The
BBC reported today that Israel disregarded as many as 10 distress calls from the UN Observers who were killed by an Isreaeli precision-guided missile. Additionally, the UNIFIL troops who tried to rescue the observers were shot at by the IDF. Kofi Annan had received personal assurances from the Israeli PM that the UN post would be safe, and the post was well known to the IDF.
Now, DEBKAfile, which was founded by ex-Mossad agents and is usually authoritative and sober in its reporting (although it has made mistakes at times and some people question its objectivity, as with everything else in the Middle East), adds this surprising twist:
Jerusalem wants UN secretary Kofi Annan to apologize for accusing Israel of deliberately targeting the UNIFIL post.
DEBKAfile adds: The holier-than-thou tone of outrage taken by Annan is surprising when it generally known that many UN missions are exploited as the cover for foreign agents, often hostile, to carry out spying operations in war zones. The inadvertent Israeli air strike revealed the fact that the UN force in Lebanon includes Chinese observers. One was killed along with an Austrian, a Canadian and a Finn. The presence of Chinese observers keeping an eye on the combat in South Lebanon has never before been reported.
Our intelligence experts compare the incident to the inadvertent US bombardment which wrecked the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1998 (picture), killing a number of Chinese “diplomats.” It was discovered that from that building the Chinese had operated sophisticated surveillance to track the performance of American warplanes, missiles and smart bombs.
The Khaim observer post was located near Hizballah positions and training facilities in the eastern sector, where the IDF has launched the next stage of its campaign against Hizballah in southern Lebanon.
The short article is a strange one. It refers to the bombing as inadvertent, but then goes on to suggest that the Chinese may well have been a spy, and that, analogous to the incident in Belgrade, there may have been good strategic reasons to eliminate him. On some level, this seems to be as close as it gets to an explicit allegation that the UN post was targeted because the IDF suspeced the PRC of espionage -- and a claim that it was justified.
If there turns out to be any truth to that suggestion, I wonder what the strategic impact will be.