As we now know, this guy was the “rescue work” at the Qana incident. Salam Daher has also been identified as the “mortician” at the hospital in nearby Tyre. His work includes transporting cadavers in a refrigeration truck, as confirmed now with this recent AP story.

Tyre is about 6 km northwest of Qana. And Qana is midway between Tyre and Bint Jbeil where heavy fighting has taken place. Salam Daher’s activities reach across this area.

At the site of the collapsed building in Qana, Salam Daher spoke in Arabic to a TV reporter for Aljazeerah. He said that he estimated there were 210 victims in all.

Later, other newsmedia reports from the scene claimed there were dozens of dead children. Here in the USA, inflated numbers were repeated as fact: for example, Amy Goodman on the radio program, ‘Democracy Now’, claimed that among the dead were 37 children and that only 8 people had survived. Newsweek reported 56 dead.

Now the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch have reported that 15 children were among the 28 confirmed dead and that at least 22 and probably as many as 35 people had survived.

As this new AP story said: “Twenty-eight bodies were recovered — more than half of them children.”

Yes, 15 is more than have of 28. But no mention of the 35 survivors. No mention of the 13 adults who had survived but remain unaccounted for (perhaps Hezbollah fighters). Obviously, they were on the scene when the building collapsed. Salam Daher did not arrive until much later in the morning.

Given the very large discrepancy between the actual count and the estimate originally offered by Salam Daher, it would seem like a reasonable question to ask Salam Daher for the basis of his on-the-scene guess. He appears to be very experienced in this type of stituation and so his explanation might be enlightening.

Maybe he knew there were twice as many people in that particular area, which is a 5-road intersection. If there were, then, there were many more hands to help with the rescue prior to his arrival and tv appearance at 8am that morning.

I suspect he just plucked a number out of the air to top the Qana incident of 1996. Multiply the found corpses by 10 and presto! The world can relive the 1996 tragedy in the face of “dozens” of dead children symbolically held aloft by Salam Daher.

The AP story implies that we are mistaken to criticize what is merely a cultural difference.

* * *

AP hems and haws to explain doubling of Qana death toll [2 August 2006]
http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Briefs/9037.htm

Death toll half what was previously reported [3 August 2006]
http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Briefs/9030.htmRed Cross, rights group: Qana

Eye witness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyZsq3jyJ6w&mode=related&search=qana%20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyZsq3jyJ6w&mode=related&search=qana%20

F. Rottles on August 12, 2006 at 12:20 AM

Green Helmet shown in uncut video footage to be overtly staging photo ops.

This video was originally taken by the NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk)agency and made available to ZAPP, a German video magazine, who added the following caption:

Germany`s NDR presents unpublished video footage from the qana events, demasking “Green Helmet” as a cynical movie director, staging photographs with a liitle boys body.

Richard North at Euroreferendum says:

This, as “Zapp” quite rightly observes in its subtitles, is the abuse of the body of a dead child. But the “abusers” included the camera crew, who willingly went on with the charade (although someone along the line has a conscience and has released the footage) but it especially includes the likes of AP’s Kathleen Carroll.

* * *

I should add a correction for my previous comment.

Salam Daher had guesstimated 210 casualties at the site of the house that had collapsed in Qana on 30 July 2006.

The recent AP story said that “more than half” of the dead were children; and yet the same story failed to say that more than half of the people in that house had lived — 28 died, 35 survived.

By Salam Daher’s original guesstimate, at least 147 more people were in that place. But where were these people during the “rescue work” that Salam Daher supervised that Sunday morning?

Newsweek reported that a woman and her two daughters had been sleeping in the basement of the house when it collapsed in the night.

The mother said that her sister and family dug her out of the rubble; her two young daughters were also found, dead, and pulled from the wreckage. Their corpses had been found ontop of their mother. So there were people on-hand to recover both survivors and the dead immediately after the collapse.

If Salam Daher’s guesstimate of 210 was based on some knowledge or expectation of how many people had been there, and since his own rescue work entailed little more than going into the one basement and carrying out the bodies that lay ontop of the rubble, and since that work seemed not to dirty his hands very much, it becomes very compelling to question

1) the basis of his expectation of 210 casualties,

2) the failure of survivors to recover the bodies supposedly found hours later, and

3) the whereabouts and descriptions of those (now-missing) survivors.

F. Rottles on August 12, 2006 at 2:58 AM