Sarid: IAF's report on Nusseirat strike was incomplete
Ha'aretz, 19 November 2003MK Yossi Sarid (Meretz) emerged from his Wednesday evening with Israel Air Force Commander-in-Chief Major General Dan Halutz saying that more clarifications are needed on the helicopter strike in Gaza's Nusseirat refugee camp in which 12 Palestinians were killed.
Sarid said he received a full report on the operation from Halutz but that the matter requires further clarification.
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According to Sarid, the IDF used special, very powerful munitions with an unusually large radius of impact, which is what caused the large number of Palestinian casualties.
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The army has admitted that it did not use a helicopter-launched Hellfire air-to-surface missile in the strike, as it originally claimed, but rather employed a different and -unspecified - missile in the attack.
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The clash has caused a crisis between the IDF and military correspondents, who received erroneous information on the munitions used by the air force in the raid.
The IDF has admitted deceiving journalists, but said this was done in order to protect operational security secrets.
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/362626.htmlhttp://images.maariv.co.il/cache/ART590065.html ('What is the IDF's mystery weapon?', hebrew)
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BACKGROUND: At the time, Ze'ev Schiff of Ha'aretz said "The full text (of the IAF explanation),
minus a few operational details having mainly to do with munitions, appears in today's Hebrew Haaretz" (my emphasis). He was quite strident about the non-culpability of the IAF BTW.
Now, Schiff was clearly either deliberately distorting or was in fact himself deceived (the latter seems the most likely, given the 5th graf above, though I wouldn't rule out the former).
I imagine this is going to have some legs...
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