Israeli report blames map for strike on observers: Official says pilot who killed Canadian thought he was hitting Hezbollah position

Carolynne Wheeler, Special to Globe & Mail, 15 Sept 06

JERUSALEM -- Faulty co-ordinates on a hand-drawn map led an Israeli pilot to mistakenly bomb a United Nations bunker in southern Lebanon, killing a Canadian soldier and three other military observers, an Israeli investigation has concluded.

"There was a mishap on our side," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. A Hezbollah position had been identified 180 metres from the United Nations post and the pilot "believed he was hitting the Hezbollah position," he said.

"The trouble with the maps was there was a manual duplication that was faulty," leading to a mistake in the identified position, Mr. Regev said. The pilot did not have visual contact with the target. "We would never have deliberately targeted a UN position."

The details are from a confidential report presented yesterday to the ambassadors and military attachés representing the four nationalities of the victims: Canadian, Austrian, Finnish and Chinese. The report was also forwarded last week to UN officials conducting a separate investigation into what happened, he said. UN officials did not attend yesterday's briefing, which was held with senior Israeli defence officials and lasted more than an hour.

Rodney Moore, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, said the department would not comment on the findings because the Canadian ambassador was briefed on the report but not given a copy to pass on. It was not immediately clear whether the confidential document would be shared with diplomats.

At the Department of National Defence, spokesman Lieutenant Ken Allan said the Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command, which is in charge of all overseas missions, has called a board of inquiry into the death. The inquiry is expected to take four to eight weeks, involving telephone and written interviews with Israeli and UN officials, as well as forces on the ground.

"There's a lot of very polite diplomatic dancing, if you will, to be done to get in and get some answers," he said.

Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, the former associate foreign-affairs critic who travelled to southern Lebanon after the ceasefire was declared, suggested that Canada be part of a further investigation.

"I'm extremely concerned that Canadians haven't been involved in an arms-length investigation," he said. When incidents of friendly fire took place in Afghanistan, he said, "there were very fulsome investigations by Canadians and by Americans. That hasn't taken place."

Although the report will not be released publicly by the Israeli army, which has labelled it a classified internal document, Mr. Regev said it "opens and closes with our statement of regret."

Major Paeta Derek Hess-von Kruedener was killed along with three other observers in the July 25 air strike near Khiyam, which came two weeks into the bloody conflict in southern Lebanon. Overall, 1,000 people died in the war, a vast majority of them civilians.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan initially said he was shocked at the "apparently deliberate" strike on the post; UN officials said records showed Israeli officials had been warned several times before the air strike that their fire was too close to the post, to no avail. And an e-mail written by Major Hess-von Kruedener before the strike spoke of Israeli shelling coming close to the post, although he believed it was out of "tactical necessity."

Mr. Regev said the report found that artillery fire had stopped after those warnings. "When the UN said they were being shelled, the shelling stopped," he said.

The Israeli report is the result of investigation at the battalion and division levels. It also covers military standing orders that "totally prohibit targeting UN personnel or UN positions" and outline how close fire is allowed to come to such positions if an enemy is nearby, as well as co-ordination between Israeli and United Nations officials during the conflict, Mr. Regev said. He said there was no cause found for action against Israeli troops.

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