Shrapnel clue to Gaza beach shelling

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"A small piece of jagged metal emerged last night as a possible key to discovering who was behind the killing of eight Palestinians on a Gaza beach last week.

The fragment of shrapnel, marked with numbers and two letters, was removed by Palestinian doctors from the abdomen of a teenage boy caught up in the blast.

With Israel denying responsibility for the blast, an American munitions expert identified the shard as coming from the fuse of an artillery shell.

It is definitely part of an artillery fuse," said Marc Garlasco, who is working in Gaza for the American organisation Human Rights Watch.

"It should be possible to work out whether it was a fuse from the type of shell being fired by Israel into Gaza."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/16/wmid16.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/16/ixnews.html

Either falsify Garlasco's conclusions or the Israeli metallurgical analysis.

Assuming there's accurate enough record keeping by the Israelis. And assuming there's a decent chain of custody for the shrapnel; presumably it wasn't just removed from the boy's abdomen last night, even though that's the easiest inference to get from the article.

It might also render disputation about the timeline moot. If it's from a shell fired when the family was there, but not at other times, that's what it was; if it was from something else, or a type of shell not used that day, it wasn't a case of shelling civilians.

It might not resolve much, if it's either from a shell that might have been lobbed that afternoon or a month before, or is used in both artillery shells and for other purposes. In the first case it's back to yes-it-is/no-it-isn't, and in the second some Israeli explosives wonk saying it's also used by IJ or whoever, and the PA/Hamas calling that accusation scurrilous. :-)

If you see the results of investigating the fuse, please post.

If I see anything, I'll be sure to post it immediately.


Israel: More Evidence on Beach Killings Implicates IDF

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"A digitally dated and time-stamped blood test report of a victim treated at a Palestinian hospital that admitted wounded from the June 9 killings on a Gaza beach suggests that the attack took place during the time period of an Israeli artillery attack, Human Rights Watch said today. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have denied responsibility for the killings, saying that although they fired six artillery shells onto the beach between 4:32 p.m. and 4:51 p.m., the fatal incident must have occurred after that. Human Rights Watch first challenged this conclusion, concluding that the IDF most likely caused the killings, in a press release, http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/06/13/isrlpa13544.htm, based on an investigation by its researchers in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch researchers examined the computer-generated record from the Kamal Adwan hospital, which documents the blood test of a victim from the beach incident being taken at 5:12 p.m. on June 9. Furthermore, hand-written hospital records log patients from the incident as having been admitted starting at 5:05 p.m. If the records are accurate, based on the time needed to dispatch an ambulance and drive from the hospital to the beach and back, this suggests that the fatal explosion took place at a time when the IDF said it was firing artillery rounds. Both sets of records also directly call into question the account of the IDF that ambulances did not reach the beach until 5:15 p.m. that day.

Altering the records would require re-setting the computer's clock and re-writing pages of the hospital's admissions log. Human Rights Watch researchers said that the pages they saw documented patients un-related to the beach incident, followed by two pages of victims from the beach. The first of those were admitted at 5:05 p.m. The researchers saw no evidence that the times might have been altered."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/72aa91563387c8f06b6a9231abd58185.htm