The United Nations report on the massacre at Qana, in which over 100 people were killed by Israeli artillery fire as they took refuge in a Fijian UN compound, is a carefully argued document, which clearly establishes that there is a real case to answer by the Israeli government. Its conclusions are presented cautiously, but firmly, saying that "the pattern of impacts ... makes it unlikely that the shelling ... was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors", although it does not entirely rule out this possibility.
The UN Secretary General, Dr Boutros Ghali, has published the report and passed it to the Security Council, to the fury of the Israeli and United States governments. They have been using all manner of ad hominem arguments against him and the author of the report, General Frank van Kappan, the Secretary General's military adviser, on the basis that it is unimaginable to say the crime may have been deliberate. Unfortunately, as the report has found, much of the evidence points to the possibility that it was. It is necessary to hold fast to that conclusion in assessing whether the report should have been made public and passed to the Security Council.
The massacre was a crime against the international community and its representative organisation, the United Nations Implementation Force in Lebanon (Unifil), committed in the course of a war between the Israeli army and Hizbullah guerillas. The UN was quite right to mount this investigation and Dr Boutros Ghali was right to publish it. To argue, as Israeli representatives have done, that it reaches unwarranted political conclusions and is based on incomplete research is one thing; but the implication that the very decision to pursue an inquiry falls, if it reaches unacceptable conclusions, is impossible to sustain.
There is a clear contradiction between the various accounts made available to the inquiry; supplementary evidence has since been produced on the Israeli side in justification of their position. Action must now be taken to establish who was to blame and to determine appropriate redress. Suggestions that Israel should apologise and pay compensation stop well short of what is required. Once this case is put it exposes a grave shortcoming in the international law dealing with war crimes and grave human rights abuses. It would be necessary to establish a specific tribunal to investigate the matter further. The fact that the current UN tribunal into war crimes in ex Yugoslavia is almost unprecedented, illustrates the legal difficulties involved.
It would be quite unsatisfactory for the investigation into the Qana massacre to become bogged down in partisan argument over the rights and wrongs of Operation Grapes of Wrath. There is a marked contrast between the positions of the US and European governments, including the Irish Government, on the matter. The US badly compromised its role as a broker of Middle East peace by its uncritical attitude towards the quite disproportionate Israeli bombardments of southern Lebanon, and now by taking Israel's side in so pronounced a manner in criticising this report. The European governments should press the case for an international inquiry into the massacre which could assess all the evidence and make recommendations on who is to blame for the massacre.