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June 12th, 2015 
Awake Goy The Israeli report gave the impression that the military made an effort to contact all witnesses to the killings on a Gaza beach during the Israeli invasion last July, and that Palestinians had declined to cooperate.
But the slaughter took place right in front of a hotel where many western journalists were staying. And as Dan Cohen writes, “no effort was made to contact journalists who witnessed the incident.” Peter Beaumont of the Guardian was one of the eyewitnesses. Beaumont writes today that the Israeli military made no effort to contact him or other witnesses who could have provided firsthand information.
The Israeli claims appear at odds in several details with what journalists were able to see at the time, Beaumont says, beginning with this Israeli assertion:
“From the factual findings collected by the investigators, it revealed that the incident took place in an area that had long been known as a compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants.”
Beaumont disputes this:
The hut, however, was in plain sight of nearby hotels housing international journalists, none of whom described seeing militants in the area at the time of the attack…
The Israeli military also claimed that the alleged Navy “compound in question spans the length of the breakwater of the Gaza City seashore, closed off by a fence and clearly separated from the beach serving the civilian population.”
That wasn’t the case, Beaumont says.
The breakwater is both easily accessible from a side lane and also is located on one of the busiest parts of the public beach in Gaza port and accessible not only to the fishermen who use it, but local Palestinians who come to sunbathe and swim within feet of it.
He cites an Israeli claim that a container inside the alleged compound “was used to store military supplies.” Beaumont says:
The container described in the Israeli finding also appeared to contain no military equipment.
As of now, the New York Times has not yet issued a follow-up report to yesterday’s stenographic article by Jodi Rudoren simply repeating what Israel military said as gospel without making any effort to get the other side. The Times has also never reported on the Breaking the Silence report on the Gaza invasion that documented attacks on civilians who happened to be in the vicinity of targets.
We await with interest the Times’s followup on this tragedy.
We also note that 500 other children were killed during last summer’s attack along with 1700 adults.
Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/interview-eyewitnesses-slaughter
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