear about it] I smack the caller for name-calling, and I smack the callee for crying about it.

Grow.The hell.Up.

People who whine about being called names are monumentally immature. And those who whine in proxy about others being called names are so desperately immature that they actively search for subject matter to cry about.

My kids are not about to become part of that if I can help it, and the fact that much of the rest of the country has devolved into a squirming, bawling mass of babies actually nauseates me. We do not deserve to be the pre-eminent military and economic world power if this is what we're like underneath. And I wonder if this was part of what killed off Rome and Byzantium.

[xxx]

I never said macaca was a big deal, Allen should have just apologized and said he was pissed off by being so openly tracked by his competitor. I would never even say that being less 'sensitive' than I am means you can't be a good leader.

But what I object to is the lengths that the conservative blogsphere, especially Dan here went to first, explain away macaca as NOT being a racial slur and then, when that failed miserable as of course it would have to since it defied REALITY, Dan went on one of his halfazzed 'investigative' binges to find something to discredit the guy...as if, as I said in the previous post, if he turned out to be a bad guy then calling him a macaca was okay.

Same reason for the ambulance obsession and discrediting any photo or report that makes Israel look bad. It MUST be a fake because the white hat Israeli's would never do that. They would never, ever, never drop cluster bombs designed to penetrate what is it, tanks?, on a bunch of villages, especially ya know, when they allegeldy promised the seller of said cluster bombs [that's us as you know] that they would be wicked, wicked careful in using them so as not to unnecessarily injure civilians, or have ya know, thousands of them laying around after their pretty little incursion was over. That CANNOT be, err, well if it is, then its okay, because Israel did it, and besides, you know, a border raid kidnapping two guys by a non state actor is AN ACT OF WAR...I must have missed the part where Israel officially declared war against Lebanon though....

[Phoenix]

I say, Rwilymz, old chap... nice smackdown. I don't give the arse of a rat about the panty-wetter, but I am kind of laughing about the 'luxury outrage' and 'name-calling' thing. You'll remember who declared it, but some leader or country declared another country or leader 'irrelevant'. It makes me laugh for some reason, and I recall it caused huge outrage. I think it was in the Levant that someone was declared irrelevant.

So what does that mean, exactly? You don't count, so we're going to bomb you off the planet, or you don't count so we're not going to waste a bomb on you? Or you can't join our club? Or is it PCspeak for 'you are an idiot'?

So, if a blogger is irrelevant, why would someone comment on their blog? This gets very twisted if you ask me. As far as I'm concerned most racial slurs are irrelevant mainly because we *have* to talk about race or most political, geopolitical discussion comes to studdered halt while everyone scrambles for the correct vocabulary to describe a race by non-racial terms. "Let's see... um.... uh.... umm.... you're not a 'race'.... uh.... a melange of DNA attacked a market today and killed a plethora of upright walkers."

Talk about irrelevant....

[rwilymz]

'x'! Why you peevish panty-wetter. Howya been?

I'll agree with one thing you said. If five people witness any given event, you'll likely get six, maybe seven, different versions of it.

But frankly, I'm tired of people getting righteously indignant about "racial slurs". Grow up. If that's the worst thing you've had to deal with then you've had it easy.

Worrying about insults is a luxury outrage, and it's only available when real outrages -- such as starvation and death -- are absent.

Fretting over "names" reminds me of my kids: "Ben looked at me!!" He's gotta look somewhere. Get over it.

[xxx]

Talk about blogging yourself into irrelevance, ha, not that you ever were relevant.

Get off this taxi obsession why don't you. If you read multiple reports written by different reporters about ANY story unless they are all reading off AP copy there are going to be, get this....DIFFERENCES.....in the details...reporters get things wrong, they are lazy, they focus on different aspects...

For example, the Nizmarie Brown case in NY had the girl dead in the bathtub, lying naked on the floor, sopping wet with her clothes put back on her and many other conflicting details, but no one suspected that the NYC media were purposefully reporting these things wrongly or that, ya know, maybe Nizmarie didn't really die a terrible death.

Same with your demented obsession with somehow discrediting the recipient of the racist Macaca comment, the thinking being I suppose that if the kid was not a nice guy then it was acceptable, that he be racially slurred in a public place, course, Senator Allen couldn't have known whether he was a nice guy or not, all he knows is he's a macaca.

Un believable.

[Carol Herman]

This crap sounds like the questions on "social quizzes" kids see in college. Or in "word comprehension" parts of the SAT. So, just move along. Nothing to see. Americans think this double-speak is part PC.

If the MSM thinks they are ahead, then I guess Dan Rather sees his retirement as spiffy. On the other hand, isn't Katie Couric coming on board with C-BS doing "laser egged logos" for distribution in supermarkets?

Lunacy has no parallel. But we're watching in real time, as there is an implosion in the market place. Sort'a like seeing the Keystone Cops merged inside the heads of lunatics.

I'd bet it only makes Americans ANGRIER AND ANGRIER. Not frightened. And, not cowering. Too bad Bush doesn't own a set of vocal chords that could knock this stuff right out of the ball park. (Will we have to wait for Guiliani to get elected in '08?)

[Phil]

1. Can it be determined from the video _which_ leg was amputated?
2. If you put the different "facts" of the case into an easy-to-read chart, I think your message will make a much bigger impression. Keep up the great work!