Something is very, very wrong with the reporting on Qana, for the moment, the worldwide symbol of Hezbollah's media offensive. It is already reasonably clear that major media photographers were willingly made into tools of propaganda, accomplices in the hideous desecration of corpses of children. The timing of the building collapse hours after the actual air attack raises very awkward questions. Why were women and children kept inside the building for so long? Were they murdered?

Now, the previously—announced toll of 57 appears to be as phony as the picture of the dust—covered baby with a sparking clean pacifier. Haaretz reports:

... the number of fatalities in the incident appeared to be much lower than originally published.

The Red Cross announced yesterday that 28 bodies, including those of 19 children, had been found at the site. Additional bodies are expected to be found over the coming days.

The timing is once again in question:

None of the survivors said that the building only collapsed several hours later. [....]

Ibrahim Shalhoub described how he and his cousin had left to find help following the strike on the building. "It was dark and there was lots of smoke," he said. "No one could do anything until morning. I could not stop crying; I couldn't help them."

The fact that the Red Cross in Tyre was informed of the incident only in the morning is another reason why assistance was late in arriving. The director of the Red Cross office in the city, Sami Yazbek, said that he received word of the incident only at 7 A.M.

Do NOT expect the world's media to be the least bit curious about all the inconsistencies. They've got their story, and they're sticking to it.

Thomas Lifson  8 01 06

Update: Confederate Yankee raises some further interesting questions about the pictures and the entire incident.

As asked here on Confederate Yankee, why were the bodies Hezbollah said were recovered from the scene seemingly inconsistent with the dead and injured of other collapsed buildings? The same forces of nature occur in every building collapse, regardless of whether the collapse is intentional (implosion or explosion) or unintentional (faulty construction, etc). Buildings of concrete such as the one in Qana generally produce a substantial amount of fine concrete dust that blankets nearby surfaces to such an extent that it almost appears to be volcanic ash, especially when explosives are involved in their demolition. [....]

And yet, when we look at the bodies of those reputedly recovered from the building in Qana, only a handful of those are covered in the heavy layer of concrete dust. If all of these bodies were recovered from the same basement or shelter as Hezbollah claims, then why are the bodies so unevenly coated? Why do some appear all but free of dust at all?

Update: Israel Insider has more.

There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

National Public Radio's correspondent reported that residents of that building had left and the victims were non—residents who chose to shelter in the building that night. They were "too poor" to leave the down, one resident told CNN's Wedeman. Who were these people?

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. While medical examination clearly is called for to arrive at a definitive dating and cause of their deaths, they do not appear to have died hours before. The bodies looked like they had been dead for days.

Viewers can judge for themselves. But the accumulating evidence suggests another explanation for what happened at Kana. The scenario would be a setup in which the time between the initial Israeli bombing near the building and morning reports of its collapse would have been used to "plant" bodies killed in previous fighting —— reports in previous days indicated that nearby Tyre was used as a temporary morgue —— place them in the basement, and then engineer a "controlled demolition" to fake another Israeli attack.

The well—documented use by Palestinians of this kind of faked footage —— from the alleged shooting of Mohammed Dura in Gaza, scenes from Jenin of "dead" victims falling off gurneys and then climbing back on —— have merited the creation of a new film genre called "Palliwood."