Daily Alert Archives

The Red Cross Ambulance Incident: How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax

[zombietime.com] Time magazine, the BBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and thousands of other media outlets around the world reported that on the night of July 23, 2006, an Israeli aircraft fired missiles at and struck two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. But there's one problem: It never happened. The story first broke in a press release issued by the Red Cross. On July 24, Britain's ITV News ran a breathless report about the attack. However, the ITV report states that journalists did not see the ambulances themselves, and instead showed a four-minute video taken by a "local amateur cameraman." After a spate of stories on the incident, including some (the New York Times) declaring that Israel targeted the cross on the roofs of the vehicles, by the beginning of August the media were charging that Israel was conducting a systematic campaign to strike Red Cross ambulances - a war crime. Dozens of reporters from prestigious publications had interviewed survivors. The wounded were shown in the hospital. There was video of the injured drivers arriving back at the Red Cross office. But photos of the ambulance with "an Israeli missile hole" in the exact center of the Red Cross on the roof reveal, on closer inspection, that the hole looks unmistakably like a pre-existing circular hole in the roof, to which some feature - such as a ventilation cover - was attached, and then removed. There are small screw holes at regular intervals around the perimeter of the hole, and the metal around the edges is not bent inward, as one would expect from a missile puncturing through the roof. Other pictures of Lebanese Red Cross ambulances show a ventilation cover of the exact same diameter as the "missile" hole right in the center of the cross on the roof. Analysis of photos also reveals that the damage to the ambulance could not have happened on July 23. The photos of the ambulance were taken within a week of the incident, but close-ups reveal the rust on the dented areas of the roof to be quite old, proving that the damage must have happened long before July 23. As for the claim that a missile penetrated the vehicle and caused a huge explosion, when there is an explosion inside a vehicle things get blown outward. Yet the windshield is caved inward. Furthermore, aside from some of the ceiling material hanging down, nothing on the inside of the ambulance looks damaged. The damage to the ambulance is completely unlike the damage that would have been caused by a missile strike. Various videos and pictures show a man in a hospital who really does seem to have part of a leg missing. Might he simply have been a hospital patient whose injury was completely unconnected to the ambulance in question, but who was paraded before the cameras as a victim of an Israeli missile? The driver of the Tyre ambulance, who was the original source for most of the story, was filmed staggering into the hospital, and then later lying in a bed with large bandages on his chin and right ear. All the media reports state that he was injured during the missile attack. Posing for a sympathetic Lebanese photographer a week later, his chin is not only miraculously healed, but shows no scar or discoloration of any kind. Did he put on bandages as a prop to fool the foreign journalists? The ambulance drivers, sympathetic to Hizballah, conceivably could have staged the entire incident.
2006-08-25 01:00:00
Full Article